Temporality in Life as Seen through Literature: Contributions to Phenomenology of Life (Analecta Husserliana)

TEMPORALITY IN LIFE AS SEEN THROUGH LITERATURE ANALECTA HUSSERLIANA THE YEARBOOK OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH VOLUME ...

Author: Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (editor)

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TEMPORALITY IN LIFE AS SEEN THROUGH LITERATURE

ANALECTA HUSSERLIANA THE YEARBOOK OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH

VOLUME LXXXVI

Founder and Editor-in-Chief: Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning Hanover, New Hampshire

For sequel volumes see the end of this volume.

TEMPORALITY IN LIFE AS SEEN THROUGH LITERATURE Contributions to Phenomenology of Life

Edited by ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA The World Phenomenology Institute, Hanover, NH, U.S.A.

Published under the auspices of The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning A-T. Tymieniecka, President

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

ISBN 978-1-4020-5330-6 (HB) ISBN 978-1-4020-5331-3 (e-book)

Published by Springer, P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands. www.springer.com

Printed on acid-free paper

All Rights Reserved © 2007 Springer No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ix

THE THEME / LITERATURE AND TEMPORALITY

ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA /

Editors’ Introduction:

Timing Our Life

xiii SECTION I

A. ASHVO-MUNOZ / A Temporal Chora A. OMRANI / Literature and the Sense of the Past

“A Moment in Timelessness”: Ben Okri’s Astonishing the Gods

3 15

R. GRAY /

T. E. AFEJUKU /

23

A Mode of Recollection in African

Autobiography

37

M.-Q. MA /

“In an Instant of Time”: The Imagist Perception and the Phenomenology of the “Upsurge” of the Present in Ezra Pound’s Cantos

W. S. SMITH /

47

Ascent Patterns in the Early Poetry

of Tennyson

65 SECTION II

J. S. SMITH /

Ontology and Epistemology of Time in the Stage Play: Revisiting Roman Ingarden’s The Literary Work of Art and The Cognition of Literary Work of Art v

85

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

V. KOCAY /

Temporal Sequence and Permanence in Neiges by Saint-John Perse Non-Teleological Temporality in Philosophy and Literature: Camus, Achebe, Emerson, Ellison, Hurston, and Nietzsche

95

I. OKHAMAFE /

115

P. MROZ /

The Conflicting World-Views of the Traditional and the Modernist Novel

129

T. DESPOTOVIC / Towards the Infinite Memory

143

M. DION /

Between the Dialectics of Time-Memory and the Dialectics of Duration-Moment: Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf in Dialogue

155

SECTION III

R. M. PAINTER / Temporal Rearrangement of the Moral

Cosmos: Alice Munro’s Fiction

173

V. G. RIVAS / On the Distinction of Tragedy and Pathos

Through the Perusal of Henry James’ The Beast in the Jungle W. O’BRIEN /

187

Telling Time: Literature, Temporality

and Trauma Transcendence Unbound: Existence and Temporality in Montaigne’s Essays

209

J. KIM-REUTER /

Translation Lost, Translation Regained – On Temporality, or on Being

223

A. ZACHARZ /

233

L. KIMMEL / Notes on a Poetics of Time

257

´ J. HA NDEREK / Camus, Time and Literature

271

TABLE OF CONTENTS

vii

SECTION IV

M. DURANTE /

The “Deepening of the Present” Throughout Representation as the Temporal Condition of a Creative Process

“My Dear Time’s Waste”: The Experience of Time and Creation in Proust

285

V. REED AND M. STATKIEWICZ /

D. DOYLE / Indexicalities of Image, Text and Time

311 327

J. COLLINS / Achieving a Human Time: What we can

Learn from Faulkner’s Benjy Kafka’s The Metamorphosis: Gregor’s Da-Sein Paralyzed by Debt

355

L. LIVESAY /

Time in Post-Modern Fiction: Time’s Arrow, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and “The Alexandria Quartet”

367

R. J. WILSON III /

NAME INDEX

395 415

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The present collection of studies is gathered from our 29th annual conference of the International Society of Phenomenology and Literature (affiliated with the World Phenomenology Institute) which was held May 25th and 26th at The Harvard Divinity School, in Cambridge Massachusetts. Thanks are due first of all to our colleagues who came from different parts of the world to offer their views to discussion, enriching our thinking and its perspectives. Our secretaries, Jeff Hurlburt and Amanda Wheeler, deserve appreciation for their respective help in organizing the event and with the preparation of the volume. We owe to Springer Publishing help with the proofreading and copy-editing. A-T.T.

ix

THE THEME / LITERATURE AND TEMPORALITY

ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION: TIMING OUR LIFE

1. L I F E , S E N S E , R E A S O N , O R D E R

Our life passes, everything we cling to passes, and we pass along. The acute awareness of the passing of life has from time immemorial set apart the fully conscious human being from the rest of animalia. Fully conscious human beingness is indeed above that of the simpler animals. It is endowed with will and deliberative/selective powers for planning. Human beings compare, calculate, foretrace in imagination their moves in existence. Individuals become aware of their interactions and “measures,” of the proper timing of functional moves so as to guarantee their success by coincidences, proper successions, simultaneity as well as by avoidance among the innumerable steps that could be followed. They can be not only acutely aware of the “timing” of life functions in their own rules of unfolding but also concurrently aware of the independent timing of circumambient life conditions, of the world, nature, others, society, etc., of both the predictable and the unforeseeable. Briefly, the human being realizes that he or she is essentially a temporal being in se and just as much a being sustained upon other coincidental temporal beings, and upon the temporal conditions around him. Human beings construct endlessly, and their accomplishments are continually destroyed, if not by natural processes and cataclysms, then by their own doing. Each new culture thrives on the cemetery of a previous one whose dreams of achievement and glory are extinguished. That culture perdures only through its traces in memory and its interpretation by the succeeding culture. These traces are transmuted by the new ideas, sensibilities, aspirations of the incoming cultural thrust. Chronos of mythology devours his own children, and we often have the feeling that “in the course of time” unforeseeable turns of events may or will destroy the endeavors we have been pursuing step by step toward completion, timing our constructive initiatives with greatest care and assuming that the ground of our blueprint will endure; but if it shift the entire edifice will xiii A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana LXXXVI, xiii–xix. © 2007 Springer.

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crumble. Everything existing stands amid a ceaseless flux of becoming — nothing stands still. All the same, human beings do not give up. Awareness of this mutability might have been the primordial conscious instance awakening the living being, as living, to plotting a course of existence. This awareness multiplies “inwardly” as functional networks unfold and become entangled with “external” life functions and “external” circumstances. Along both of these lines the living beingness unfolds carried by its own processes as much as by enacting them itself in conscious steps. Each person enacts them itself out of its very own impulses as much as by following a path that it delineates itself within the circumambient milieu. In its propulsions it registers much success when it moves in compliance with current conditions and is defeated when it fails to negotiate them. This holds for all living beings. In the history of humankind this awareness advanced the hypostatizing of the inevitable “coming to be and passing away,” as Aristotle puts it, into an ontological power governing all, one that strikes with lightning, breaks the mast, and shifts the winds shaping human destinies: time. Life itself, however, has come to dispel this centuries-old view. 2. L I F E ’ S Q U E S T F O R R E A S O N S

It is life itself that forces us to change the focus of our reflective attention. Nature itself, the nature in which human beings endure, brings about the main and essential factor of life in its mutability and temporality: order. As already stated, the human being does not abandon himself or herself to the outcomes of neutral combining forces. Such an attitude would leave us prey to blind necessity, to a senseless doom. On the contrary, we question, impelled by the logos within, all the data available by which our planning may be informed. We seek “reasons,” causes, effects. We have to cope within and without with life’s exigencies. We have to follow adroitly the winds propitious to our projects. We have to try to avoid pitfalls, knowing that unforeseeable changes menace us. We have to contend with life’s turnabouts in order to advance and move toward our goals. This convergence with our own temporality itself is our life. It takes place in innumerable avenues, directions, modalities — as many as are actively functioning, carrying on and projecting our generative, unfolding, and extinguishing course. We hope to grab hold on some main strings of its dynamics, at least in our conscious assessment, but we are also aware that the mechanism of our life enactment has profound bearing on dimensions of our beingness that we do not control — or are not even aware of as possibilities and which lie


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mute within the deep spheres of our active beingness that are not fully known to us. The interactive effects of our dealings within the human community and the world of nature also escape our comprehension and even our awareness. Amidst uncertainty as to possible outcomes, as to “cause” and “effect,” amidst invisible “reasons” — directives, intents, tendencies, hazards — the reflective human being is pressed, impelled by the questioning bent of his or her beingness to wonder, to ask, to interrogate, to seek “reasons” for the turns of life’s route. Here we oscillate between faith in our freedom to forge each of us a destiny out of life, one redeeming its tormenting struggles, and despair over the contingencies of the lifestream. 3. L I T E R A T U R E , A C A N V A S F O R L I M N I N G A W O R L D V I E W

Could we not say that the most profound impulse of the plastic artist is to prolong, freeze, make permanent the presence of fleeting color, shape, and texture? And is not the deepest purpose of a writer, especially a narrator — novelist, biographer, historian — to find the hidden reasons of personal life courses, of the successes, defeats of the protagonists chosen or conjured? Ultimately, do not writers hope to reach beyond even that and glimpse as reflected in individual fates some universal law? Literature, and especially the novel, quests for reasons, and beyond for the meaning, the sense of life. The present collection of studies, continuing our ongoing inquiry into the deepest fonts of the specifically human significance of life, is devoted to pursuing some of the main perspectives with which literature in search of reasons reveals to us — or at least puts us on the path toward understanding — the turns taken in our lives that determine the sense of our existence. Always operative, whatever the perspectives within which the writer seeks to situate his inquiry, is the cultural climate of a given period, the then common vision of the world and the human place in it, a vision shared by the writer and within which he sees his protagonists and their life struggles, aspirations, successes, and defeats as upon a canvas. In the classic novel the world of life within which the protagonists conduct their existence, with all its turmoil, natural or manmade — war, plague, cataclysm — we find a stable background with lasting values and commitments against which the author depicts the course of events, for the fiction that is the novel is meant to evoke actual life and follow its patterns, with departures from the norm in their way affirming the lasting norms and values. It is enough to mention Manzoni’s epic The Betrothed as an example. In Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century literature, in French, German, Polish, English literature in particular, author and reader shared a worldview

xvi


that was ever present, the cultural product of the period. Yet, as we see in the penetrating analysis in a study by Piotr Mróz in this collection of studies (pp. 131-...), this shared worldview has undergone a radical upheaval in our time. The classic worldview embraced the vision of the Great Chain of Being and was committed, whether approvingly or critically, to the view that world of humankind is governed by rational principles. Thus authors like Goethe, Boleslaw Prus, Dostoyevski, Melville, Dickens, Eliot aimed at revealing a perduring metaphysical structure or reality (p. 132) as well as the essential human character. It is with respect to this worldview that the life course and the struggles of protagonists were depicted and interpreted. This was a worldview in which there reigned a subjacent order, a rational perspective within which the authors themselves participated “in this great cause: the defense of the stable order based upon truth, justice, unity and order” (p. 133). The tragic world events that unfolded from the beginning of the Twentieth Century shattered this vision of reality and, it seemed, any lasting foundation of reality. A “state of far-reaching, all-embracing intellectual, moral uncertainty soon led to a complete thoroughgoing revolution of all previous convictions and truths” (p. 135). Several were the causes of this upheaval undermining if not uprooting the vision of order that saw in life a subtending metaphysical ground. There were the unimaginably tragic events in the world, there was the philosophical current of Bergsonism, and there was Freud’s giving primacy to the role of the unconscious in our lives and not to the human powers of reasoning. These developments have shaken faith in the continuity of life over time. This vision of a discontinuous world, evident in the emergence of new directions in literature and the fine arts, reflect a world and reality that has lost any stable and solid structure. And so the timing and spacing of the events of life is being abandoned as the basis for ordering theworld/reality. 4. T H E C A L L F O R R E A S O N , S E N S E , L I F E O R D E R

In the history of philosophy the greatest minds have sought to find the origins, the laws, the telos of life and of the world, finding it in principles of reality / universal rules, or alternately in the unfathomable depth of human consciousness and its constitutive principles. These approaches have evolved with the cultural drift of humankind and with the demands that each inquiry has made for more adequate explanation of the phenomena of life coming to the fore in each succeeding epoch. In our day, “time,” with which we seem to contend for our survival, is receiving particular attention. First of all, there is the unprecedented effects upon human life and nature of our developing


xvii

technologies, so that our experience of life has changed right down to our everyday existence, changed particularly in the intensity of the hold world affairs have upon us. Life in general has seen an “acceleration” that our everyday personal life has to submit to. And so time and the temporality of life as well as of ourselves has to be interrogated, for its nature and status, till now assumed, are being put in doubt. The greatest question before us is this, whether life’s progress is to be credited to time as a universal or whether, on the contrary, this progress by its own innermost order “times itself.” Is it not simply our own experience of temporality that hypostatized accounts for the traditional view of time as a universal? It is the question of life’s ordering, of life’s own “order,” that is at stake, and it is to that question that the present volume’s investigations are dedicated. Our Occidental culture — which on the whole has had a cherished faith in a universal vision of the world, life, humanity — is in transition from modernity to postmodernism. It is as if the human mind has been transformed. That vision has been attenuated beyond recognition, for faith in a universal order of things has evaporated, with our concerns fragmenting along the lines of an unprecedented plurality of schemata, in the process of which we have lost the order among categories that no longer communicate. Hence our universe is become a chaos for which we have no map by which to orient ourselves and no steering wheel by which to negotiate our way. Moving from outcome to outcome, from day to day, in a rational fog and without a compass, we seek the nearest points of orientation amid the onrushing waves of life. We have to find points of stable if dynamic linkage in life. Ordering is not only the law of existence, of the world, of the individual life, it is also an indispensable rule of the human cognizing/constituting mind, with which we create our world. As I have argued often, life proceeds according to its spontaneous propulsions by timing itself. This is an ordering that no scientific invention may radically alter, even as science seeks to unravel it for the sake of “improving” it to accommodate human desire. No technology may reverse the succession of the course of events. It is the events themselves that establish order; they carry an intrinsic project — “order.” Here is the thread of the logos of life promulgating and carrying life, bringing it about. This ordering of life is the key not only to life’s surging, its maintenance, its extinguishment, leaving space for successors, but also to its intrinsic sense. This ordering is not the fruit of an anonymous universal of time but of the dynamic unfolding moves and steps of living itself. Living progress times itself.

xviii


5. L I T E R A T U R E I N S E A R C H O F A N E W U N I V E R S A L O R D E R

A new order has to be sought despite the difficulties our era presents to believing in its possibility — the above-detailed emergence of philosophical distrust or outright rejection of all faith in order. The denunciation/renunciation of the “logocentrism” of classic thought as unjustifiable and a falsification of reality in tandem with the disparaging of faith in the capacity of our conceptual and linguistic forms to treat reality undermines any attempt at discerning an order and rational sense of the world. Wittgenstein’s reduction of thought to a “language game,” by denying the universal validity of the linguistic representation of reality, has battened the various forms of the “deconstructive” attitude and is depriving us of any conceptual framework for apprehending the world, life, ourselves with adequacy and so has undermined the very ground on which we presume to live. On the rebound, however, the literary presentation of reality is being called upon to seek a new, more adequate, more “definitive” order of things. Even while rejecting the hitherto valid ordering of the world, individual life, society, etc., the postmodern author seeks a new vision. Order is the prerequisite of existence, reality, life. Rejecting the system of universal ordering with its logocentric principles, denounced for being preestablished and omnipotent, rejecting all ordering of reality, means abandoning understanding of reality, performing our life functions simply as a matter of vital necessity, depriving our life of its sense. Thus contemporary writers have recourse to topsy-turvy experiments, like reviving remembrance so that it eclipses the vivid present, transposing the knots of events into the shade of memory, or cutting events asunder in order to reveal a supposed hidden meaning. This is, indeed, to deprive the life routine itself of any sense other than utilitarian necessity. The contemporary novelist or playwright is seeking the sense of life’s instants in links that are hidden to the eye but which inwardly make of them an existential continuity. And, indeed, if a universal ordering of elements and forces is to be abandoned, if universal principles and concepts cannot be maintained, being merely mind-concocted devices that do not stretch to any embracing whole, if faith in an all-explaining metaphysical schema may not be held, where shall we look if not to the temporality of events itself for principles of a linkage that shapes meaning, that manifestly maintains or perhaps even subtends reality? We see here in our collection of essays numerous attempts undertaken by authors to seek new linkage in and meaning for life. Contemporary postmodern authors seek knots of sense in experimental deconstructive efforts. They seek significance within disrupted temporal


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sequences and so reveal how the moral significance of events, feelings, judgements, and choices depends on their timing (see R.M. Painter’s study, pp. 173-...) and how the search for the sense of human destiny calls for pursuing the origin of life down to its source, creation itself (see the study of Alira Ashvo Muñoz, pp. 3-15). We invite the reader to imbibe the fascinating presentations in this volumes with this new quest for meaning in mind, for they show that no matter how we cut, displace, reshuffle, or distort the line of unfolding developments, of events, it is in their subjacent temporal constitution, coherence, continuity in succession, intergenerative coalescence that their sense is shaped and the order of the entire course generated. It comes to the fore that it is life’s temporalization that generates its nuclei of sense, ultimately bringing about the order that maintains the continuity/discontinuity of life and the sought for origin of life. The logos of life proceeds in establishing sense, reason, the rationality of becoming in temporalizing moves. Thus the logos/sense of life is modulated along infinite constitutive/generative lines, metamorphic transformative knots, issuing finally in aspirational planning, the throwing forth of imaginative bridges, the conscious carrying out of the creative upsurge and quest in human deliberative action and creatively enriched endeavor. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka

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SECTION I

ALIRA ASHVO-MUNOZ

A TEMPORAL CHORA

Alejo Carpentier’s narrative ‘Journey Back to the Source’ stylistically takes the behavior of a chora, as in Julia Kristeva’s Polylogue (J. Kristeva, Polylogue, Paris, Seuil, 1977, 57), the melody and consciousness as a performance. In this case another peculiarity is added by being a chora kept alive in someone’s memory, since the main character, Marcial, is deceased, constituting a presence not a character in a proper sense, as in Husserl’s reformation of a conscious subject. This quality helps to substantiate a metaphorical birth, mainly that of the character’s persona, procuring a birth born as imminence of existence. The arising and stepping beyond the common possibilities of any mortal being forms a creation of movement, which is what Hegel named the experience of consciousness. The movement is created through the temporal planes, which in the narrative allegorically also become musical notes. Human consciousness as a whole is vast like the ocean and is also constantly fluctuating through a variety of depths, through the prism of time and space; each individual is a unique entity with the possibilities of a conscious being which imprint energy in actions and conceptualizations. Western thought has stated that death constructs a dialectical paradigm of pure presence and absence. To be born is to transform one’s essence through time. In its search to find the answer to the question of being, Western philosophy has always determined Being as presence. Marcial’s character is more a presence since, after he ceases to be, he undergoes transformation by the musical recollections, a previous temporal plane, going so far back as to arrive at the primordial beginnings of the earth’s creation, continuing in a realm in which only the essence of time exists, the creation of the universe. ‘Temporatization’, in these terms, is not a new ‘ground’, a simple origin, but rather, as Derrida says in dissemination, ‘marks’ an irreductible and generative multiplicity … forbidding an exhaustive and closed formalization of [the text], or at least a saturating taxonomy of its themes, its signified, its meaning. (Jacques Derrida, Positions, Chicago, Chicago UP, 1981, 45)

Time here is perceived as multiplicity, a dissemination that marks opposites and continues on. This notion of endless time is connected with the idea of 3 A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana LXXXVI, 3–13. © 2007 Springer.

4

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the existence of God, since without this all powerful entity, death can only be considered the end of time. Le temps n’est pas la limitation de l’être mais sa relation avec l’infini. La mort n’est pas anéantissement mais question nécessaire pour que cette relation avec l’infini ou temps se produise. [Time is not the limitation of the other but its relation with the finite. Death is not an annihilation but a necessary question in the relation it has with the infinite or the time it produces.] (Emmanuel Lévinas, Dieu, la Mort et le Temps, Éditions Grasset and Fasquelle, Paris, 1993, 28)

Time is also central to the conception of music and as such takes a prioritized function within its production. Due to the inclusion of musical concepts and allusions, the text also has to be perceived as a musical performance. The author gives a performative aspect to the narrative by inserting the musical allegations at key instances when the narration undergoes a temporal change. It is not through linguistic structures but by phenomenological consciousness that the narrative develops, following Marcial’s fragmented time, double time, the one in the story and the one in the internal narration, the one on earth and the one in the journey. Narrated in a zigzag pattern he continuously and increasingly journeys towards the primordial time. Temporal perception is the underlying basis for the fragmentation of time and textual reality is the transformative force elaborated through the musical awareness. The circularity of the cannons cangrisans is being followed. This is a Baroque musical structure in which notes are played and then the musicians play back each note exactly from the last, continuing in a receding mode until they arrives again at the first, creating a perfect audible circularity. De acuerdo con las exigencias de este tipo de piezas, la primera voz canta un tema dado, mientras, la segunda voz canta su copia en retroceso, es decir, empezando por el final y concluyendo por el pricipio, de derecha a izquierda. De esta manera se escucha la primera nota junto a la última, la segunda junto a la penúltima, etc … [In accordance with the demands of this type of score, the first voice sings a theme; meanwhile the second voice sings the same backwards, that is to say, it begins from the end and concludes in the beginning, from right to left. In this way one hears, the first and last note together, then the second next second to last, etc …] (Antonio Benitez Rojo, La isla que se repite, Ediciones del Norte, Hanover, 1989, 248)

A psychological analysis of time (Freud and Lacan) perceives time from the present to the past, the future and so on, in a non-linear fashion (Jacques Lacan’s theories of the inverted bouquet, based on Freud’s theories of temporal perception). The narrative is trying to simulate this technique of perception, going backwards, forwards and backwards. There is abundant evidence in the narrative about these temporal discrepancies; the oppositions create unity, identity, immediacy, temporal and spatial over what might at first be perceived as distance, difference and deferment. Very subtly, the narrator describes the time discrepancy:

A TEMPORAL CHORA

5

Era el amanecer. El reloj del comedor acababa de dar las seis de la tarde. [It was dawn. The clock in the dining room just struck six in the evening.] (Alejo Carpentier, Cuentos completos, Barcelona, Editorial Brugera, S.A., 1981, 70)

Later we are clearly told: Marcial tubo la sensación extraña de que los relojes de la casa daban las cinco, luego las cuatro y media, luego las cuatro, luego las tres y media … [Marcial had the strange sensation that the clocks in the house were marking five o’clock, then four thirty, then four, then three thirty …] (Ibid., 75)

As readers, we become aware that a new reality is being created, a tempo nuovo constituting a quasi-intertextuality, a double reality in reverse being unfolded within the narrative, not a mere repetition of previous events but embarking upon new experiences from the past, expressed in the demarcations of musical sounds. The text acts as a musical score using written language to express what music accomplishes by abstract perceptions which create feelings in those who listen. The narrative begins with a minor reference to an ancient African ritual, performed by a long-time friend of the deceased, Marcial. In Ancient Egypt it was believed that there was a triad that constituted human personality; Ka or the spirit, Khu was the soul, and Khat the body. Another comparable version states that the triad was formed by Khaybet, the shadow, Ba, the soul, and Sahu, the mummy. Ka, being the oldest, began at birth and continued after death, being the invisible double of the body. It is important to mention this because it sets the narration in the performance mode and consequently sets the narrative in a larger time frame, going back to cultural traditions that predated Ancient Greece while at the same time continue in a derived manifestation in Yorubaland now. Consequently the author hints at a transformation of religious beliefs, from Ancient Egypt to Europe, to the Americas, since the story of Marcial takes place in Colonial times. From a philosophical standpoint this sacred passage might contain a critique of Western metaphysics since several traditional African religions conceive a parallelism between the time of the living and the dead; the body serves as a barrier to accessing the time of the ancestors. The modern concept of time is expressed in a constant rehistoricization of intellectual life in Hegel’s principle of subjectivity as Phenomenology of Mind, in the introduction. Fundamentally, literature is not only a reduction of the individual play of signifiers, since it plays a role in the controversies that manifest within the intellectual heritage of a nation. Written in 1953, this short story by Carpentier reveals a mature author creating a very complex narrative, showing a mixture of pathos, tragedy and comedy that unfolds into another parallel narrative, enclosing a sense of

6

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otherness. By this it creates a pertinent question that relates to the theory of authorship and the issue of who is really narrating the story. Attentive readers not impersonality as the narration progress through time in the temporal alteration and the zigzag effect being created with the use of the cannons cangrisans. The journey that takes place is central to the story. The text is stratified into layers between the constative and the performative while functioning as a musical score. Is a transformative journey, in the ancient Egyptian religious tradition as the post mortem journey through the temporal. The time change constitutes the paradigm for inventiveness similar to what takes place in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. Time is simultaneously condensed and expanded, as it is both the mystery drama and dreams, the play returns to us more directly, as those forms do, to the transcendental and primal sacred forms. (Arthur C. Kirsch, Shakespeare and the Experience of Love, Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1981, 172–3)

Cymbeline is Shakespeare’s last work and has been called an unfinished piece due to the constant temporal changes that take place in the play, culminating with a final time change, when the gods mingle with humans. Since much is left unsaid in Carpentier’s text, the discontinuity sets the difference between what is written, or what the author sets out to express, and the actual intention in the textual operative or what actually ends up being expressed. The text can be divided into explicative and deconstructive phases. The effect thus created permits us to perceive the philosophical inception similar to Plato’s pharmakon. Saussure has previously clarified that language is a system of differences and similarities, not a grouping of independent meaningful sound units, a system constituted by differences which language constantly tries to overcome. Inextricably united to the fluctuations of time and presence, lies the function that music provides. Music is constituted by sound, in a system carrying specific and meaningful code. Music and literature are subject to time and space in accordance to how Being is defined (substance defined in time and place). Time is a fundamental key element in music, where energy placed in a temporal-spatial continuum produces sounds executed in temporal specificities, tempo, where the temporal function takes precedence and creates a sense of timelessness, audibly, by the perception of a perpetual moving present. Rhythm in music is used to create equilibrium by which symmetry is perceived. In all instances in this narrative, the temporal element functions as a disconnect by the use of sounds, musical and otherwise, creating an odd unifying effect, one that seems clear following the cannon cangrisans format. Time, then, is transfigured and canceled, returning to its beginning in perfect

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circularity, similar to what appears at the end of Cymbeline. By annulling the perception of time, as in music, the narrative remains dependent on the content of the form instead of the form of the content; it is universalized to grasp totality: Einheitserlebnis. This sense of timelessness provides a kind of escape route for the main character, a way to free the participating being, which has been excluded from the world and thus remains only located in time, having neither place nor substance. When promulgated, literature and music teach the reliability of humanity’s accrued knowledge. Both manipulate time in accordance with internal laws, disregarding physical ones, in order to achieve an individual’s unique time, imposed by the author or composer. Nevertheless, both music and literature achieve infinity by existing after the death of their creator, taking a life of their own. It is evident that time in literature, as in music, has separate rules from real time. Textual reality is fiction, being real by the implication of its own verisimilitude, and so it is with the use of tempo. The short story belongs to a collection first published in a book entitled War of Time. Included in the prologue is a quote by Lope de Vega referring to the incapacity to achieve control over it: “What captain is this, what soldier of war of time?” Lope de Vega (Alejo Carpentier, War of Time, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1970, x).

The reader becomes aware of the repetition, circularity and infinity that have been created. Circularity is structurally achieved through a phenomenological understanding that structurally is in accordance with the use of the Baroque musical structure, the cannons cangrisans. Continuing with the format, the text contains a polyphony of voices: one voice sings and a second one later sings the same notes backwards, by which the ending then coincides with the beginning. The text copies it, repeating actions that undo the previous ones. As the narrative begins the demolition of the house takes place in the act of erasing the spatial while the old black man pronounces incomprehensible words, like those of the ancient Egyptian ritual for the dead, and as the deceased follows his journey through time; the one implied in the title. The narrative thus constructed begins with a destruction that formulates the creation, making its form and content appear similar. The end is the beginning again when the final paragraph culminates with another demolition, a verbal reminder that only in words–ephemeral as they may be–does one have in literature the capacity to remain alive after death, a temporal metamorphosis with the ability to be remembered by others, imprecisely.

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The text includes the metaphor of twelve butterflies, signaling the metamorphosis. The literary technique used simulates the musical to achieve a continuous present. Carpentier, a well known musicologist, specialized in the Baroque period. The recovery of lost time in literature is known in Marcel Proust’s A la Recherde de Temps Perdu, creating a parallelism between both works. Carpentier’s main protagonist, Marcial, has a Spanish equivalent of the French author’s name. The recovering here is done backwards and forwards, the zigzag pattern, which also alludes to contemporary Neo-Baroque literary techniques of the late twentieth century which signal this new approach, as Fabio Lucas has mentioned: A estória noa quer ser historia. À estória, em rigor, deve ser “contra a Historia”. A estória, às vees, quer-se um pouco parecida à anecdota. [A story does not want to be a history. A story, in rigor, ought to be a counter-history. At times, a story seems to be a bit similar to an anecdote] (Fabio Lucas, Do barroco ao moderno, Editora Ática, S.A., Sao Paolo, 1989, 139)

Stories can be told in more than one way: flashbacks, remembrances, references, and intertextualities, in many ways that evoke multiple possibilities. Most people do not participate in the historical; even historical figures have a personal and public story, and many times they are contradictory. Reference to multiple elaborations or deviations of a single theme and the overly ornate in the Neo-Baroque brings about a sense of completion, established in the repetition. In the text, sounds are mediators of time, altering the dynamics of rhythm and tempo in the plot. As time runs parallel to rhythm and rhythm is the breath of the universe, Atmen des alls, music and life are subject to time and space. The essence of being is a universal created from the void, where only time exists. Attributing the qualities of verbal simultaneity (Jean-Luc Nancy, Le partage des voix, Éditions Galilée, Paris, 1982) and the constant repetition in the polyphony of the voices, the text itself becomes multiple as the musical notes unite and multiply in playing the cannons cangrisans. This not only alludes to the internal textual format but also to the fact that it creates more than one story, the one being told and the one referred to, the known and the hidden. This is achieved by the fragmentation in the narration and by not completely finishing the narrated events in each of the thirteen episodes, again strictly in accordance with the Baroque format similar to a site of inverse mirrors, a familiar technique in that epoch. Each of the thirteen sections of the narrative concludes in an open ending, suggesting a void, a space or time lapse, which adds to the intrigue in the plot. The reader questions whether there is something missing in the story being told or that simply cannot be said or explained by the narrator in accordance with the proper customs in

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vogue at the time. Does this also allude to the obliteration of events in one’s memory? Time certainly does that, which might suggest that an occurrence took place that was deviant from proper conduct. Obviously one begins to notice other possibilities here, based on the concealment of details, in the incompleteness of the plot (Jacques Derrida, La Voix et le Phénomène, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1967). Accordingly the text says: Transcurrieron meses de luto, ensombrecidos por un remordimiento mayor. [Months of mourning went by, covered in shadows by a greater guilt] (Alejo Carpentier, Cuentos completos, Editorial Brugera S.A, Madrid, 1981, 71).

Nothing more about these events is mentioned later. The narrative continues in reverse mode, as one encounters the previous, a premonition concerning a sinister possibility that had already taken place by the river. ¡ Desconfía de los ríos, niña; desconfia de lo verde que corre! Distrust the rivers, child, distrust what is green that runs! (Ibid.).

Marcial is in mourning for the death of his wife and feels guilty–about what? In the plot nothing is clear, for what remains unsaid is of most importance. The use of gaps in narrating a plot is commonly used now by many Spanish authors, as Rosa Montero explained in an interview: … no conduce a ninguna revelación. Ningún personaje sabe en definitiva nada. No hay ningún mago omnisciente … Todos son lamentables y eso es lo que yo creo que es la humanidad: no somos ni buenos ni malos, no heroicos ni ruines, ni felices ni trágicos … nada en realidad o todo un poco. [… it does not lead to any revelation. Neither character knows definitively. There is not an all-knowledgeable magician … Everyone is deplorable and that is what I believe humanity is: we are not good nor bad, neither heroic nor low, neither happy nor tragic … nothing in reality or a little of all.] (Fajardo, Manuel, “Entrevista con Rosa Montero”, Cambio 16, 426, Feb. 1990, 100)

This is meant to present humanity as such, the absences, the lack of knowledge, improbabilities and incongruencies that form a bulk of ones’ existence. Later, when the story is about to end, this passage is retaken and the narrator explains that years later someone remembers the story: Uno recordó entonces la historia, muy diseminada, de una Marquesa de Capellanías, ahogada, en tarde de mayo, entre las malangas del Almendares. [Someone remembered the story, well disseminated, that of a Countess of Capellanías, drowned, on a May afternoon, between the Yucca plants of the Almendares river] (Ibid., 93).

What is more important, what one remembers of events or what actually happened? We are only told of the discrepancies that occur in relation to

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actual events, like old Kodacolor photographs that fade with time; most people partially remember events or forget details. We seem to perceive things differently after years have gone by, time alters perception. Using irony by opposition, the narrative tells us about jolly events in regression, creating an absurd logic. … Y, como era de costumbre, los esposos fueron a la iglesia para recobrar su libertad. [And as it was the costume, the couple went to church to recover their freedom] (Ibid., 73–4).

The freedom the couple attained in church as customary refers to wedding vows, which in a reverse mode, tells about the distance and indifference that had grown over years of married life which later culminates with the incident of the wife’s drowning by the river. The passing of time over the years created an indifference that characterized their relationship. These metaphors add authenticity to the narrative, a hermetic reality in accordance with Avant Garde Ultraist techniques. Ultraism was a literary movement that began in Europe during the nineteen thirties and ’forties in selected capitals. Authors including Jorge Luis Borges and Carpentier were members. Metaphors of time abound in this story, creating a semi-poetic construct, an aesthetic mode pertaining to each time period that elapses: …. Existía un pequeño sótano lleno de frascos holandeses, debajo de las cuadras, y que en desván inútil, encima de los cuartos de criadas, doce mariposas polvorientas acababan de perder las alas en caja de cristales rotos. [… Existed a tiny basement full of Dutch apothecary jars, under a frame in the useless loft, above the maids’ rooms, twelve dusty butterflies just happened to lose their wings in the broken glass case] (Ibid., 88).

Time exists, even for the dead, the time of the ancestors, as attested by the twelve dusty butterflies without wings preserved in the glass case. Ephemerally, the wings of a butterfly vanish, break or decompose to the touch. Inexorably we are told that a simple mischief of the central character during childhood is more than a careless imprudence, it is a reminder of the future breakage of time. Destruction comes from the passing of time, is delicate as the wings of a butterfly. The twelve butterflies, as the twelve hours of the day, formed the time unity. The breakage of the crystal case is a counterpoint to his wife’s death, a poetic image of a broken life, a mirror that encompasses what will take place, the rupture of someone’s lifetime. The butterflies as mirror of the husband, Marcial, refer to when he remained enclosed in his mother’s womb, the source he came from, and the journey of the title that has become the central focus of the story. Butterflies are symbols of the soul, the afterlife, of transformations and rebirth. Parallel to the music and the

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temporal references are a game of chess and a game of cards, symbols of the probabilities enclosed in a destiny. One sees it in the following: Comenzaron a jugar al ajedrez They began to play chess ] (Ibid., 85).

The games of chance and strategy, cards and chess, take precedence, which connects the lack of control in one’s life with the temporal. The characters are puppets of time, and of God’s will. Movement in music and through time, rhythm, is what constitutes the journey. There is a historical hermeneutics where music becomes a catalytic agent that enables the narrator to alter and switch through the temporal planes. It goes beyond the textual interpretation to the insightful suggestion of the historical component in cognition. Here the character signifies well beyond him, his family, his contemporaries and humanity itself; he becomes Everyman. And as man he then becomes a child, in a clear reference to a well known Spanish children’s song, Urí, urí, urá (Carpentier, 88). This child’s song, “La víbora de la mar” (“The viper of the sea”), deals with inconsistencies, the unknown, treason, power, the irremediable complications in trying to understand reality, one’s position in society, the issue of class and what it constitutes for the individual. Turning into fast motion, the narrative uses musical terminology to express the rapid movement of time: Time goes now in a soft crescendo, specifically a glissando. Pero ahora el tiempo corrió más pronto, adelgazando sus últimas horas. Los minutos sonaban a glissando de naipes bajo el pulgar de un jugador. [But now time went by faster, thinning out his last hours. The minutes sounded like a glissando of cards under the index finger of a player] (Ibid., 91). [glissando: a slide up or down, played, for example by sweeping the hand across harp strings or sliding the index finger along a violin string. Max Wade Matthews and Wendy Thompson, The Encyclopedia of Music, Hermes House, London, 2002, 501].

The author explicitly uses the term “glissando” meaning a pianissimo effect by which the index finger slides over the strings in unison effect, creating a vertigo sound, with the difference that the narrative uses a harpsichord as referential to the Baroque. This is the performance mode of the narrative, the glissando effect in the narration. The play of cards, a human poker game, played as glissando, constitutes a metaphor for a fast sliding in time after death and during a lifetime as well, in any human life in which the course of events mostly are left to chance. By referring to the cards it insinuates court figures; kings, queens, and pages, a reference to the Colonial times where the central plot takes place.

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In this progressive climate characters finally leave behind all trace of substance, becoming only a presence arriving at the void before creation, the primal source of all creation. The elements enumerated in the story are: earth, night, Eden, chaos, water, earth and nothingness, clay and bareness; all primordial elements. Time deals with movement. Man is defined in time and his movement in time forms the base for forging his story, his own destiny. By definition man has the capacity to create history, his own, through the use of knowledge. Words are expressions of knowledge, and the ability to utilize words and one’s intellect is a human prerogative by which man imposes his will against chance in this chaotic world. The exercise of introspection and inquisitiveness aids man responsibly in his quest to control the outcome derived from his time on earth. He uses his individuality according to his will, forging his humanistic conscience. The text formulates a question to us readers, by the act of reading itself, and by doing so it opens many possibilities. The beginning of an interpretation is in fact a response, in this case to the meaning of time, proving the possible that allows the narration to unfold into multiple endings, a partnership of collaboration with the author’s intention. Moving from a priori to the posteriori plane, forwards and backwards, the story follows society and history in a personal memory voyage of transformation. The text then remains plural in the transformation by virtue of interpretation, in a dialectical interpretation (H.-G. Gadamer). The textual polyphony of voices serves as the temporal chora when it carries the melody of consciousness in the performance, as Umberto Eco elaborated: Aucun texte n’a la solidite, la cohérence, l’assurance, la systematicité requise si la réponse de l’autre ne vient l’interrompre, et l’interrompant, le faire résonner. [Certain texts do not have solidity, coherence, assurance, the required systematization if the answer of the “other” does not interrupt it and the interrupter creates sense of it] (Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader, Bloomington, Indiana UP, 1979, 99).

Temple University BIBLIOGRAPHY Leonardo Acosta (1981) Música y épica en la novela de Alejo Carpentier. La Habana: Editorial Letras Cubanas. Baruch A. Brody (1980) Identity and Essence. Princeton: Princeton U.P. Sean Burke (1998) The Death and Return of the Author. Edinburgh: Edinburgh U.P. Alejo Carpentier (1981) Cuentos completos. Madrid: Editorial Brugera S. A. Jacques Derrida (1981) Dissemination. Chicago: U. of Chicago P. Jacques Derrida (1967) La Voix et le Phénomène. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.


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Jacques Derrida (1998) The Derrida Reader: Writing Performances. Lincoln: Nebraska U.P. Umberto Eco (1979) The Role of the Reader. Bloomington: Indiana U.P. María Cecilia Font (1984) Mito y realidad en Alejo Carpentier. Madrid: Editorial Rodolfo Alonso. Hans-Georg Gadamer (1976) Hegel’s Dialectic. New Haven: Yale U.P. Hans-Georg Gadamer (1976) Dialogue and Dialectic. New Haven: Yale U.P. Hans-Georg Gadamer (1976) Philosophical Hermeneutics. Berkeley: U. of California P. Rodolphe Gasché (1986) The Train of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection. Cambridge: Harvard U.P. Jürgen Habermas (1995) The Past as Future. Lincoln: Nebraska U.P. Louis Hay, Neefs Jacques, de Biasi Pierre-Marc, Tadie Jean-Yves, Neumann Gerard, Levaillant Jean and Lebrave Jean-Loius (1986) Le Manuscript Inachevé. Écriture, Creation, Communication. Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Julia Kristeva (1977) Polylogue. Paris: Seuil. Emmanuel Levinas (1991) Entre nous; Essays sur le Penser-à l’Autre. Paris: Bernard Grasset. Juliet Flower Mac Cannel (1986) Figuring Lacan, Criticism and the Cultural Unconscious. London: Croom Helm. Bonnie Marranca and Dasguta Gautam (1999) Conversations on Art and Performance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U.P. Diane P. Michelfelder and Palmer Richard E. (1989) Dialogue and Deconstruction. The Gadamer Derrida Encounter. Albany: State U. of N.Y.P. Jean-Luc Nancy (1982) Le partage de voix. Paris: Éditions Galileé. Jean-Luc Nancy (1993) The Birth of Presence. Stanford: Stanford U.P. More Rockmor (1997) Cognition: An Introduction to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Berkeley: U. of California P. John Carlos Rowe (1998) Culture and the Problem with the Discipline. New York: Columbia U.P. Patricia Waugh (1988) Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. New York: Routledge. Kathleen V. Wider (1997) The Bodily Nature of Consciousness: Sartre and Contemporary Philosophy. Ithaca: Cornell U.P. D. Wiggins (1967) Identity and Spatio-Temporal Continuity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Edith Wyschogrod, Crownfield David and Raschke Carl A. (1989) Lacan and the Thelogical Discourse. New York: State U. of New York P.

ARIA OMRANI

LITERATURE AND THE SENSE OF THE PAST

According to Matthew Arnold, the poet’s main responsibility is to appeal to those elementary feelings which subsist permanently in the race, and which are independent of time.1 To Arnold, the externals of a past action [mean] the poet cannot know with the precision of a contemporary; but his business is with its essentials. The outward man of Oedipus or of Macbeth, the houses in which they lived, the ceremonies of their courts, he cannot accurately figure out himself; but neither do they essentially concern him. His business is with their inward man; with their feelings and behavior in certain tragic situations, which engage their passion as men; these have in them nothing local and casual; they are as accessible to the modern poet as to a contemporary.2 Arnold seems, in this passage, to claim that literature knows a ‘subject’ not a ‘person’. In other words, the author is conceived of only as the past of his own book. Indeed, based on this view, “A text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash”.3 Therefore, the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior. On the other hand, his only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them. From this point of view, to give a text an author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. Author and the book stand on a single line divided into a before and an after; this ‘division’ has been reflected in a quotation of Lionel Trillings: “Young people who are of radical, social and political opinion are virtually never troubled by the opposed views or the settled indifference of the great modern writers … it is because that they know that they are to trust the tale not the teller of the tale. They know that, if the future is in the bone of anyone, it is in the bone of literary genius, and exactly because the present is in his bone, exactly because the past is in his bones”4 As a matter of fact, there is no reason to think that “writing designates exactly what linguists call a performative, a rare verbal form in which the enunciation has no other content than the act by what it is uttered”.5 15 A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana LXXXVI, 15–22. © 2007 Springer.

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Such views, indeed, remind us that on the one hand, the relation between the past and the present can no longer be conceived as ‘survival’, ‘continuation’, or ‘legacy’, and that, on the other hand, the different between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past’s awareness of itself cannot show. There are, however, so many other views that confirm William Butler Yeats’ thought. He writes: I have felt … that by assuming a self of past years, as remote from that of today as some dramatic creation, I touched a stronger passion, a greater confidence than I possess, or ever did possess.6 It seems to me that such viewpoints are based on this fact that sometimes the pursuit of the past is part of an exercise in self-definition and selfknowledge. One chooses moments in the past as landmarks from which to measure one’s own position. Indeed, the past and the present are so intertwined, so coalescent in a conscious historical memory and continuity, that the present – despite the fact that it has a spirit which is wholly new and wholly its own – is intimately penetrated and conditioned at every point by the past. To some novelists and poets, it is only when the past is regarded as dead that we are able to see it plainly. The supposed deadness of the past was a challenge to Browning’s virtuoso creativity so that by performing an act of resurrection he could seem to defeat the powers of life and death: Bring good antique stuff. Was it alight once? Still lives spark enough For breath to quicken, run the smouldering ash Red right-through (Parleyings with Certain People: ‘With Charles Avision’, II, 293–6).

According to some novelists, the past is a theatre in which problems can be acted out, but in an environment free from modern association, so that one almost produces ‘scientific conditions’ to study the operations of psychology or social struggle.7 The past is a dominant interest for Victorian writers.8−12 Most poets of the Victorian periods (1830–1890) had a dominant orientation to their own pasts and the past of their own and other societies.13 The pasts that spoke most clearly to the Victorian poets were the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. An episode in ‘Lancelote and Eliane’ shows the distance Tennyson has come from the Middle Ages.14 In general, Victorians had a tendency to reshape the past to make it resemble their own times, but when they were prepared to register its difference from themselves it became apparent that its great utility was that it offered


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challenging contrasts with the present. Elizabeth Barrett-Browning liked the palpability of the past. In other words, She was drawn to the rich and varied identities of the men and women who inhibated the past. She liked their definiteness, their self-knowledge, their extrovert attitudes, their sense of purpose, their vigour.15

The homogeneity, devoutness and the certainty of purpose were some aspects of the Middle Ages that appealed to the Victorians.16 Victorian poets try to create complete imagined worlds in the past for their characters to move about in. We can see such creation in some of Morris’ works. Indeed, “since he was involved in making objects which followed the spirit of the Middle Ages he had a better than average sense of physical and tactile quality of the period”.17 In previous centuries, a rather narrow range of pasts had been available for inspection, but in the Victorian period the scope became extraordinarily wide. In this period, there is an extreme sensitivity to the precise characters of periods in the past. There is, however, a basic point that must be made here that in this period, historical novelists and poets choosing the past for their subject were not wholeheartedly interested in the pastness of the past or in those ways in which the past resembled nothing at all in the present; they were more interested in those moments in the past when there is an uncanny resemblance to the present, and if the resemblance did not naturally present itself they were all too ready to fabricate it, they did not regard the past as dead”.18

It should be mentioned that the Victorian age was very eclectic in its interests. As a number of authors have pointed out, the passion for the past among Victorian poets is directly related to their sense and their desire for some kind of escape.19 In his ‘Empedocles on Etna, and other poems’, Matthew Arnold writes: And we shall struggle awhile, gasp and rebelAnd we shall fly for refuge to past time. Their soul unworn youth, their breath of greatness; (Empedocles, II, 32–84)20

One of the Victorian poets whose poetry is retrospective is Tennyson. The Arthurian subject had appealed to Tennyson for a long time. Indeed, Tennyson had been fascinated by Arthurian themes from early childhood. Some of his works like ‘Morte d’Arthur’ (1842), ‘Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere’ and ‘The Lady of Shalot’ (1832), show Tennyson focusing on points of interest

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and relatively brief episodes rather than trying to hold a complete epic form in his mind.21 The Morte d’Arthur expresses belief in an after-life “where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow, nor ever wind blows loudly’ (II, 260–61), in nobility of spirit and in some form of continuity for its influence: ‘and all people cried, “Arthur is come again: he cannot die”’ (II, 295–6)

His poetry is dominated by reverie, nostalgia, longing and melancholy. To Tennyson: The present is the vassal of the past: So that, in that I have lived, so I live And cannot die, and am, in having been – A portion of the pleasant yesterday, Thrust forward on today and out of place; A body journeying onward, sick with toil. The weight as if of age upon my limbs. (The Love’s Tale II, 115–21)22

Tennyson’s friend, James Spedding, observed in 1835 that Tennyson was always discontented with the present until it has become the past, “and then he yearns toward it, and worships it, and not only worships it, but is discontented because it is past.23 As reflected in Bernard Richards’ words, “he is creating a separate time that operates by the own laws and the drift of the work is not antiquarian but parabolic.24 Some of Tennyson’s sources were Thomas Croker’s ‘Fairy Legends …’ (1825–28) and Thomas Keightley’s The Fairy Mythology (1833). Arthur’s death had an impact on Tennyson’s poems. His main rival, Hardy, was able to review past and present with a much more special and inquiring eye. The most famous plea for modernity in poetry, which, naturally, involved turning one’s back on the past, was made by Elizabeth Barrett Browning at the opening of Book V of Aurora Leigh: I do distrust the poet who discerns No character or glory in his times And trundles back his soul five hundred years, Past moat and drawbridge, into a castle Court … 25

Among Victorian poets, the most sustained creativity was probably exercised by Browning, who possessed an uncanny sense of the past. This point is well illustrated by a passage of Bernard Richards about Browning. He writes: “Browning’s knowledge of the past seems inexhaustible. In ‘The Ring and


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the Book’, it is by the incidental accumulations of information that one is particularly impressed”.26 Some authors regard ‘The Ring and the Book’ as his major achievement in reanimating the past. In this book “he has a rare courage to take us into the poetic laboratory and exhibit the processes of creation”.27 According to Browning, the ‘sole work’ of modern poetry is to represent age: Their age, not Charlemagne’s, – this live, throbbing age The brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires, And spends more passion, more heretic heat, Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms, Than Ronald with his knights at Roncevalls. To flinch from modern varnish, coat or flounce, Cry out for togas and the picturesque, Is fatal,-foolish too. King Arthur’s self Was commonplace to Lady Guenever; And Camelot to minstrels seemed as flat As Fleet Street to our poets (II, 202–13)28

Some poets of the Victorian period oscillate from valuing the retrospective view to castigating it. In his ‘Thought While Reading History’, Fredrick Faber writes: There is no bent of mind so vile, so weak, As that which on glorious Past doth set In currents of inordinate regret; And wish a sphere of dreams content, doth weak Itself upon the love of beauty. (‘Use of the Past’, II. 105)

Indeed, as Bernard Richards states, “Fredrick Faber is half-hearted in his condemnation though, since the past is allowed to figure as ‘the glorious Past’. The two poems ‘Chivalrous Time’ demonstrate diametrically opposed views of the past of approval and disapproval”.29 An essential Characteristic of literature, according to E.R. Curtius, is that the literature of the past can always be active in that of the present, that is to say, the “timeless present”.30 From this viewpoint, the poet must be aware that “the mind of Europe is a mind which changes and that this change is a development which abandons nothing en route, which does not superannuate either Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock drawing of the Magdalenian draughtsmen”.31 As some authors believe, the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature

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of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal together and involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its present. Based on this perception, “no poet has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets”.32 Quoted to D.H. Lawrence “the novel is the book of life”.33 What happens when a new work of literature is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of literature that preceded it. The past and the future are two great bourns of human emotion, the two great homes of the human days, the two eternities. They are both conclusive, final. Their beauty is the beauty of the goal, finished, perfected [Ibid., p. 535]. The historical sense makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time; “The historical sense is which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year”.34 Some writers hold that time diminishes our awareness of literature’s nasty, inaesthetic tendency to insist upon some degree of immediate practicality, and the aestheticians take all possible advantages of this effect of time.35 To some literary critics, great literature is timeless and great writers transcend the particular outward forms of history because their works give us a universally valid account of human nature.36 Indeed, as Ronald Barthes states, “the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate; there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now”.37 Nevertheless, based on some viewpoints, despite the fact that love, friendship and transience (the active principles in life) concern basic relations of existence and hence are timeless, in all poetical topics the style of expression is historically determined.38 It seems relevant, moreover, to mention a remarkable fact that Raymond Williams’ words direct our attention to it: no nineteenth-century reader would have read all the novels; no individual in the society have known more than a selection of its facts. But everyone living in this period would have had something which no later individual can wholly recover: that sense of the life within which the novels were written, and which we now approach through our selection theoretically, a period is recorded; in practice this record is absorbed into a selective tradition and both are different from the culture as lived.39

We can see a strongly escapist vein in Victorian poetry with historical settings; “many works are in The Eve of St. Agnes tradition – remote, decorative, only impinging on a recognizable life at a psychological level”.40 There was a catholic interest in history in the Victorian poetry.


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However, as a number of critics have pointed out, when it came to recreating and imagining the psyche of figures in distant history, many of the Victorians were the victims of an underlying assumption that has been increasingly questioned in our time: the assumption that the human heart is unchanging.41 One of the works that cultivated Victorians were readier to take an interest in it, either independently or in groups, is ‘Sordello’. Indeed, Sordello is an attempt to dramatize the struggle of the poet to grasp and imagine the past and make sense of it: Confess now, poets know the dragnet’s trick, Catching the dead, if fate denies the quick, And shaming her; (I, 35–37)

It can be said the Victorian appropriation of the past was one in which no pretence is made that the past is in any way being reproduced. Finally, I would like to mention a quotation from T.S. Eliot: The past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. The poet who is aware of this, will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities. The poet will be aware also that he must inevitably be judged by standards of the past. It is a judgement, a comparison in which two things are measured by each other.42

Isfahan, Iran NOTES 1

Mathew Arnold (1960–1977) The Complete Works of Mathew Arnold, R.H. Super (ed.), 11 Vols. Ann Arbor: U. of Michigan Press. Vol. I, p. 4. 2 Ibid., p. 5. 3 Raman Selden (ed.) (1988) The Theory of Criticism. New York: Longman. p. 321. 4 Lionel Trilling (1967) ‘The Leavis–Snow Controversy’. In Beyond Culture. Harmondsworth: Penguin. pp. 150–151. 5 Bernard Richards (1988) English Poetry of the Victorian Period. New York: Longman. p. 319. 6 Quoted in R. Ellmann (1964) The Identity of Years (Reprinted 1968, 1975). City: Publisher. pp. 239–240. 7 Bernard Richards op. cit. p. 100. 8 J.H. Buckley (1966) The Triumph of Time: A Study of Victorian Concepts of Time, History, Progress and Decadence. Cambridge, Mass.: Publisher. 9 J.W. Burrow (1978) ‘The Sense of the Past’. In Lerner, L. (ed.) The Context of English Literature: The Victorians. City: Publisher. 10 A.D. Culler (1986) The Victorian Mirror of History. City: Publisher. 11 R. Chapman (1986) The Sense of the Past in Victorian Literature. City: Publisher. 12 M. Gent ‘To Flinch from Modern Varnish’. Stratford-upon-Avon Studies, 15, 13–35. 13 Bernard Richards, op. cit., p. 98.

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Ibid., p. 114. Ibid., p. 107. 16 Ibid., p. 104. 17 Ibid., p. 106. 18 Ibid., p. 101. 19 Ibid., p. 99. 20 Cf. Bernard Richards, op. cit., pp. 98–99. 21 Ibid., p. 111. 22 Ibid., p. 98. 23 Quoted in R.B. Martin (1983) Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart. City: Publisher. p. 203. 24 Ibid., p. 113. 25 Cf. Bernard Richards, op. cit., p. 102. 26 Ibid., p. 106. 27 Ibid., p. 108. 28 Ibid., p. 103. 29 Ibid., p. 99. 30 E.R. Curtius, in Selden, Raman (ed.), op. cit., p. 110. 31 Ibid., p. 409. 32 Ibid., p. 107. 33 D.H. Lawrence (1936) ‘Why the Novel Matters’. In McDonald, Edward D. (ed.) Phoenix, The Posthumous Papers. London: Heinemann. p. 512. 34 In Raman Selden (ed.), op. cit., p. 108. 35 Lionel Trilling (1957) A Gathering of Fugitives. London: Secker & Warburg. pp. 135–136. 36 In Raman Selden (ed.), op. cit., p. 419. 37 Ibid., p. 319. 38 Ibid., pp. 410–412. 39 Ibid., p. 414. 40 Bernard Richards, op. cit., p. 103. 41 Ibid., p. 116. 42 In Raman Selden (ed.), op. cit., p. 109. 15

ROSEMARY GRAY

“A MOMENT IN TIMELESSNESS”: BEN OKRI’S ASTONISHING THE GODS (1995; 1999)1

In a recent article, entitled “African Modes of Self-Writing” (Chimurenga, 2004:10), Achille Mbembe proposes that a distinctly African philosophy has emerged “at the intersection of religious practices and the integration of human tragedy” (2004:10). But, invoking Gilles Deleuze’s (Cinéma 2: L’image-temps) aphorism that “the only subjectivity is time ”, Mbembe counters the promise inherent in such a philosophy by asserting that such mediation on divine sovereignty and African people’s histories has not yielded any integrated philosophico-theological inquiry systematic enough to situate human misfortune and wrongdoing in a singular theoretical framework (ibid.).

He expatiates: African philosophy offers nothing comparable to German religious mysticism, on the one hand, or Jewish Messianism, on the other. And, while his generalization that African philosophy has largely resulted in narratives of loss, victimization and mutilation2 certainly has merit, he has seemingly overlooked the later works of such prominent black African writers as Wole Soyinka and Ben Okri (from West Africa) and their Southern African counterparts, Zakes Mda, Njabulo Ndebele and the late Yvonne Vera. What distinguishes the creative works of these writers in general, and of Ben Okri in particular, is their systematic philosophising about both time and subjectivity. Pace Mbembe, Okri conflates the intellectual currents of German philosophy (with its “will to transgress the boundary between the human and the divine” [Mbembe, 2004:10]) with the Judeo-Christian tendency to confront “almost without mediation the problems of the absolute and its promises” (ibid.), to form a singular theory of temporality, where temporality constitutes a state of becoming within the stillness of time and connected to the chosen literary text. In the realization of his integrated philosophicotheological theory of ‘a moment in timelessness’, Okri combines dream (“Trust in dreams,” says Kahlil Gibran [The Prophet, 2001:109], “for in them is hidden the gate to eternity”) and desire with myth in his exploration 23 A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana LXXXVI, 23–35. © 2007 Springer.

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of an imaginary city of the mind as a remedy for “human misfortune and wrongdoing”. Consider, for example, Okri’s single stanza poem from the closing section of his collection Mental Fight (1999:67), tellingly entitled “Turn on your light” which, coincidentally, inspired the title to this paper: The illusion of time will give way To the reality of time And time present is made Before time becomes present. For all time is here, now, In our awakening. [My emphasis]3

Invoking the time as space equation,4 where ‘time present’ is an a priori becoming, the poem is evocative of timelessness, of eternity and, more importantly, of spiritual regeneration. “Human kind,” writes Okri, cannot live long With the notion Or the reality Of timelessness. Only in the mind. Only in the spirit. (Mental Fight, 1999:6)

What Okri propounds in Astonishing the Gods is freeing the fetters of the past, and visualizing universal justice “through careful spiritual and social evolution” (72): Allow uncomplicated regions Of time to project themselves Into your sleeping consciousness Inducing terror, or mental liberation. (Mental Fight, 1999:4)

The linear flow of time in the novel can be seen as a literary device, functioning as a substructure on which the nature of the protagonist’s inner time is superimposed. The above injunction thus points not so much to selfknowledge but to self-enlightenment or, as Dominic Bradbury (The Times, January 1999) puts it, learning “how to make possible the impossible, how to turn the ordinary moment or mind into the legendary, how to turn darkness into light”. Okri’s project is essentially how to turn spiritual exhaustion into spiritual energy; how to distil human experience, how to domesticate the infinite. His opening poem in Mental Fight (1999:3) points the Way:

A MOMENT IN TIMELESSNESS

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An illusion by which we become More real. A moment unmarked by the universe, By nature, the seasons, or stars. Moment we have marked out In timelessness. Human moment. Making a ritual, a drama, a tear On eternity. Domesticating the infinite. Contemplating the quantum questions, Time, death, new beginnings, Regeneration, cycles, the unknown. [My emphasis]

In line with Perennial theology, the Way to “domesticate the infinite” suggested here is by meditating upon the cyclic nature of time. It is also via “a mystical initiation, consisting of multiple experiences”,5 based on the premise that man is saved not by faith but by knowledge (gnosis); and, as Stuart Holroyd (1989:87) observes, “such knowledge is vouchsafed by secret lore or obtained through mystical illumination”. This is perhaps more readily understood by two axiomatic paragraphs in Astonishing the Gods, featuring Okri’s invisible initiate’s reaction to the marvellous city he finally encounters: He contemplated the overwhelming mystery of the square. He studied its bronze equestrian rider. He gazed upon its sea-god and horses emerging from a giant fountain of adamant. And he pondered its guardian figure of an ancient prophet-king who stood poised in dreaming marble before his own mystic annunciation of courage. The equestrian rider was on a high diamond platform. With the hand bearing the shining sword of truth, he was pointing ever-forward to a great destiny and destination, never to be reached, because if reached the people and their journey would perish. He was pointing to an ever-moving destination, unspecified except in myth, the place of absolute self-realization and contentment which must always be beyond the reach of the brave land, but not so much beyond reach the people would give up in perfection’s despair, and set up tent somewhere between the sixth and final mountain (87).

In this novel, Okri resorts to the popular device of travel but, here, the journey is an ongoing spiritual quest. Re-enforcing the numerologically resonant seven year sea journey and three physical feats to shed the temporal body that precede this vision, this pivotal extract is from Book Four, Chapter Three, and so too evocative of the union of the temporal and the Divine. The above extracts from Okri’s anthology of poetry Mental Fight and Astonishing the Gods, respectively, conjoin to define Okri’s narrative mode. Variously defined as “non-realist” (Ato Quayson, 1995:144); “classic magical realism” (Cooper, 2003:412); or, by implication, “the prose of nativism”

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or counter-realism (Mbembe, 2004:13), Okri’s taxonomy is, I believe, a philosophico-theological one, with a mystical Perennialist bent. His vision in Astonishing the Gods is predicated upon the paradigm of rhizomatous growth and “possible worlds”, inevitably drawing upon a dynamic interdisciplinary network of cosmic understanding for, as Stalnaker (in Lubomir Doležel 2000:14)6 observes, “possible worlds have transcendental existence, they reside in the omniscient divine mind”. In another key passage, the author imagines, supposes, believes in, wishes for, dreams about an ‘other’ reality, a reality beyond – where building a nation derives from three qualities. “[A]mazing things” accrue from conscious knowledge; and “extraordinary things” from inner knowledge. But when a nation or an individual creates things “sublime” or “miraculous” they create always from the vast unknown places within them. They create always from beyond. They make the undiscovered places and infinities in them their friend. They live on the invisible fields of their hidden genius. (51)

Featuring an invisible querent7 in the chthonic realm, Astonishing the Gods is thus a metaphysical conception: a liminal utopia in a timeless zone ‘beyond’. This is a text in which (as the above extract shows) the creative energy of fictional pretence has primacy over mimesis. Both Doležel and Deleuze/Guattari privilege this kind of fiction-making over representation. For the latter, the text is “a pragmatic assemblage or tool kit of becoming”;8 while text writing is for Doležel, “the art of making and understanding the world”.9 Both theories are integral to my own reading of Astonishing the Gods because both posit an alternative world, generating a philosophy of becoming;10 both detach themselves from a static, hierarchical order; and both are concerned with the effect of duration. Motifs common to both Heterocosmica and Rhizome theory are the absence of mimesis, invention, and a convergence of aesthetics, ethics and politics. These too are central tropes in Okri’s novel. As if extending Deleuze and Guattari’s critical theory of becoming and exteriority, as opposed to being, derived from the paradigmatic shift from the metaphor of the tree of life for knowledge with its static, binary logic, to that of the rhizome, “conceived as an adventitious mode of thinking that grows between things and produces offshoots in unforeseen directions” (Deleuze, 2001:1595), Okri’s narrative philosophy likewise attempts to free “the forces that have been constrained” (Deleuze, op. cit.:1594). But, its focus is more spiritual. In Astonishing the Gods, the depressingly ‘dusty’ malaise of rationalism masquerading as physical science11 and the customary fare of narratives of


27

loss and victimization are countered by the hopeful, if ‘shadowy’ epiphanies accessed through suffering and love. Through the reaction of his central character to the purpose of his quest, Okri elaborates: The possibility of a whole people approaching, in their humanity, the condition of divinity, scared and astonished him [the initiate]. The thought that suffering could give people insights into the intersection of life and eternity filled him with amazement. (73)

Capturing the mood and atmosphere of Judaic-Teutonic mythology (close to his native Urhobo cosmogony) with its convergence of the rational and the spiritual, the extract serves to crystallize Okri’s message. In this eclectic, transdisciplinary African fable of “possible worlds”, Okri seeks to reveal the myths and magic of the air by exploring alternatives for a possible (re-)construction of an essential and mystical unity between body, brain-mind and soul: The purpose was to discover the hidden unifying laws of all things, to deepen the spirit, to make more profound the sensitivities of the individual to the universe, and to become more creative. (66)

Influenced by theories of chaos and complexity, Deleuze and Guattari likewise claim to “study subjectivity where it emerges, society where it mutates and the world where it is recreated”.12 Okri’s narrative is an empowering quest for spiritual self-realization that initially inheres in unravelling the “secret of visibility” (4), of becoming more real in a Lacanian sense.13 Here, Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of becoming, becomes – in the hands of Okri – a blueprint for ‘becoming more real’. But, in a text that turns on the enigmatic, on the paradoxical (“The season’s fashion was for paradoxes, and the market place, even at night, was abuzz with fresh-minted paradoxes and ancient riddles ” [74]), the initiate, after resisting a number of temptations of the flesh, is ready to learn that “the real things can’t be seen” (107). This novel features an imaginary celestial island landscape, seven light years away, “discovered only once in a lifetime – if you’re lucky” (7), where “ light poured upwards from below, as if the island’s relationship with the moon and sky had become inverted” (8). In his rejection of the popular conception of African identity as rooted in its historico-geographical milieu, Okri’s vision seemingly rests on rhizomatic theory: In literature, Deleuze and Guattari do not look for meaning . In reading, they look for the lines of flight by means of which writers detach themselves – and their texts – from an immobilizing order. In becoming, such writers “deterritorialize” themselves from and within official culture before “reterritorializing” themselves elsewhere.14

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Like the rhizome, the horizontal root that sends up adventitious shoots, the writer here complements a personal history (the story people tell) with a “possible world” geography (that ‘ground’ that the spirit inhabits). Adopting the personae of a series of four guides, the author describes the creation of a fabulous “new civilization” (35) and outlines the four stages of his invisible initiate’s solitary and enigmatic search for “the truest grace” (39) which, in turn, incorporate the eight stages of initiation into the Corpus Hermeticus. The first stage – a solitary negotiation of an elemental bridge – correlates roughly with the first two stages of an initiation into the mysteries of the Perennial Tradition (allowing the spirit to reunite with the Higher Consciousness; and releasing the spirit from the spell under which it is held in bondage in the body). In the second stage, in the realm of the marvellous, protected by the bridge made of mist and a huge golden gate, where silences have melodies, sounds have colours, tenderness has fragrance and smiles are heard – implicitly overlaying imagery, hear no evil, speak no evil with a kind of Keatsian synaesthesia and negative capability – Okri’s pilgrim finds himself in a “city of sensitive stone” (64): It was a city of stone and fire, but its true inspiration was water . It was a place that understood that the good things should be visible, but the best things should be hidden (64).

Apprised by his invisible initial guide that the first law of the city is “that what you think is what becomes real” (46) and that “anything you are not aware of you have to experience again” (46) – evocative, respectively, of the power of thought in its echoes of Berkeleyean Philosophical Idealism (esse est principi) and a Hermetic mystical rebirth, with its promise to be silent – the initiate learns to bring the body and mind to quiescence and to free the Higher Consciousness from the ego consciousness (the next phases of initiation into the mystical Hermetic rites). Reminiscent of Turner’s inspiration for his transcendent 1844 painting, “Rain, Storm of Speed”, the extract is a fine example of Okri’s interest in the elemental as representative of timelessness. It is here that Okri’s Everyspirit learns that the basic law of this civilization is “a permanent sense of wonder at the stillness of time” (47). Taking the form of a Socratic dialectic, the conversation that follows transforms the Alice in Wonderland type question of the nature of time15 into a reuniting of the spirit with its lost universality: “Is time still?” “Does time move?” “Yes.” “Where to?” “I don’t know.”


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“Have you seen it move?” “Yes.” “Where?” “On a sundial.” “That is the measurement of a motion. Time itself is invisible. It is not a river. While you are in time all time is still. As in a painting.” “But day turns into night.” “Yes.” “So time moves.” “No. The planet moves. Time is still.” (47)

Here, the evocation of timelessness suggests postmodernism’s flight from the horrors of history. In an address to fellow philosophers in 1932, Jan Smuts (1932:5) explained this scientifically: Relative rate of motion becomes basic, and contracts or expands space, creates or annihilates mass, for the outside observer. So far as the volume and the physical substance of the world is observed from the outside, its motion becomes a strange creative factor.16

Failing to comprehend his first lesson in time and motion, Okri’s querent is apprised of the second law of the city: “When you need to know it you will find out” (48). This transcription of the orthodox “Seek and ye shall find” leads to the seventh step in the mystical initiation, that of freeing the mind of misconceptions, here transcribed into: “When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they are” (49). What strikes one most is the compositional unity of effect. Okri’s interest in the interplay of light and time (“the sunlight of unwritten ages”; “the invisible centuries of unwritten but differently coloured ages” [3]), and of dream and memory rather than objects, points to the interrelationship of the African past, the universal human condition and a way into a transformation of the future. This unity between man, microcosm and macrocosm is also evident not only in the declared purpose of the quest (quoted earlier), but also, for example, in the chiaroscuro effect created by “parts of him dissolving in the effulgent lights” (10), and in the coalescence of real time and dream time, of movement and stasis, while the single city mirrored in “an infinity of perfect realms” (10) is suggestive of the indeterminacy of Quantum measurement.17 This, in turn, is reflected in Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic notion that the official ‘molar’ line of a social and political position is replaced by a ‘molecular’ line that begins to separate itself from the first, and in Okri’s Doležellian imaginary city, the magnificent empty buildings of which, suffused in radiant light, “all reflected themselves in an oddly terrifying infinity” (8). And, owing to “an eternal motionlessness about everything” (5), pilgrim fancies that he has “wandered into a disquieting dream” (5), where

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The moonlight, glowing on the chessboard patterns of the town’s magnificent square, filled his heart with a beautiful solitude that would haunt him for the rest of his life. (5)18

The chessboard symbolizes both pattern and process, for it is here, before the “Great Basilica of Truth”, likewise iridescent with refracted light, that he sees a unicorn (symbol of wisdom)19 and the “forgotten sword of Justice” in the middle of “a green lake” (11),20 and learns of the infinite nature of things when he complains to his guide that he cannot understand anything that he has seen: Things are what they are. That is their power. They are all the things we think they are, all the things we sense they are, and more. They are themselves. If they meant something they would be less. What you see is your personal wealth and paradise. You’re lucky if you can see wonderful things. Some people who have been here see only infernal things. What you see is what you are, or what you will become. (11)

Here, in a revisioning of the Cartesian Je pense, donc je suis, the teleological a priori is becoming: Je vois, donc je serai. From an ontological perspective, the extract suggests that the rhizomatous world is unitary in its diversity. Okri’s method is to braid, juxtapose and unify the realistic and the fantastic, the convoluted and the labyrinthine, the expressionist and the surrealistic as his initiate learns in his third stage of re-education to separate the higher subtle feelings from the gross sense feelings, personified by pain in the form of an injured bird and a beautiful, seductive temptress fleeing the higher realm of existence for sensory delights. The fourth stage of initiation (equivalent to the final or eighth stage of Hermetic Rebirth, viz. allowing the spirit to travel to higher realms) is anticipated as early as Book 2 of Okri’s eight part novel, when pilgrim’s guide points to the significance of triumphing over “all that is flux”: There is a time for inventing reality, and there is a time for being still. At the gate of every new reality you must be still, or you won’t be able to enter properly. (50)21

Before departing, Okri’s initiate’s first guide prepares him for the last stage in his journey, teaching him that sublime knowledge creates the potential for an earthly paradise (51), that the key to immortality is unseen suffering in silence (52–53), and that his role is to herald change (53). Re-entering the magnificent city gates alone, he finds himself in a terrifying mutable domain, the elemental city of paradoxes and mythical creatures, where “the open air seemed eternal” (80). Then, joined successively by an archetypal, silent boy-child guide (Book 3), a tall lean youth and a misshapen dwarf (Book 4), and a goddess (Book 5), he encounters the prophet king (already mentioned) and the great earth mother, and learns


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that this civilization is dedicated to a simple goal: “the perfection of spirit and the mastery of life” (67). The impulse is towards a Sufi yearning for and striving towards the ‘God self’. In this utopian culture, the merchandise is ideas (75); the currency of banks is thoughts of well-being, wealth and serenity (69); libraries are places to deposit intuition, dreams, memories and prophecies; hospitals are for the joyfully healthy (69); and universities are places “for self-perfection, places for the highest education in life” (66): “the art of self-healing” (70). The remainder of the book is devoted to temptations reminiscent of those in Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, and to a never-ending striving after the four major historical types of knowledge: experiential, holistic, analytic and experimental, with the discourse and symbolism shifting from the magical, through ritual-mythical, initiatic-religious, philosophic and scientific, to the artistic. Pilgrim’s destiny is the great convocation, where three masters of illumination (143) tell him of his true quest, that is, creative wisdom (143); henceforth, in an echo of the Hermetic sublime, he must dedicate himself to “increase the light, and to spread illumination” (149). The final message of the novel is that “it is dreams that create history” (115) and “Only those who truly love and who are truly strong can sustain their lives as a dream” (115). And it is these spiritually enlightened higher order of beings who are able to consecrate their master dream “to initiate on earth the first universal civilization where love and wisdom be as food and air” (131). This, then, is Okri’s “singular theoretical framework” to counter misfortune and wrongdoing: a rhizomatic renewal – a non-canonical philosophy of temporality, reflecting universalist, mystical cosmogony. In this new cosmic order, reminiscent of the ‘snortor a¯ n mode’[wise in mind], in The Wanderer, ‘hy sæt at rune’[he sat in meditation]22 ; the initiand is able to meditate in “the silences for a millennium” (140), silences born of suffering. from the heart of Time and the languid countrysides, from the hidden dimensions and the hidden heaven, from all the dead and all whose hearts quicken to the highest love, the silences came, and they passed through him, and they altered no spaces, and he noticed how real the room of meditations was for such dancing eternities. (140)

University of Pretoria, South Africa NOTES 1

All references to this text are to the Phoenix Paperback edition (London: Orion Books, 1999). Such narratives accrue from historical events broadly construed as the hegemony of slavery, colonization and apartheid. 2

32 3

ROSEMARY GRAY Cf. Thomas Sterns Eliot’s Four Quartets, “Burnt Norton” (1935): Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future And time future contained in time past, If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibilit” Only in a world of speculation. What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present.

The extract is also redolent with Nietzche’s myth of eternal recurrence. cf. V =s/t. In other words, the theory is that ‘space and time were but abstractions and shadows, and the reality behind them was space-time’ and that ‘motion or velocity depends on the time taken to cover the distance travelled’ (Smuts, 1932: 4–5). Einstein’s theory of relativity thus extended Newton’s discovery of the mutuality of time and space rather than the separateness thereof. 5 Stuart Holroyd, The Arkana Dictionary of New Perspectives (London: Penguin, 1989), p. 87. Initiation into the Perennial Mysteries, embraced by Hermeticism, Gnosticism and Sufism, consists of eight guided steps: to allow the spirit to reunite with the Higher Consciousness; to release the spirit from the spell under which it is held in bondage in the body; to bring the body and mind to quiescence; to free the Higher Consciousness from the enthrallment of the ego consciousness; to reunite the spirit with its lost universality; to separate the higher subtle feelings from the gross sense feelings; to free the spirit from any misconceptions; and to allow the spirit to travel to higher realms. 6 Doležel is quoting Stalnaker (1976:65). 7 A querent is both one who asks questions and one whose questions relate to astrology. 8 The Norton Anthology of Literary Criticism (2001:1594). 9 Lubomir Doležel, Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), p. 42. 10 Deleuze’s rhizome theory was renamed “ecosophy” (op. cit.:1596) by fellow critic, Guattari. Thomas Berry’s (1996:1–9) Harvard address on environmental ethics is pertinent to the argument. 11 Here, the dichotomy is also that between the world of concrete fact and the world of abstract symbolism in which both the mathematician and creative artists like Ben Okri live. Cf. Robert Louis Stevenson’s (c.1881) “Pulvis et Umbra” [literally ‘dust’ (in which the early mathematicians drew their diagrams) and ‘shade’ (metonymic for pleasant rest)]: 4

“Of the Kosmos in the last resort, Science reports many doubtful things. And all of them appalling. There seems to be no substance on which we stamp; nothing but symbols and ratios that way madness lies; Science carries us into zones of speculation where there is no habitable city for the mind of man. But take the kosmos with a grosser faith, as our senses give it to us. We behold space sown with rotatory islands, suns and worlds and the shards and wrecks of systems; some, like the Sun, still blazing; some rotating like the Earth; others, like the Moon, stable in desolation. All these we take to be made of something we call Matter, a thing which no analysis can help us to conceive, to whose incredible properties no familiarity can reconcile our minds.” Cf. also Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, (1969).


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12

The Norton Anthology of Literary Criticism (2001:1596). Cf. The phyicists’ “theory of everything”. 13 In an extension of Plato’s notion of the ‘really real’ (in his theory of Forms, the ‘Forms constitute a realm of unchanging being to which the world of individual mutable objects is subordinate. Because the forms are mutable, they are more real – and more true – than the changeable material world’ [Norton, 2001:34]), Jacques Lacan defines ‘the real’ as that which is outside reality: ‘The Real [as opposed to the Imaginary and the Symbolic] is the easiest to define and the hardest to talk about. In fact, it can’t be talked about; any such discussion is “impossible.” The moment it becomes an object of discourse, it ceases to be the “Real” because it becomes real for someone and it becomes the “truth.” “We are used to the real. The truth we repress,” says Lacan (Leitch, 2001:1281). 14 The Norton Anthology of Literary Criticism (2001:1596). 15 At the “Mad Tea-Party” (s.d.:76–77), Alice remarks on the Hatter’s “funny watch” that “tells the day of the month” but not “what o’clock it is”. He retorts that hers does not tell “what year it is”. Ultimately, although Lewis Carroll was a scholar of mathematics at Oxford, the question of time is left as an unsolved ‘riddle’, probably because time was not yet as fully understood scientifically as it is today, but was clearly a preoccupation among mathematicians. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was written in 1865. Coincidentally, this discussion reflects what was later to be formulated as the Relativity of Time and Stephen Hawking (1997: 12–13) provides a succinct explanation of relativity and its relation to Quantum mechanics: ‘The general theory of relativity describes the force of gravity and the large-scale structure of the universe, that is, the structure on scales from only a few miles to as large as a million million million million (1 with twenty-four zeros after it) miles, the size of the observable universe. Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, deals with phenomena on extremely small scales, such as a millionth of a millionth of an inch’. 16 In Ways of Seeing (1972:7–8), John Berger explains this ever-present gap between perception and knowledge, more simply: It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight . The way we see things is affected by what we know and what we believe. 17

Again I am indebted to Smuts (1932:6), who explains: ‘The attempt to fix the position of an atom has altered its velocity and momentum. The measure affects the body to be measured and vice versa, and a certain unavoidable uncertainty arises in the determination . This uncertainty involves that it is impossible to determine both the exact position and the velocity of a particle at any particular moment. The more accurately we locate a particle here, the more its velocity is altered and it becomes uncertain whether it is here now, and not rather in the immediate past or the immediate future. 18 Fortuitously, in a chapter entitled “Cybernetics and Ghosts” (The Literature Machine, 1980, 1997:8–9), Italo Calvino helps us to understand, in terms of our mental processes, the significance of the graphic chessboard patterning of Okri’s galactic city, Quantum mechanics and entropic time: In the place of the everchanging cloud that we carried in our heads until the other day, the condensing and dispersal of which we attempted to understand by describing impalpable psychological states and shadowy landscapes of the soul – in the place of all this we now feel the rapid

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passage of signals on the intricate circuits that connect the relays, the diodes, the transistors with which our skulls are crammed. Just as no chess player will ever live long enough to exhaust all the combinations of possible moves for the thirty-two pieces on the chessboard, so we know (given the fact that our minds are chessboards with hundreds of billions of pieces) that not even in a lifetime lasting as long as the universe would one ever manage to make all possible plays . every analytical process, every division into parts, tends to provide an image of the world that is ever more complicated, just as Zeno of Elea, by refusing to accept space as continuous, ended up by separating Achilles from the tortoise by an infinite number of intermediate points. The process going on today is the triumph of discontinuity, divisibility, and combination over all that is flux, or a series of minute nuances flowing one upon the other. 19

Cf. T.S. Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” (1930) with its “jewelled unicorns” who “draw by the gilded hearse”. 20 Reminiscent of Arthurian legend. 21 The lesson echoes that of Kahlil Gibran’s (2004:83) prophet: Of time you would make a stream upon whose bank You would sit and watch its flowing. Yet the timeless in you is aware of life’s timelessness, And knows that yesterday is but tomorrow’s memory And tomorrow is today’s dream. And that that which sings and contemplates in you Is still dwelling within the bounds of that first Moment which scattered the stars into space. 22 The quest for divine grace in Okri’s text transliterates those of The Wanderer and The Seafarer in the Anglo-Saxon elegiac Verse, trans. intro. Louis J. Rodrigues (Felinfach: Lianerch Press, 1944).

REFERENCES Thomas Berry (1996) “The University: Its Response to The Ecological Crisis,” Paper delivered at Harvard Divinity School (11 April), pp. 1–9. Dominic Bradbury (1999) “Review of Ben Okri’s Mental Fight,” in The Times (January, s.p.). John Bunyan (1678, 1960) The Pilgrim’s Progress, London: Collins. Italo Calvino (1969) Invisible Cities, London: Picador. Italo Calvino (1997) The Literature Machine, London: Random House. Lewis Carroll (1865) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, London & Glasgow: Collins, s.d.). Brenda Cooper (2003) “Okri, Ben,” Encyclopaedia of African Literature, ed. Simon Gikandi. New York & London: Routledge, pp. 412–413. Gilles Deleuze (1985) “Cinéma 2: L’image-temps,” The Time-Image in Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent C. Leitch, New York, London: Norton, pp. 1593–1597. Lubomir Doležel (1998) Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1998. Thomas Sterns Eliot (1978, 1998, 2000) Four Quartets, “Burnt Norton,” (1935) and “AshWednesday,” (1930) in The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot, London: Faber. 1998; 2000



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Alexander Gunn (1929) The Problem of Time, London: Allen & Unwin. Stephen Hawking (1988, 1997) A Brief History of Time, London: Transworld. Stuart Holroyd (1989) The Arkana Dictionary of New Perspectives, London: Penguin. Edmund Husserl (1964) The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, ed. Martin Heiddegger and trans. James S Churchill, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Jacques Lacan (2001) “Jacques Lacan,” in Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent C. Leitch, New York, London: Norton, pp. 1278–1310. Vincent C. Leitch ed. (1985) “Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari,” in Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, New York, London: Norton, pp. 1593–1597. N.D. Livergood, http://www.hermes-press.com/Perennial_Tradition/esoteric_ christianit-y.htm Accessed 12 March 2005. Achilles Mbembe (2004) “African modes of self-writing”, Chimurenga, Johannesburg: The Sibling, pp. 10–19. Ben Okri (1995, 1999) Astonishing the Gods, London: Orion. Ben Okri (1999) Mental Fight, London: Orion. Plato (1953) Republic, trans. Robin Wakefield, Oxford. Ato, Quayson (1995) “Esoteric Webwork as Nervous System: Reading the Fantastic in Ben Okri’s Writing”, Essays on African Writing, ed. Abdulrazah Gurnah, London: Heinemann, pp. 144–159. Jan Christiaan, Smuts (1932) “Recent Advances in Science and Philosophy”, in Our Changing World-view, ed. H.R. Raikes. Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand Press. Robert, Stalnaker (1979) “Possible Worlds”, Nous 10, pp.65–75. Robert Louis, Stevenson (1932) “Pulvis et Umbra,” (ca.1881) in Our Changing World-view. ed. H.R. Raikes, Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand Press.

TONY E. AFEJUKU

A MODE OF RECOLLECTION IN AFRICAN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

In an autobiography the autobiographer cannot avoid being mentally close to his or her past in the endeavour to elucidate the reality of his or her present. And being mentally close to the past does not mean or imply that the autobiographer’s recollection of the past must be done with absolute fidelity to evidence and events. Clearly, we can argue for autobiography as a genuine enterprise founded on imaginative discourse only if we understand that the autobiographer’s close mental association with the past in the present time of writing involves some (self-) invention. As Barret John Mandel informs us, nobody can “talk about the present at all but [ ] by distancing and fictionalizing it” (“Autobiography”, 327). Of course, arguing as an intending autobiographer, Mandel states that his present produces his past by inspiring meaningless data with interpretation, direction, suggestiveness-life. But as long as I live, my past is rooted in my present and springs to life with my present [ ] I cannot fully give my past to the page because it flows mysteriously out of the incomprehensive moods of the present. And as new moods come upon me, my past comes upon me differently (327).

As a wishful autobiographer, Mandel tends to adopt the approach of an autobiographer who has grown old and is looking back at his past at a significant moment, which is the creative present now alienated from the past by “new moods.” One can infer and argue, as Louis A. Renza seems to have done, that in Mandel’s kind of “autobiography” the “autobiographer” sacrifices the “past to a secondary role vis-à-vis his incomprehensible present” (272). In his recollection, the African autobiographer does not sacrifice his past in order to satisfy the creative present which encapsulates his identity. The past and the present tend to complement each other. Of course, the flashback is a vital mode of recollection which the African autobiographer adopts in creating and energizing his autobiography. Thus this essay examines the autobiographies of prominent African literary autobiographers such as the Nigerian Wole Soyinka (Ake: The Years of Childhood), the South African Ezekiel Mphahlele (Down Second Avenue) and Peter Abrahams (Tell Freedom), the Guinean Camara Laye (The African 37 A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana LXXXVI, 37–46. © 2007 Springer.

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Child) and the Sierra-Leonean Robert Wellesley Cole (Kossoh Town Boy). The argument posited is that one reason why the autobiographies are intriguing is that the writers, in varying degrees, demonstrate an obsessive pre-occupation with the reflective memory which manifests in the form of flashback in their endeavour to recreate reality and give literary shape to their autobiographies. In exploiting the narrative device of flashback, these autobiographers tell us that their autobiographies are not rigid chronological narration of events, but conscious recreations which reflect their different layers of awareness and experience. They achieve this by stepping back in time and filling in pictures of the past. In Ake, for example, this is best exemplified by the first three chapters, in particular in the scene where the sign-board of Abeokuta Grammar School reminds him of the school’s principal, Rev. J.J. Kuti, whose fall from a motor-bicycle he evokes (ch. 3, 43–4). In this chapter, Soyinka, out of curiosity, joins the procession of other curious children following a police band that is marching past his father’s compound. One of the places Soyinka marches past with the procession and the police band is Abeokuta Grammar School. When Soyinka sees the school’s sign-board he vividly recalls the image of its energetic principal and, as I said before, his fall from a motor-bicycle, an incident that caused everybody, in particular Soyinka’s father and mother, real panic. The whole recollection cleverly reveals the young Soyinka’s growth in awareness: Kuti was a principal and I recognized from the sign ABEOKUTA GRAMMAR SCHOOL that we were passing the compound where he taught. I tried now to recollect how my father explained the difference between Principal and Headmaster [ ]. Only a principal could preside over a school as huge and imposing as the one which I had just seen. Still, I hoped that the fact that I was only the son of a headmaster would not prevent me from obtaining a place there; in any case the principal was a frequent guest at our house. Mother called him Uncle and we were encouraged to do the same [ ]. He rode about on the only motorized bicycle I had ever seen, his agbada billowing on either side of him. One day, he fell off, right near us, at Ake [ ]. He was brought into our house where I heard someone explaining that his agbada had billowed out as usual until the sleeve was caught in the spokes of the wheel. They all disappeared into father’s room while mother flew all over the house [ ]. “We must take him to the hospital. The burn at the thigh is quite bad.” I heard father mutter something about the machine falling on top of him, so that the hot exhaust must have done the damage. The nurse [who arrived] said my father had done the right thing by smearing the injury in vaseline [ ] we were herded into the back of the house and the parlour door locked on us. There were heavy movements, doors opening and shutting, then silence. When we emerged, the patient had gone, father and mother with him. When Daodu emerged from hospital he bought a car and never rode on the motorped again [ ]. I felt rather uplifted as I marched away from the Grammar School; I was going there, that was settled. (43–4)


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This is a vivid and interesting recollection. The child who hitherto did not quite understand the difference between a principal and a headmaster now knows that the former is superior because he, unlike the latter, presides over a school as “huge and imposing” as Abeokuta Grammar School which he is seeing for the first time and which he now expresses the desire to enter as a student. His admiration for the school makes him recall so admiringly the personality of Rev. J.J. Kuti who is its principal. The child recollects his deep voice and “energetic gestures” and seems to imply, from his limited perspective, that only a man with his kind of personality can be the principal of such a “huge and imposing” school. His fall from a motor-bicycle which he rode admiringly – “his agbada billowing on either side of him” – is evoked to show the respect everybody has for him, in particular Soyinka’s Headmaster father and family. The kind of concern the Headmaster shows over his fall is, I think, deliberately recalled to reinforce, in the perspective of the child, the “difference between Principal and Headmaster”. As we approach the end of the passage the former’s eminence is further underlined by the recollection that he bought a motor-car to replace his motor-bicycle when he left the hospital. The car, we are told, “was the third in the whole town. The first was owned by the Alake himself, another belonged to a wealthy Chief who lived in Itoko. Even the English District Officer did not appear to own one; he rode a motor-cycle or went on horse-back” (45).

Soyinka’s recollection here is also valuable for its historical interest; for the wonder evoked by the motor-car which at that point in time – that is, the early thirties – was not identified with the poor. Thus the feeling of attending such a magnificent school presided over by an equally great principal is uplifting to the child as he stands gazing at Abeokuta Grammar School compound, lost in thought. Other instances of flashback which are found in the narrative, especially in the first chapter where Soyinka evokes Bishop Ajayi Crowther (4–5), and in chapter three (41–43) where he evokes the market near Ibara, equally reflect the child’s layers of awareness and experience as well as his imaginative view of life. Each instance enables us to speak of Ake as a true and engaging autobiography of introspection in which character, the hero’s, has been “shaped by the passage of time”, to borrow Victor Gerald Rivas’s words (224). Generally, Soyinka adopts the cinematic technique of recollection to underscore his autobiography’s significance as a recreative act of the imagination. Indeed, in Ake, Soyinka employs cinematic memory, in which the sequence of events is vertical, involving a continual backward and forward oscillation,

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often with little or no warning from the autobiographer. Soyinka’s cinematic memory also involves a movement from narration to description and vice versa. He does this to underscore the fact that his autobiographical enterprise is literary art. In Down Second Avenue, Mphahlele also uses flashback to show his awareness, as a child, of a given reality. This is quite evident, for example, on page 27 where the young Mphahlele tries to know from his mother why she brought him and the other children from Maupaneng, and why the father always quarrels with her and beats her. After the mother tells him the reason, which has to do with the father’s wayward behaviour, the young Mphahlele falls into a reverie in which he recollects his life and experience in Maupaneng where he was staying with his wicked paternal grandmother before his mother came to take him back to Pretoria. The real purpose of the reverie, apart from acting as succour for him following the pain which his mother’s revelation causes him, is to determine which life was better: the life led in Maupaneng or the life led in his parents’ home in Pretoria? Although he did not like Maupaneng, his reverie suggests that he prefers there and that he would like to go back there. Perhaps he is deliberately exploiting that well known dichotomy between the habitation of the city and the tranquility of the countryside. An interesting point of contrast to point out between Soyinka and Mphahlele is that while Soyinka uses the flashback to link his chapters, Mphahlele uses it to sum up what had gone before in previous chapters. In Ake, a notable example of how Soyinka uses flashback to link chapters can be found at the end of chapter twelve. This chapter is mainly about how the principal, Rev. Kuti, runs Abeokuta Grammar School. The real point of interest in the chapter is the farcical scene where Rev. Kuti is seen in his “court” presiding over the case of senior students he caught roasting a chicken which they stole from the school poultry. As the “court” scene draws to a close, there is the unexpected and unannounced flashback to the Egba Women’s Movement and the women’s activities. In fact, we first learn of the women’s movement and activities at the end of this chapter. But it is in chapter thirteen up to the final two chapters that the story of the Movement is described and developed in full. In this way the chapters flow naturally and logically into one another. This is despite their suspenseful digressions. In Down Second Avenue, the “Interludes” best exemplify how Mphahlele uses the flashback to sum up what had gone before. For example, the Interlude that comes after chapter eleven graphically reproduces the young Maphahlele’s memory of what we had read before of his miserable experience


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in the countryside and about the incident that led his father to pour boiling potatoes and curry on the mother: No use trying to put the pieces together. Pieces of my life. They are a jumble. My father’s image keeps coming back only to fade. I can’t think of him but as a harsh, brutal, cold person. Like his mother. And that brutal limp of his. The smell of paraffin from the stove and the smell of boiling potatoes and curry. An incident on a Sunday morning. His mother and the mountain. The old woman sitting in the yard, weaving a sleeping-mat or a mat for eating out of. Bending over a stone, grinding corn, her shoulders full of strength, fire and heartlessness [ ]. And then Leshoana river. The cruel river every one had to cross [ ]. The defeaning roar and long wailing cries along the course. (74–75)

We have read all this before on pages 11–12 and on pages 25–28. Mphahlele’s reliving all of them again in his imagination is not merely fortuitous. This interlude which in fact is a flashback (like the other interludes) certainly underlines the lingering effect of the past experiences on him, but I think he more appropriately uses it here as a means of giving coherence to the narrative. This is because this interlude is not a mere repetition but an artistic summation of what had gone before. The previous important experiences cohere in it. The other interludes are put to similar use, thus tying the various parts of the narrative together, even though Mphahlele’s perception of reality, as seen in the interludes, seems fragmentary, sporadic. While it can be said that the flashback is a distinguishing feature, which helps to give qualities of compactness of structure and of wholeness of conception to Ake and Down Second Avenue, the same cannot exactly be said of the other autobiographies – The African Child, Tell Freedom and Kossoh Town Boy. In these three works, the authors, unlike those of the first two mentioned texts, tend more to engage in chronological mode of writing in which we see their respective intellectual, social and physical development. Yet the reader never loses sight of the fact that the history of their growth is a demonstration of the perfect correspondence between their past and creative present. In other words, in Laye’s The African Child, Abrahams’s Tell Freedom and Cole’s Kossoh Town Boy, which tend to be more chronological than Soyinka’s Ake and Mphahlele’s Down Second Avenue in conception and design, there is still glaring evidence that each autobiographer’s perception of events (reality) and of the temporal process is discursively reflective. For example, in Kossoh Town Boy Cole asserts as follows: I HAVE been asked how it is I can remember what happened so long ago in my life. The answer is simple really. There are certain landmarks which are easy to fix, and by which personal events could be related in time and place. Take the case of Mohammed Bundukar, who, I have shown, chased me with murder in his heart because I had taken disciplinary action against him in class. I can picture the scene as he

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rose up in the full majesty of his years and robes to threaten me. This was in the classroom which adjoined and faced the Infants Department. The only period I was in that classroom was during my first year at school. Therefore I must have been seven years old at the time. (111–12)

In this passage, there is no attempt to suppress the consciousness of pastness vis-à-vis the consciousness of presentness. Cole seems here to confess it openly to himself and to the reader. He even tends to extol it in the endeavour to emphasize the narcissism of his autobiographical act. And his fragmentary style, despite his attempt to write chronologically, is hardly concealable throughout the narrative. The incident he refers to in the cited quotation was first mentioned on page 94, and it runs thereafter to page 96 before Cole interrupts it with the story of his “Rehabilitation at Home” (96) which he dwells on, among other stories, up to page 111 from where he again picks up the incident of his encounter with Mohammed Bundukar. In his essay, “The Style of African Autobiography,” Tony E. Afejuku argues as follows in regard to the above passage: “The present which is the moment of writing is employed to establish the relationship between the author-narrator and his own past, a past which looms so large in the consciousness and present of Cole because of its inescapable and unforgettable ‘landmarks’ ” (214).

We can qualify this statement now by adding that in Cole’s consciousness we see his acute memory which functions as flashback, as style, which he purposely and persistently employs to advance his autobiography. Of course, in his use of flashback as memory, his autobiography does not demonstrate that he is adopting the cinematic technique of recall and narration which Soyinka, as a playwright-autobiographer, employs with care and distinction in Ake. Instead, in Kossoh Town Boy, memory discursively shifts from description to narration of events, and this shift “becomes a stylistic device employed to show growth and development in age, maturity and response to situation” (Afejuku 214). Discursive memory also seems to give shape to Camara Laye’s The African Child and Peter Abrahams’s Tell Freedom. Generally, in discursive memory, the sequence of events may be fragmentary or coherent, depending on the retrospective mood and inclination of the autobiographer. In Laye’s one cannot but quote the following typical retrospective gleaning: I was a little boy playing around my father’s hut. How old would I have been at that time? I cannot remember exactly. I still must have been very young: five, may be six years old. My mother was in the workshop with my father, and I could just hear their familiar voices [ ]. Suddenly I stopped playing, my whole attention fixed on a snake that was creeping round the hut [ ]. I thrust this reed into the reptile’s mouth. The snake did not try to get away: he was


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beginning to enjoy our little game: he was slowly swallowing the reed; he was devouring it, I thought, as if it were some delicious prey, his eyes glittering with voluptuous bliss [ ]. I was laughing, I had not the slightest fear, and now I know that the snake would not have hesitated much longer before burying his fangs in my fingers if at that moment Dany [ ] had not come out of the workshop. The apprentice shouted to my father, and almost at once I felt myself lifted off my feet [ ]. I began to weep [ ]. A little later, when I had calmed down a little [ ] my mother solemnly warned me never to play such a game again; I promised, although I could not know where the danger lay. (1–2)

This is a perfectly autobiographical passage where the past and the present tend to converge. Indeed, this is one of the celebrated passages in The African Child in which we see that the past returns to dwell in the present at the “cost of complete falsification,” to borrow Georges Gusdorf’s words (40). In the passage, the five or six years’ old child of yesterday is being recalled by the man of today; the child cannot utter any word of protest against the recollection of the latter who tries to merge the child’s and adult’s perceptions and identities. This involves some measure of falsification as seen clearly in the choice of words and phrases such as “reptile,” “fangs,” “glittering,” “delicious prey,” “voluptuous bliss,” which are those of the man of today writing his autobiography. These words and phrases contain visual metaphors and sensual and tactile images which give the autobiography the quality of fiction. Laye’s use of them confirms Mandel’s observation that in autobiography “Language creates illusion” that creates the past afresh (“Full of Life Now” 63). The passage needs this additional qualification. Like several others in the text, it attests to the fact that Laye’s is an autobiography of memories in which we see not a simple recollection of the past but the presence of the ghost of an experience forever gone. Indeed, Laye’s narrative creates the illusion of a forever gone past coming to life in words, in the present of writing. But how does the child gain consciousness? How does he grow in awareness? Of course, the main development in the autobiography portrays Laye as employing the discursive dimension in which memory, however, occurs coherently in the mind and in which the adult author shows the young Laye discovering some of his innate power – the power to make choices and affirm reality as he sees it. Despite its observed falsification, the passage records a definite step in Laye’s development towards the well developed sensibility of none other than the autobiographer who is recreating and attempting to repossess the essence of his life. The text gives meaning to his life as a village boy, the son of a goldsmith and traditional healer and visionary who foregoes his presumed destiny for a far higher one in France, outside the shores of Africa. According to Burton Pike, one major reason why a literary autobiography is intriguing is that the writer demonstrates “an obsessive pre-occupation with

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the chronological aspect of time” (327). In such an autobiography, continues Pike, the “act of writing is linear [ ] The autobiographer sees his life as a [ ] line which begins with his birth and runs up to the present of writing” (327). For an autobiographer who tries to distance himself from his narrative by recreating himself as a child narrating the events, this linear account which “begins with birth” and “runs up to the present of writing” can be problematic and can be a means of falsifying memory and time of events. I wish to contend that The African Child and the other autobiographies fall into this category even though they are not rigidly chronological. Each autobiographer, in his respective ways, I wish to reiterate, falsifies memory, which includes time of events. But memory is significant as flashback which, stylistically speaking, can also take the form of reverie, another means the literary autobiographer, in his retrospective mood, can utilize to structure his autobiography. In this connection, we easily cite Peter Abrahams’s opening pages, where reveries, what Abrahams himself calls “flashes of memory” (15), govern narrative mode and structure: There are flashes of memory. I remember the family picnics on Sundays. My mother and father would lie on the grass talking. We children would play on the grass. The grass always seemed very green [. . .]. I remember going to Sunday school . . . . I remember the stirring music of the salvation Army Band. I remember the marching children in the Band of Hope, [. . .] and crying because I could not wear a sash and march with them [. . . .] I remember my first experience of crime and punishment [. . .] I remember my mother and father merging into each other in my mind. Together, they were my symbol of peace and laughter and security. Then my father died. I remember the shadow that was over our house: the solemn faces of my brother and sisters; the new strangeness of my mother. It surprised me to see her crying. I remember the many people who suddenly invaded the house, making me feel a stranger in my own home [. . . .] I remember someone lifted me up and I looked into the coffin where my father lay. Because he did not smile at me, and because my mother cried, I cried too. Then they took him away. And I never saw him again. With his going, the order and stability that had been in my life, dissolved. There was no bread-winner so we had to leave the place that had been our home. (14–15)

In this passage, as elsewhere, Abrahams, like Laye, employs discursive memory which gives structure to his narrative. For him, time passes quickly. Living and writing tend to overlap. The narrator who experiences the kind of mixture of palpable joy and harsh reality Abrahams experiences must record it as quickly as time permits. Thus the narrative structure joins text and


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autobiographer by simplifying time and memory sequences, wandering from one event to another, condensing years and expanding others. Through “flashes of memory,” which are discursive rather than cinematic, Abrahams deals with past, present and future. The passage of years and the inevitable circumstances of his birth in apartheid South Africa are objective phenomena. How Abrahams seeks to preserve his selfhood through his shifting sense of the meaning of his present vis-à-vis his past and the possibility of his future is the subjective measure. As Abrahams’s memory shifts from one memory to another, from one flashback to another, we see his unfolding self-discovery where events and characters become significant aspects of his evolving consciousness. At this point, I wish to conclude this essay by stating as follows: our five chosen texts have demonstrated that autobiography is an interesting enterprise in which the power of flashback or memory, cinematic or discursive, resides in the present of writing, for the present of creativity makes it possible for the autobiographer to go to the recreated past. In recreating their pasts the autobiographers may have “coloured” their imagination and invented roles, in which we see their different layers of experience and consciousness, for narrative appeal. But the inference that can be drawn from this is that autobiography is falsehood about falsehood; the more truth it espouses the more lies therein. Finally, although our five representative texts are by Africans, the statements made in respect of autobiographical recollection and narrative mode remain valid for all autobiography. I hope this remark will not ruffle a lot of feathers. University of Benin, Benin City, Nigeria REFERENCES Peter Abrahams (1954) Tell Freedom. London: Faber, rpt. 1981. Tony E. Afejuku (1995) “The Style of African Autobiography”. Prose Studies 18(2) (August), pp. 211–226. Robert Wellesley Cole (1966) Kossoh Town Boy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Georges Gusdorf (1980) “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography”. Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Ed. James Olney. Princeton: Princeton UP. Camara Laye (1955) The African Child. Translated by Kirkup. London: Fontana. Barret John Mandel (1972–1973) “Autobiography – Reflection Trained on Mystery.” Prairie Schooner 46, pp. 323–338. Barret John Mandel (1980) “Full of Life Now”. Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Ezekiel Mphahlele (1959) Down Second Avenue. London: Faber.

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Burton Pike (1976) “Time in Autobiography”. Comparative Literature 28(4), pp. 326–342. Louis A. Renza (1980) “The Veto of the Imagination: A Theory of Autobiography”. Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Victor Gerald Rivas (2004) “A Reflection on the Autobiographical Memory and on the Current Meaning of the Individual Life”. Analecta Husserliana Vol. 82, pp. 215–235. Wole Soyinka (1981) Ake: The Years of Childhood. London: Rex Collings.

MING-QIAN MA

“IN AN INSTANT OF TIME”: THE IMAGIST PERCEPTION AND THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE “UPSURGE” OF THE PRESENT IN EZRA P O U N D ’ S C A N T O S1

An “image” is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. Ezra Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound By these words, the “primacy of perception,” we mean that the experience of perception is our presence at the moment when things, truths, values are constituted for us. M. Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception

The Cantos of Ezra Pound dramatizes the paradox of time: Being an epic, this monumental work presents itself, according to Pound’s own famed definition in his ABC of Reading, as “a poem including history” (p. 46); yet throughout its eight-hundred-plus pages, there reveals, insofar as its temporality is concerned, neither a discernible arrow of linearity whereby historical events are presented nor a palpable trajectory of continuity with which any historical syntheses could be made. Intended and designed ambitiously as a modernist project “to write Paradise” (C, p. 802), the Cantos becomes, as a result, a conglomerate composite of “notes” (C, p. 797) in which, as the poet acknowledges in “Notes for CXVII et seq.,” the center is lost (C, p. 802). Pound himself is, without any doubt, aware of this paradox, and he thus brings this Gordian knot to the fore in Canto CXVI: “I have brought the great ball of crystal; / who can lift it? / Can you enter the great acorn of light? / But the beauty is not the madness / Tho’ my errors and wrecks lie about me. / And I am not a demigod, / I cannot make it cohere” (C, pp. 795–796). Strikingly candid, Pound’s confession above can be read, however, as expressing a philosophical position rather than an aesthetic-methodological conundrum. It articulates, in other words, not so much a straightforward, though frustrated, resignation to his own failure in the Cantos “to make a 47 A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana LXXXVI, 47–63. © 2007 Springer.

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paradiso / terrestre” (C, p. 802) as a different concept and understanding of time in connection with himself as a poet. For, in composing this epic including history, Pound refuses to take a position that transcends history (“And I am not a demigod”) and, in so doing, denies himself, temporally as well as perceptually, what Christopher Macann calls, in his study of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “a God’s eye view of the world”2 (“I cannot make it cohere”). That being said, what, then, is the time-modality at work in Pound’s Cantos? Or, what is the temporal form that renders the poet unable to make his notes cohere (C, p. 797)?3

I

In an essay titled “Date Line,” Pound concludes his wide-ranging meditations on a variety of issues by making brief references to a series of occurrences, both real and hypothetical, that have, or could have, taken place in history. He then ends his referencing with a summary pronouncement: “There is a TIME in these things,” he asserts; “It is quite obvious that we do not all of us inhabit the same time” (LE 87).4 Thus stated emphatically, Pound’s notion of time becomes indeed suggestive, and his phraseology, in particular, calls attention to a tripartite, phenomenological ramification. First, the structure of “there is,” as a syntactic pattern, explicitly establishes time as an entity, one that exists or lives (Webster’s), as is also implied through the tone and the context of Pound’s observation, independent of both the objective mappings of empiricism and the synthetic presuppositions of intellectualism. In addition, it specifies, by way of its denotative mandate, that time is a circumscribed or situated phenomenon, always manifesting itself in relation to place and action (Webster’s). Secondly, the use of the indefinite article “a” to refer to time de-constitutes time as the unifying scale of history by multiplying it and, therefore, democratizing it in tandem with various individuals finding themselves entangled or situated concretely in respective happenings. Thirdly, time as such can only be perceived or experienced as differently as there are diverse individuals, each living in (“inhabit”) “a TIME,” and the form of this time-dwelling is in none other than the moment when one becomes suddenly conscious of his or her own very entanglement or situated-ness in certain specific circumstances. Time, as is thus implied so far by Pound, can be read as Merleau-Pontian; for it is, to put it in Macann’s words, “the time of an incarnate consciousness living out its life in a given situation” (FPP, p. 198).

IN AN INSTANT OF TIME

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This concept of time can be seen as having originated from Pound’s imagist aesthetics, but with one specific feature added. “An image,” Pound writes, “is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” (LE, p. 4). Central to the imagist perception is, in this sense then, not only the element of time but also, and more significantly, the phenomenon of time understood in terms of the present, which is instantaneous, and the manifestation of which can only be experienced, therefore, “in an instant.” Pound brings this point home emphatically when he thus elaborates further on this temporal dimension of the image, one he considers, in his overall modernist scheme of things to “Make It New,”5 as precisely that which allows of an escape from the impasse of the traditional constructs of time and space: “It is the presentation of such a ‘complex’ instantaneously which gives that sense of sudden liberation,” he reiterates; “that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art” (LE, p. 4).6 Nowhere is Pound more comprehensive on all these temporal specificities than in his reflection upon the creative process with regard to the prototype of an imagist poem, or in Pound’s own words, the “one image poem,” with a title that highlights, rather pointedly, the place of his experience: “In a Station of the Metro”: The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals, on a wet, black bough.7

In an article titled “How I Began” printed in T. P.’s Weekly shortly after the publication of the poem, Pound thus recalls his own situated experience in “the Paris underground,” out of which the poem is born: “I got out of a train at, I think, La Concorde and in the jostle I saw a beautiful face, and then, turning suddenly, another and another, and then a beautiful child’s face, and then another beautiful face.”8 Intended obviously to capture in language a whirling of sensory onslaught, Pound’s deployment of the quasi-paratactic syntax here (“and then and then,” “another and another”), together with his use of expressions such as “turning suddenly,” registers in an overwhelming fashion the vortexes of precipitate moments, enacting each instant in which a face, upon being seen, instantaneously presents in Pound’s mind a complex of what he later calls his “metro emotion” and “a certain vein of thought” (G-B, p. 89). More specifically, “In a poem of this sort,” Pound explains, “one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective” (G-B, p. 89). This instantaneous transformation or darting from the outward to the inward, from the objective to the subjective, is subsequently understood and identified as the activity of

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consciousness. It is, furthermore, a consciousness of / as a sudden presence or “a presencing,” which is, so argues Macann, “the very action of time creation” (FPP, p. 197);9 and “This particular sort of consciousness,” Pound contends further, “is worthy of attention” (G-B, p. 89). A temporal phenomenon of instantaneity, the imagist perception or consciousness, which anticipates “The state of mind of the impressionist [that] tends to become cinema-tographical” (G-B, p. 89), is, as Pound’s “one image poem” has hitherto testified, incarnated in a “bodily subject” (FPP, p. 194). As such, it is unreflective or “pre-reflective” (FPP, p. 194).10 “The image is the poet’s pigment,” Pound argues, and the poet, being “creative” rather than “mimetic or representational,” “must use his image because he sees it or feels it, not because he thinks he can use it to back up some creed or some system of ethics or economics” (G-B, p. 86). It follows then that this imagist perception or consciousness, so incarnated as to be anti-mimetic or anti-representational, entails a concomitant economy of words in composition, in a way of writing, that is, which intends to facilitate the bodying forth of an instantaneous and unreflective presence by reducing as much as possible the mediation of language. In “A Retrospect,” an essay on the imagist tenets and methodology, Pound begins by specifying the first two of the three principles of imagism as follows: “1. Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether subjective or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation” (LE, p. 3).11 Imperative are the direct treatment of the thing and the use of absolute minimum of words because “the natural object is always the adequate symbol,” Pound asserts, and any mixture of “an abstraction with the concrete,” he points out further, “dulls the image” (LE, p. 5). In other words, any abstraction or language “ornament” (LE, p. 5) prolongs the temporal-perceptual instantaneity into a slow, conceptual lingering in which the keenness or the acuteness of the object, otherwise experienced directly, is lost (Webster’s). “An image, in our sense, is real,” Pound insists, “because we know it directly” (G-B, p. 86). Hence a different form of knowing in the imagist aesthetics, the directness of which finds its expression in the present, in that embodied moment of instantaneity in which the incarnated consciousness lives out its immediately situated present. Pound’s concept of time as such can be characterized as “timing,”12 in the sense that time is itself dynamic, constituting itself in a sudden or instantaneous fashion. In its present participle form, timing thus denotes the velocity of time being born, signals the moment of time becoming manifest, and pinpoints the instant of time finding itself coming on the scene. In this sense, time as timing seems paradoxical in relation to the imagist perception or consciousness.13 For, on the one hand, both the conspicuous absence of a


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perceiving subject in Pound’s definition of the image as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” and Pound’s assertion that “the natural object is already the adequate symbol,” with its own temporal scheme of presentation, can be construed as his arguing implicitly for a view of time postulated as ontological rather than epistemological. On the other hand, the subtexts of Pound’s statements above unmistakably assume as given that, first and foremost, there has to be a perception of such an instant of time, or a consciousness of such an instantaneous presentation by the image, so that the “intellectual and emotional complex,” or the natural object as “the adequate symbol,” can be invoked at all and subsequently experienced. Hence the paradox, but not without a possible answer to it: Time exists, independently, but camouflaged, so to speak; and it makes itself manifest the instant when perception or consciousness is intensely activated with regard to a thing, be it objective or subjective. From this perspective, there is, indeed as Pound has pointed out earlier, “a TIME” in everything, and its sudden presence, or presencing, is synchronous with the instant of its being inhabited by an incarnated consciousness deeply engaged in its own situated present. II

Pound’s notion of time, so articulated through his imagist aesthetics, presents a conceptual resonance, as is already briefly suggested, with the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In a move similar to but in reverse order from Pound’s theorizing of the image in terms of an embodied and situated perception, Merleau-Ponty’s theorizing of the embodied and situated perception is, among other approaches, carried out in part through a discussion of the image. In The Primacy of Perception, he offers a critical rethinking of the image in terms that remind one of Pound’s metro experience and of his pronouncement that an image is bodily incarnated, functionally anti-mimetic, experientially real, and directly knowable. Merleau-Ponty writes, beginning with a complaint about how the word “image” has been habitually, and wrongly, understood as derivation, abstracted into mediation, and relegated, finally, to the instrument of representation: The word “image” is in bad repute because we have thoughtlessly believed that a design was a tracing, a copy, a second thing, and that the mental image was such a design, belonging among our private bric-a-brac. But if in fact it is nothing of the kind, then neither the design nor the painting belongs to the in-itself any more than the image does. They are the inside of the outside and the outside of the inside, which the duplicity of feeling [le sentir] makes possible and without which we would never understand the quasi presence and imminent visibility which make up

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the whole problem of the imaginary. The picture and the actor’s mimicry are not devices to be borrowed from the real world in order to signify prosaic things which are absent. For the imaginary is much nearer to the actual — nearer because it is in my body as a diagram of the life of the actual, with all its pulp and carnal obverse [son envers charnel] exposed to view for the first time. (PP, pp. 164–165)

Having thus exonerated the image from its mis-identity of a mimetic device, Merleau-Ponty restores it to its right place in the body which, and which alone, is considered as the real or the actual. To perceive an image as such involves the element of time, Merleau-Ponty indicates further, and the manner in which time manifests itself in this perceiving experience can be described, rather similarly, as instantaneous. He thus explains, in what might seem to be a paraphrase of Pound’s imagist aesthetics: By these words, the “primacy of perception,” we mean that the experience of perception is our presence at the moment 14 when things, truths, values are constituted for us; that perception is a nascent logos; that it teaches us, outside all dogmatism, the true conditions of objectivity itself; that it summons us to the tasks of knowledge and action. (PP, p. 25)

As is the case with Pound’s imagist counterpart predicated on “an instant of time,” Merleau-Ponty’s perception is pivoted upon “the moment” — i.e., a definite point, or a definite instant, of time. More importantly, this moment is endowed with two specific properties. First, the prepositional phrase “at the moment” designates “the moment” as an entity that exists in an external, synchronous relation vis-à-vis “the experience of perception” as one’s “presence” and, correspondingly, presents “the moment” as autonomous and self-constituting. Secondly, the preposition “at” qualifies “the moment” denotatively as a point and, connotatively, as both precise and instantaneous. Stated otherwise, “at” foregrounds, in Pound’s words, “the precise instant.” Viewed from this perspective, the experience of perception is, as Merleau-Ponty has so formulated, temporal in nature. It is the sudden activation of consciousness coupled with an “operative intentionality” (PhP, pp. xviii, 418, 429), which embraces the life-world directly and immediately; and the instant this direct and immediate embrace by the consciousness of the nascent logos occurs is the one and the same instant consciousness “inhabits” time, to use Pound’s expression. Hence the experience of perception as the experience of one’s presence, a presence of being as consciousness, which is none other than “the consciousness of the present” (PhP, p. 424), and which is itself also a presencing — i.e., a present presenting its own presence instantaneously to consciousness as consciousness comes into it. Similar to Pound’s “instant of time” as timing, Merleau-Ponty’s “moment” as presencing thus centers on a present asserting itself, configuring itself, and manifesting itself.


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“Time must constitute itself,” Merleau-Ponty thus summarizes in The Visible and the Invisible; “— be always seen from the point of view of someone who is of it”15 — that is, be always experienced by someone who embodies time by inhabiting it as presencing, or by inhabiting its presencing. Of this concept of time and the time–subject relationship, Merleau-Ponty offers a more focused and more systematic account in Phenomenology of Perception, in which he makes his position clear from the outset that “To analyze time is not to follow out the consequences of a pre-established conception of subjectivity,” rather, “it is to gain access, through time, to its concrete structure” (PhP, p. 410). His chief postulate therein foregrounds, therefore, an ontological configuration of time. “There must be another true time,” he so explains; “in which I learn the nature of flux and transience itself” (PhP, p. 415). Arguing against the empiricist’s — and Husserl’s, for that matter — conception of time as “constituted,” as “the series of possible relations in terms of before and after,” as “the ultimate recording of time, the result of its passage” (PhP, p. 415), Merleau-Ponty then opts for a “Temporality [which] temporalizes itself,” for “one single time which is selfconfirmatory” (PhP, pp. 420, 421). Time, in other words, “bears itself on and launches itself afresh” (PhP, p. 423), he thus describes. It is a time that is, at once figuratively and literally, “the one single movement appropriate to itself in all its parts, as a gesture includes all the muscular contractions necessary for its execution” (PhP, p. 419). Fundamental to this notion of time as self-constituting and selfconfirmatory is the phenomenon of the present, which, Merleau-Ponty acknowledges, contra-Heidegger, “enjoys a privilege” in his rethinking; so much so that, in a rhetorical moment of his theoretical manoeuvring, he selfconsciously relates his notion of the present to the age-old cliché of “eternity” (PhP, p. 422).16 But the present is indeed eternal, only in a negative sense. For Merleau-Ponty, the specific way whereby the present manifests itself, or the concrete manner in which it moves, is “upsurge,” also described synonymously by expressions such as “at a stroke,” “lunches itself afresh,” “restarts itself ,” and “thrust” (PhP, pp. 419, 421, 423, 426). Time constitutes itself with nothing but this upsurge of the present. More importantly, when time, or the present, moves in this fashion, “it moves throughout its whole length” (PhP, p. 419). Which is to say, more concretely, that “each present, in virtue of its very essence as a present, rules out the juxtaposition of other presents,” only allowing itself to upsurge afresh “according to its own tempo” (PhP, p. 423). All-encompassing, the upsurge of the present is, in other words, all there is of time and, as such, “The upsurge of a fresh present does not cause a heaping up of the past and a tremor of the future,” Merleau-Ponty elaborates

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further; because “the fresh present is the passage of future to present, and of former present to past” (PhP, p. 419). In this light, “The ‘instants’ A, B, and C are not successively in being, but differentiate themselves from each other, and consequently A passes into A and thence into A ”; differently put, “they run into each other,” which forms “the one single phenomenon of running-off ” of the present (PhP, pp. 419, 420). Merleau-Ponty summarizes this concept as follows: This amounts to saying that each present reasserts the presence of the whole past which it supplants, and anticipates that of all that is to come, and that by definition the present is not shut up within itself, but transcends itself to wards a future and a past. What there is, is not a present, then another present which takes its place in being, and not even a present with its vistas of past and future followed by another present in which those vistas are disrupted, so that one and the same spectator is needed to effect the synthesis of successive perspectives: there is one single time which is self-confirmatory, which can bring nothing into existence unless it has already laid that thing’s foundations as present and eventual past, and which establishes itself at a stroke. (PhP, pp. 420–421)

The present transcending itself is the present of flux and transience in upsurge. It follows that, in its movement, the self-transcending of the present “continuously outruns itself and so can never catch up with itself,” as Macann has pointed out; and because “it is always beyond itself, [it] can never come to terms with itself” (FPP, p. 197). Reasserting his position against the constituted time, Merleau-Ponty emphasizes this paradoxical nature of time. “There can be time only if it is not completely deployed, only provided that past, present and future do not all three have their being in the same sense,” he argues; “It is of the essence of time to be in process of self-production, and not to be; never, that is, to be completely constituted” (PhP, p. 415). As a result, the present defies synthesis; or, should any orchestration of successive perspectives be attempted at all, “this synthesis must always be undertaken afresh,” Merleau-Ponty thus clarifies; and “any supposition that it can be anywhere brought to completion involves the negation of time” (PhP, p. 415). Merleau-Ponty brings this point to the fore when he writes: There is no need for a synthesis externally binding together the tempora into one single time, because each one of the tempora was already inclusive, beyond itself, of the whole open series of other tempora, being in internal communication with them, and because the “cohesion of a life” is given with its ek-stase. (PhP, p. 421)

To such a present, his alternative approach is “passive synthesis,” by which he means “that we make our way into multiplicity, but that we do not synthesize it” (PhP, p. 427). As the constitutive condition for the consciousness of time, the “on-going dynamic” (FPP, p. 197) of the present transcending itself delineates “the zone in


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which being and consciousness coincide” (PhP, p. 424). “We must understand time as the subject,” Merleau-Ponty argues emphatically, “and the subject as time” (PhP, p. 422). Furthermore, “consciousness takes root in being and time by taking up a situation,” or by “being in a situation — prior to which we do not exist” (PhP, p. 424, 427). The consciousness of the present is, in other words, the consciousness of one’s existence situated concretely in relation to the life world. In this sense, “time is someone,” in that it is “a dimension of our being;” correspondingly, the subject is not intra-temporal, in that “Subjectivity is not in time, because it takes up or lives time, and merges with the cohesion of a life” (PhP, pp. 422, 415, 422). Experientially embodied and situated, the present is, then, “not a real process, not an actual succession that I am content to record,” Merleau-Ponty writes; “It arises from my relation to things” (PhP, p. 412) — which is to say, to put it in Poundian terms, there is a TIME in everything as one inhabits it. On this point, Merleau-Ponty’s term for Pound’s expression “inhabit” is “effect,” and he thus reiterates this position: “The passage of one present to the next is not a thing which I conceive, nor do I see it as a onlooker, I effect it; I am already at the impending present as my gesture is already at its goal, I am myself time, a time which ‘abides’ and does not ‘flow’ or ‘change’ ” (PhP, p. 421). Of this time–subject relationship, Merleau-Ponty offers the following summary overview: Time exists for me only because I am situated in it, that is, because I become aware of myself as already committed to it, because the whole of being is not given to me incarnate, and finally because one sector of being is so close to me that it does not even make up a picture before me — I cannot see it, just as I cannot see my face. Time exists for me because I have a present. It is by coming into the present that a moment of time acquires that indestructible individuality, that “once and for all” quality, which subsequently enables it to make its way through time and produce in us the illusion of eternity. No one of time’s dimensions can be deduced from the rest. (PhP, pp. 423–424)

That being the case, Merleau-Ponty concludes his exegesis by way of a Heideggerian thesis without the latter’s privilege of the future: “Time is ‘the affecting of self by self’ ” (PhP, pp. 425–426). Or, as he himself puts it, “we are the upsurge of time” (PhP, p. 428). III

Notorious for its frustrating opacity and for its staunch defiance of interpretative synthesis, the Cantos can therefore be read, in light of the discussions above, as a poetical–philosophical experiment that engages in a MerleauPontian critique of time. Despite all its textual ambiguities and the resultant hermeneutical difficulties, the Cantos is nevertheless punctuated periodically

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by Pound’s resounding proclamations of his position against constituted time, be it historical or mechanic. As early as in “Canto V,” for instance, he makes it clear that epic perception or paradisiacal vision is not conceivable in terms of conventional temporality. He writes, parenthesizing it as if to make a note for himself in the form of an aside: “(Clock-tick pierces the vision)” (C. p. 18). It is in this sense, perhaps, that constituted time presents, for Pound, a moral problem, and he states it emphatically in “Canto XXX”: “Time is the evil. Evil” (C, p. 147). Moreover, the evil nature of constituted time is further explained, by implication, through a parallel structure in “Canto LXXIV”: “Time is not, Time is the evil” (C, p. 444). Not only does this syntactical parallel signify an appositional relation between the two statements (“Time is not” = “Time is the evil”), it also designates the second statement as offering an explanation (Webster’s) (“Time is not” because “Time is the evil”). In other words, constituted time, by virtue of its function as measurement of time and as recording of time’s passage at the service of external synthesis, constitutes what Merleau-Ponty refers to earlier as “the negation of time.” What is negated, then, is the “instant of time,” or the “moment” of time, the “upsurge” of which is embodied in the present and situated in the life world. In this light, Pound’s understanding of time and his compositional approach to it, as is articulated through his imagist aesthetics generally, and through his candid acknowledgement that he is not a demigod and that, as a result, he cannot make the Cantos cohere as an epic including history, resonate, in principle, with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological view: The upsurge of time would be incomprehensible as the creation of a supplement of time that would push the preceding series back into the past. That passivity is not conceivable. On the other hand every analysis of time that views it from above is insufficient. (VI, p. 184)

With this understanding of time in mind, the Cantos in general, and the typographical deployment of verbal images on each of its pages in particular, can be seen as staging “the field of presence”; more concretely, it is “the field of presence as the primary experience,” so defines Merleau-Ponty, “in which time and its dimensions make their appearance unalloyed, with no intervening distance and with absolute self-evidence” (PhP, p. 416).17 Hence a tripartite temporal configuration of presence–experience–time: Upon keenly and directly experienced in an instant of time, each image, already deeply incarnated in and always carried by the subject situated in the life world, is instantaneously inhabited by the consciousness, which is the consciousness of the present, of a present as timing or as presencing, in the upsurge of which the image, be it objective or subjective, is perceived anew, afresh, presenting


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for the consciousness an intellectual and emotion complex, or constituting things, truths, and values, in a way insusceptible to synthesis. Such is the case with “Canto LXXIV” or, for that matter, with any of the cantos. Take, for example, the following three image clusters arrayed, among other images, in adjacency to each other on the same page: 1) — “You sit stiller” said Kokka “if whenever you move something jangles.” and the old Marchesa remembered a reception in Petersburg and Kokka thought there might be some society (good) left in Spain, wd. he care to frequent it, my god, no! 2) Sirdar, Bouiller and Les Lilas, or Dieudonne London, or Voisin’s, Uncle George stood like a statesman ‘PEI IIANTA fills up every hollow the cake shops in the Nevsky, and Schoners “not to mention der Greif at Bolsano la patronne getting older” Mouquin’s or Robert’s 40 years after 3) Said Mr Adams, of the education, Teach? at Harvard? Teach? It cannot be done. and this I had from the monument

(C, p. 433)

It is important to note that here, as elsewhere throughout the entire Cantos, Pound, following his imagist tenets and his ideogramic method, provides neither background information nor contextual cues nor explanatory indexes for his verbal images, which in turn are presented in seemingly arbitrary juxtapositions, “discontinuous syntax and agglutinative prosody.”18 Thanks to Carroll F. Terrell and his meticulous annotations in A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound,19 these mutually isolated and often nonsensical details become luminous, revealing respectively their historical, cultural, or personal significance.20 As a result of Terrell’s thorough and comprehensive research, it has come to light, for instance, that “Kokka” in the first image cluster is “Colonel Goleyevsky, military attaché to Beckendroff, tsarist ambassador to the court of St. James and, ca. 1913, to Baron Stalevesky, tsarist ambassador to Washington. An acquaintance of the Pounds during their Paris years” (CCEP, p. 372). His fragmented utterance “if whenever you move something jangles” alludes to his remark, at a social gathering with Pound, that “if you are covered with brass chains, a sword, etc.; if your sartorial sheath is rigid and every time you move something jangles you naturally do not loll, you sit still and upright” (CCEP, p. 372).21 The last two lines therein refer to a conversation between Pound and “Kokka” on the topic of “good society”: “When asked if any ‘good society’ remained, Kokka ‘meditated and finally

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thought there was some left in Spain.’ When asked, ‘Is it a society in which you wd. care to spend much of your time?’ the general said, ‘Good GOD, No!!’ ” (CCEP, p. 372; GK, p. 83). In addition, “old Marchesa,” also an acquaintance of Pound at these social gatherings, is “Countess M. (an Italian title),” who, Pound recalls, “counted her high water mark a wedding at the court in St. Petersburg” (CCEP, p. 372; GK, p. 83). Treated similarly, most of the proper names in the second image cluster are the names of restaurants in Paris, London, Vienna, Italy, and New York that Pound has, on various occasions, visited (CCEP, p. 372–373). Apart from brief references to “Heraclitus” (“PEI IIANTA”) and “Mencius” (“fills up”), there is also the mentioning of “Uncle George,” who is “George Holden Tinkham, 1870–1956, member of the House of Representatives from Massachusetts (1915–43); a conservative and isolationist whom Pound knew in Venice” (CCEP, p. 373). In the third image cluster, “Mr Adams” refers to “Henry Brooks Adams, 1838–1918, son of Charles Francis Adams; American historian, taught medieval history at Harvard (1870–77); author of The Education of Henry Adams, which contains the seed of this anecdote [Ch. XX, “Chaos”] (“Teach? at Harvard? / Teach? It cannot be done”). Pound got the story from Santayana,” who is referred to as “the monument” (CCEP, p. 373). Ironically, however, it is not the exegetical information, illuminating as it is, that is important; on the contrary, it is its absence that makes a phenomenological statement with regard to time. Exhibited without any background or contextual linkage, Pound’s images or image clusters are accorded a paradoxical status: they are so frontally concrete and blatantly specific as to be completely opaque and mercilessly un-negotiable, as is already evidenced in the above three examples from “Canto LXXIV.” As such, each image presents itself, then, as a temporal phenomenon of the upsurge of the present. Enacting the field of primary experience, Pound’s image, such as “ — ‘You sit stiller’ said Kokka / ‘if whenever you move something jangles’ ,” instantaneously merges into the field of presence the moment it is seen or felt or perceived by a subject, whose consciousness, which is the consciousness of the present and which allows the image to be experienced anew or afresh in the present moment, inhabits the present “with no intervening distance.” Moreover, the image, like “Sirdra” or “Dieudonne London,” appears to the subject’s consciousness as both concrete and specific because, as Pound has pointed out earlier, the subject experiences it instantaneously and knows it directly as real, as a nascent logos; if the image also seems to have an opaque and un-negotiable façade, that is because the subject experiences it in an instant of time and, therefore, unreflectively or pre-reflectively. “Perception


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is opaque,” as Merleau-Ponty has asserted, “for it brings into play, beneath what I know, my sensory fields which are my primitive alliance with the world” (PhP, p. 424). In other words, “There is a paradox of immanence and transcendence in perception,” Merleau-Ponty explains; “Immanence, because the perceived object cannot be foreign to him who perceives it; transcendence, because it always contains something more than what is actually given” (PP, p. 16). So embodied in the present moment, Pound’s image, such as “Teach? at Harvard? / Teach? It cannot be done,” precisely by virtue of its specificity (“immanence”) as well as its opacity (“transcendence”) as such, visualizes the presencing of the present, materializing its upsurge “with absolute self-evidence.” The upsurge of the present, unalloyed, with no intervening distance and with absolute self-evidence, is the upsurge of flux and transience. It transcends itself, outruns itself, and it moves in this fashion throughout its whole length. Always in the dynamics of self-constituting, it is never to be, never, that is, to be completely constituted. It follows then that the consciousness of the upsurge of the present as the upsurge of flux is not external to that flux; rather, it “is actually inserted into that flux” (PhP, p. 426), thus leaving no intervening distance either for reflection. As such, the upsurge of the present defies synthesis. From “Kokka” to “old Marchesa,” from “the cake shops in the Nevsky” to “Robert’s,” and from “Mr Adams” to “the monument,” the page of the Cantos unfolds an imagistic landscape of incarnated volcanic upsurge of the present overtaking itself and overwhelming itself, always asserting itself as “unfinished” (PP, p. 6) or, more accurately put, un-finish-able. Shrouded, as it were, in the blurring mists of ambiguity and opacity resulting from the dynamics of flux and transience, each image stubbornly insists on its own concretely and instantaneously felt presence without the capacity of providing any contextual or hermeneutical vector. Hence a sudden liberation, s sudden freedom from time limits and space limits. For this imagistic landscape, with its upsurge of the present transcending itself, Merleau-Ponty offers the following perceptual description in terms of “a presumptive synthesis”: Thus the synthesis of horizon is no more than a presumptive synthesis, operating with certainty and precision only in the immediate vicinity of the object. The remoter surrounding is no longer within my grasp; it is no longer composed of still discernible objects or memories; it is an anonymous horizon now incapable of brining any precise testimony, and leaving the object as incomplete and open as it is indeed, in perceptual experience. Through this opening, indeed, the substantiality of the object slips away. If it is to reach perfect density, in other words if there is to be an absolute object, it will have to consist of an infinite number of different perspectives compressed into a strict co-existence, and to be presented as it were to a host of eyes all engaged in one concerted act of seeing. (PhP, p. 70)

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In this sense, Pound’s Cantos, as an epic including history, should be properly understood as an epic including eternity— i.e., including the on-going dynamic of the upsurge of the present perpetuating itself. For in the Cantos, and in its upsurge of the present, “We hold time in its entirety,” as MerleauPonty so contends; “and we are present to ourselves because we are present to the world” (PhP, p. 424). The resultant textual ambiguity of the Cantos, which articulates Pound’s ethics against constituted time and transcendental synthesis, thus resonates with Merleau-Ponty’s ethics governing his concepts of “bad ambiguity” and “good ambiguity”: The study of perception could only teach us a “bad ambiguity,” a mixture of finitude and universality, of interiority and exteriority. But there is a “good ambiguity” in the phenomenon of expression, a spontaneity which accomplishes what appeared to be impossible when we observed only the separate elements, a spontaneity which gathers together the plurality of monads, the past and the present, nature and culture into a single whole. To establish this wonder would be metaphysics itself and would at the same time give us the principle of an ethics. (PP, p. 11). IV

In “Canto CXVI,” Pound writes, as if to make a final, consolatory justification to himself, with an informed tone and a farewell glance over the Cantos approaching its end: but about that terzo third heaven that Venere, again is all “paradiso” a nice quiet paradise over the shambles, and some climbing before the take-off, to “see again,” the verb is “see,” not “walk on” i.e. it cohere all right even if my notes do not cohere.

(C, p. 796–797)

It is interesting to note here that, in composing the Cantos, Pound privileges, rather emphatically, perception over writing. While to see, for Pound, is to put things in perspective dictated by the life world, to record this seeing in writing is to incur chaos and ambiguity. However, the coherence of perception and the incoherence of writing are not, in actuality, a contradiction but, again, a paradox. For Pound’s notes, precisely because they have failed to be orchestrated into a coherent synthesis from the standpoint of a demigod, truthfully present an imagistic landscape, the coherence of which lies in


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an incarnated perceptual consciousness intensely engaged in the upsurge of the present dynamically transcending itself. From this perspective, Pound’s Cantos can be read as a poetic rendition of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, and his imagist perception, as well as his phenomenology of “an instant of time” as timing or presencing, makes the Cantos “an endless endeavor to clarify the meaning of experience,” to put it Paul Armstrong’s words, “without denying its density and obscurity.”22 The State University of New York at Buffalo NOTES 1

The expression “in an instant of time” is taken from Ezra Pound’s definition of the image in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1935). Henceforth cited in the text as LE. The term “upsurge” is taken from M. Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Humanities Press, 1962). Henceforth cited in the text as PhP. Pound’s Cantos refers to The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1986). Henceforth cited in the text as C. 2 Christopher Macann, Four Phenomenological Philosophers (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 195. Henceforth cited in the text as FPP. 3 The topic of time is one of the major critical interests in Pound scholarship, and has been taken up from different perspectives mainly in some early criticisms, which offer comparatively more thorough and more systematic analyses of this issue. For a reading of Pound’s time as “historical,” see George Dekker’s Sailing after Knowledge: The Cantos of Ezra Pound (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963). For an alternative treatment of Pound’s time as “cyclical” or “organic,” see Daniel D. Pearlman’s The Barb of Time: On the Unity of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969). For a book-length study of time not only in Pound’s Cantos but also in his critical writings, with a relative focus on “timelessness,” see William Harmon’s Time in Ezra Pound’s Work (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1977). Although all these studies have undoubtedly shed light on the issue of temporality in Pound’s work in many ways, the Cantos remains a fertile and inexhaustible text for further research in this respect. 4 Original emphasis. Unless otherwise noted, all forms of emphasis in this essay are from the original. It is interesting to note that Pound’s statement here also invites a rethinking of time in terms of the scientific concept of fractal time, which is, of course, the topic of another paper. 5 Generally considered as the modernist battle cry or slogan, Make It New is the title of a collection of literary essays by Pound (London: Faber and Faber, 1934; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1935). It also appears in Pound’s Cantos; see, for example, “Canto LIII,” p. 265. 6 My emphases. 7 Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (New York: New Directions, 1970), p. 89. Henceforth cited in the text as G-B. 8 Ezra Pound, “How I Began,” T. P.’s Weekly 6 (June 1913), p. 707. It is reprinted in Ezra Pound Perspectives: Essays in Honor of His Eightieth Birthday, Edited with an Introduction by Noel Stock (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1965), p. 1. 9 Christopher Macann uses the term “presencing” to refer to the form that “Eternity” assumes in Merleau-Ponty’s rethinking of time, which results from his “privilege of the present” by

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a “startlingly unorthodox” appropriation of the concept of “Eternity” that is subsequently “reinstated at the heart of time.” For a brief comment on this issue, see FPP, p. 197. Whereas Macann’s term “presencing” as such is useful in understanding both Pound’s and Merleau-Ponty’s notions of time, it is even more suggestive by simply reading it, in an equally unorthodox fashion, as the present participial, with all its corresponding ramifications. In this paper, “presencing” will be used as articulating this dual-sense. 10 It is interesting to see that the traditional understanding of an image or an imagist poem also emphasizes this point, though from a purely aesthetic and, in some sense, rather simplistic perspective. In the entry on “Imagism” in M. H. Abrams’s A Glossary of Literary Terms, 7th Edition (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace, 1999), for example, an imagist poem is defined as one “written in free verse and undertakes to render as precisely and tersely as possible, and without comment or generalization (my emphasis), the writer’s impression of a visual object or scene” (122). 11 The third principle, which is less relevant to the issue under discussion in this paper, states: “As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome” (LE, p. 3). 12 The term “timing” is not used here as a noun with all its standard dictionary meanings. Rather, its present usage adheres to the implications of the present participle of the word “time” as a verb in order to emphasize the instant of its emergence. In the following sections of the paper devoted to the discussion of Pound’s work, the poet’s concept of time will henceforth be referred to in this specific sense. 13 In The Primacy of Perception (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), Maurice Merleau-Ponty raises this issue. “Perception is thus paradoxical,” he writes; “the perceived thing itself is paradoxical; it exists only in so far as someone can perceive it. I cannot even for an instant imagine an object in itself” (p. 16). For more detailed elaboration on the paradox of perception, see Paragraph 1 on page 16. This book will henceforth be cited in the text as PP. 14 My emphasis. 15 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 184. Henceforth cited in the text as VI. It is beyond the scope of this paper to address in any detailed way the philosophical as well as methodological differences between Merleau-Ponty on the one hand and Husserl and Heidegger on the other. Suffice it to say that this statement by Merleau-Ponty clearly, though schematically, points to one of the fundamental issues that signal Merleau-Ponty’s departure from Husserl and Heidegger. 16 See Note 9. 17 My emphasis. 18 Vincent Sherry, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 65. Henceforth cited in the text as PLRM. 19 Carroll F. Terrell, A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). Henceforth cited in the text as CCEP. In this section devoted to the clarification of these three image clusters, only some background details will be selected and mentioned, as they are not pertinent to the issue of time under discussion in this paper. For a complete annotation of these images, see CCEP, Entries 172–193, pp. 372–373. 20 In Pound’s imagist aesthetics, “luminous detail” (p. 21), which is defined by Pound as that which “governed knowledge as the switchboard the electric circuit” (p. 24), is used as a “method” (p. 21). For more detailed explanation on this concept, see “Part One: I Gather the Limbs of Osiris,” in Ezra Pound’s Selected Prose: 1909–1965, edited, with an introduction by William Cookson (London: Faber and Faber, 1973), pp. 21–43. As will be argued in the remaining part of this paper, Pound’s actual deployment of the “luminous details” in the Cantos is paradoxical,



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especially in his treatment of “an instant of time,” in that details become luminous precisely when they lose their luminosity. 21 This episode is also recorded in Pound’s Guide to Kulchur (New York: New Directions, 1970), p. 83. Henceforth cited in the text as GK. 22 Paul B. Armstrong, “Phenomenology,” in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), p. 564.

BIBLIOGRAPHY M. H. Abrams (1999) A Glossary of Literary Terms, 7th Edition. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace. Paul B. Armstrong (1994) “Phenomenology,” The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 562–566. George Dekker (1963) Sailing after Knowledge: The Cantos of Ezra Pound. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. William Harmon (1977) Time in Ezra Pound’s Work. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Christopher Macann (1993) Four Phenomenological Philosophers. London and New York: Routledge. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962) Phenomenology of Perception. Colin Smith (trans.). New Jersey: The Humanities Press. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1964) The Primacy of Perception. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1968) The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press. Daniel D. Pearlman (1969) The Barb of Time: On the Unity of Ezra Pound’s Cantos. New York: Oxford University Press. Ezra Pound (1913) “How I Began,” T. P.’s Weekly, 6 (June), p. 707. Ezra Pound (1934) ABC of Reading. New York: New Directions. Ezra Pound (1934) Make It New. London: Faber and Faber; (1935) New Haven: Yale University Press. Ezra Pound (1935) Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. Edited with an Introduction by T. S. Eliot. New York: New Directions. Ezra Pound (1970) Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir. New York: New Directions. Ezra Pound (1970) Guide to Kulchur. New York: New Directions. Ezra Pound (1973) Selected Prose: 1909–1965. Edited, with an Introduction by William Cookson. London: Faber and Faber. Ezra Pound (1986) The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions. Vincent Sherry (1993) Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Noel Stock (ed.) (1965) Ezra Pound Perspectives: Essays in Honor of His Eightieth Birthday. Chicage: H. Regnery Co. Carroll F. Terrell (1980) A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound. Berkeley: University of California Press. Webster’s New World Dictionary (1982) 2nd College Edition. New York: Simon and Schuster.

WILLIAM S. SMITH

ASCENT PATTERNS IN THE EARLY POETRY OF TENNYSON

Tennyson’s “The May Queen” and “The Miller’s Daughter”, more enthusiastically received by Tennyson’s contemporaries than many of his more important works, have been almost consistently belittled and denigrated by twentieth century criticism. “The maudlin nature of this poem (“The May Queen”) is often cited as an example of sentiment turned into Victorian sentimentality. It was popular in its own day, but a change in taste has caused it to be scorned in ours” (Ryals 147). Bradley, writing in 1917, found that “ its pathos, besides being too obvious is mingled with a sickly and even false sentiment” (6). Paul F. Baum makes the devastating comment that this poem is an example of Tennyson’s “confusion” and of the fact that “it seems never to have occurred to him to inquire into aesthetic principles. With all his extraordinary gifts as a craftsman and his practical devotion to his art” (174). No statement about Tennyson’s attitude toward the theory and practice of the poetic art could, I think, be further from the truth. It cannot be argued that “The May Queen” and “The Miller’s Daughter” have great artistic merit, because they do not. In them Tennyson is obviously working against a narrative and actualistic method which he never found congenial to his talent, but the fact remains that in these first two poems written as idylls in and around 1830 and with that pictorial attention to detail which characterizes his English idylls in the 1832 and in the 1842 volumes, he is experimenting with another mode of indirection. In the English idylls, as well as in other poems the first three volumes of 1830, 32, and 42, Tennyson is always working to develop a construct upon which to base his poetry. Like so many poets who have lived since the beginning of the nineteenthcentury, Tennyson had to formulate for himself, rather than receive, a cultural tradition. In doing so, he follows the classical pattern of the romantic artist: the period of the “Everlasting No”, or negative romanticism, preceded the period of the “Everlasting Yea”, or the positive romanticism. I hope to show that in these minor pieces Tennyson works along these same general lines of a dominant romantic pattern. The pattern in such a well-known poem 65 A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana LXXXVI, 65–81. © 2007 Springer.

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as “The Two Voices”, of course, was built on the same structural pattern. Tennyson is working with themes, images, symbols and other devices which are to become standard vehicles for the expression of his serious, mature thought. For a thorough appreciation of the development of Tennyson’s thought and poetic practice, a better understanding of these minor poems is essential. The main structural and thematic patterns of his In Memoriam are well known. The movement is from despair to hope, from doubt to faith, from the view of nature as purposeless, merely organic and mindless to sacramental view of nature which sees all created things as the outward garb of the indwelling spirit. The movement in this elegy, also an important movement of the poet’s mind, is from an initial stage being without will and without conscious self-control of his poetic powers to a time of the development of self-consciousness. His poetry, which at the beginning of the elegy is a personal lament, becomes at the end a consciously molded expression of an insight in transcendental reality, appreciated, meditated upon, and rendered articulate through a process of conscious intellection and control. All of these themes are interwoven throughout the elegy, one or the other being predominant in any given lyric; but the entire movement of the poem may be seen as movement from passivity to activity. The mind merely responds to physical stimulus, coming at it from outside in the opening lyrics. The power of will gradually reasserts itself and the active powers grow until both selfawareness and poetic power are consciously possessed and used by the mind, which at the end knows that it and it alone, through its own activity, produces a view of the world and of its own relation to it. The treatment of despair is, in this major poem, and in all of Tennyson as well, is the delineation of the mind’s passivity. The way of the soul as it is traced In Memoriam is the path of the soul upward from despair and passivity. Elements of these large patterns that are developed in such detail in In Memoriam are present form the earliest period of Tennyson’s work. The dominant tone of the 1830 volume is a tension between two views of the world: the world seen as mutability, merely organic and purposeless, and the other view of the world seen as the outward manifestation of an indwelling, permanent spiritual reality, which the mind can perceive as the basis of order and purpose. This basic metaphysical tension is the basis of the dichotomized treatment of theme and image revealed from the earliest period of Tennyson’s work and is the source of the dichotomized treatment of theme and image which characterizes all his work. There is, for example, memory which is “bad” in that it serves the merely organic view of nature by presenting to the mind only sense impression; there is a “good” form

ASCENT PATTERNS IN EARLY POETRY OF TENNYSON

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of memory which represents to the mind its own response not merely to organic, empirical reality but its perception of the relation between apparent and real in a bygone experience. There is a death which is only the cessation of life and the deterioration of matter (All Things Will Die) and death which is the gateway to another realm of heightened reality (Nothing Will Die). The pairs of opposites derived from the appearance–reality dichotomy are virtually endless in Tennyson. In a great and mature work like In Memoriam the movement of the mind is traced from the first view of the world as mutable, perceived through a memory which is merely a storehouse of sense impressions. In the early poems of 1830 no ascent pattern is traceable. Most of the poems in the 1830 volume are organized around one of the other of these possible views; in some instances, both views are set off against each other, as in that of the sophist. The poet is shown as having insight into spiritual reality; the sophist is a man of “shallow wit” whose mental powers move only over the surface of appearance and impart a gloomy harbinger of death. The volume of 1832 abounds in portraits of the despairing and the lost, but the dominant mold of the collection is not so much despair as is the mood brought on by the poet’s mind now grappling more explicitly with despair as a problem. Tennyson has apparently worked out a thoroughly detailed delineation of the condition of despair as characterized by passivity, sensuality, paralysis of time, alienation from God, self, and other men trapped in time and seen as an endless sequence of the moment. The despairing soul is externalized, egotistical, lacking in insight and concern for others. It cannot will its will nor work its work. This whole delineation of despair is fleshed out in a series of portraits beginning with “The Lady of Shalott”, the first poem in the volume. She is, I believe, a case of arrested development in Tennyson’s view of the proper growth pattern. She is as much a “lost soul” as are Mariana and Fatima. She weaves her web but without understanding the relation between shadow and reality, between art and nature. At last, she cannot enter Camelot where all good will is willed and work is done. Where the fault may lie, in the lady or in this world where something may be amiss, is not clearly indicated by the poet. The cause of Mariana’s despair is also not dealt with. But in other poems in the volume the condition of despair is more clearly tied to antecedent causes and to its effects. The externalized Fatima is the victim of passion; the wider social consequences of passion as a bringer of despair and ultimately of a total destruction in the world of men is studied in “Oenone”. The essentially externalized nature of the sister in “The Sisters”, who comes at last to bitter isolation and murder, is emphasized in the refrain. Lady

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Clara Vere de Vere who trifles with men’s affections and thus reveals her own isolated and desperate condition at last falls ill. “The Lotus Eaters”, if regarded in the wider context of Tennyson’s treatment of themes of work and will, is an extended portrait of despair as “mild melancholy”. It is not my purpose here to become involved in discussions of Tennysonian ambivalence, occasioned especially by such a poem as “The Lotus-Eater”. They rank among the portraits of despair in souls no matter where the poet’s own sympathies lie at the time of writing the poem. Among these many and varied portrayals of despair or “alienation” in the 1832 volume there are, however, five poems in which a developed path of ascent upward from despair to wholeness (as Tennyson will come to define and to portray it). These poems are: “The Two Voices”, “The Palace of Art”, “A Dream of Fair Women”, “The May Queen”, and “The Miller’s Daughter”. The “Palace of Art” is much used as a supporting piece for arguing evidence of Tennysonian ambivalence, and general indecisiveness as to the role of the poet in contemporary society. The pattern in the “Palace of Art” is not really a pattern at all, the ascent of the soul from the abyss of personality to which it has descended as a result of its egotism, sensuality, and passivity with respect to its responses within the palace being hardly more than suggested in the much used final lines of the poem. The lines have been frequently commented on as an indication of Tennyson’s secret attachment to the withdrawn place within the palace far from the press of public responsibility and of his temperamental reluctance to pick up his role of poet. Whatever the merits of that kind of discussion, it is not within the area of interest here. My discussion will be a detailed setting forth of the steps in the ascent pattern as they develop in the poetry of Tennyson. Quite obviously, I will take into consideration Tennyson’s treatment of the mal du siècle and of the means for overcoming it and also make comparison of Tennyson with other thinkers and poets of the nineteenth century. Whatever the estimate of “the Palace of Art”, it does seem clear that in this poem Tennyson knows that he is delineating a sick soul that for precise reasons has fallen off from its healthful condition and must reach out for a return to health once again. The familiar descent to the nadir and ascent pattern of major romantic poetry is definitely suggested. In “A Dream of Fair Women” the concern is more specific with the poetic mind and with the development of the poetic talent. All of Tennyson’s poems in one way or another deal with himself and in characteristic romantic fashion with the extrapolation from the study of the individual, poetic mind to the study of the universal plight of man, seen in the main line of nineteenth-century thought,


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as fragmented, separated from that harmonious functioning of all the faculties, which is the mark not only of the “poet described in ideal perfection” but of all men as well. The movement in “A Dream of Fair Women” is not so much from a condition of despair as from a condition of uncertainty, of undeveloped self-awareness and unfulfilled poetic powers, specifically the powers of articulation. In “The Two Voices” and also in the “The May Queen” and “The Miller’s Daughter”, the situation is not so specialized. The central figure in all three poems is not so explicitly the poet, nor so explicitly a study of the mind as poetic; the concern in these three poems is broader and less explicitly focused on the poetic mind as a heightened, more generalized type. The patterns of “The Two Voices” are rather thoroughly drawn in, although the dynamics of “The Two Voices” are based on the continuing tension between the two opposing views of reality. The “I” struggles for its selfpossession and its powers of insight into its relation to transcendental reality against the still small voice which marshals the same battery of arguments against the repose of the soul that assails the poet In Memoriam. The arguments drawn from the new sciences come first: the universe is vast, and the human being is as nothing in it; the human being is proceeding along a purposeless path that leads only to death. All possibility of an upward movement in either the individual or the race is debunked, and at last, the powers of the mind to know and thus to move upward are assailed. Even the grounds of hope in youthful aspiration, so essential an element in the growth of the soul in both Tennyson and Wordsworth, are pulled away. And with the attack of recollection, the power to recollect essentials of spiritual life, not merely the externals of incident and outward circumstance, comes the attack on the principal of correspondence. This faith that the mind bore a direct relation to external reality and could achieve knowledge of both it and of itself which is the very foundation of romantic faith, seen at its strongest in Wordsworth and in Coleridge, is now pulled away as really no such correspondence at all. The view of the mind and of this relation to objects (nature), once again appearing as the very heart of Tennyson’s poetic concern and effort, thought and study of personality. That men with knowledge merely play’d I told the hardly nigher made, Tho scaling slow from grade to grade; Much less this dreamer, dear and blind, Named man, may hope some truth to find, That bears relation to the mind. (31)

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Mind and nature as divorced from each other, knowledge of external reality and of our relation to it as impossible, hope as a function of animal spirits and not of insightful mind of youth: the very existence of such higher powers of insight (imagination) are all called into question. The cumulative effect of this assault is clearly against higher powers of intuition and imagination, since our belief in our possession of such powers is the only real basis for our continuing ability to act and thus rise against that passivity toward matter which is of the essence despair itself. The final suggestion of the still small voice is to be expected since the whole metaphysical and epistemological argument thus far has been directed toward reducing mind to the classification of matter. He suggests that all life dies and is lost and forgotten. The “turn” in “The Two Voices” comes at this point. The “I” perceives that it cannot argue against the small voice in words, but he will, nevertheless, “shoot a random arrow from the brain” (33). A significant turn in the ascent is taken here as the “I” turns inward and has some recognition of the powers which lie within the mind itself. The argument, as has been noted, is always in Tennyson, to be seen as an argument between passivity and activity of mind. The sequence from lines 345 to 358 is an extended discussion of the validity of dreams, the small voice the “I” speaking of those youthful aspirations which touch him yet “with mystic gleams? / Like glimpses of forgotten dreams” (34). The small voice, as one would expect, mocks the dream and serves as the representation of the glimpse of spiritual mind’s insight experiences, and dreams come true when the high, active and creative powers of the mind are marshaled to embody them in the world of circumstance. In “The Two Voices,” “The May Queen,” and In Memoriam, repeatedly, Tennyson uses the device of the dream to signal the “I” in all contexts. The dream is associated with the upward ascent of the mind moving toward the culminating possession of itself in full comprehension – the dream becoming real. The “I” is in defending not only dreams which can become a reality, but aspiration toward an invisible excellence and his power of memory to recall that aspiration. He asserts that memory does not deal merely with time but also with these aspirations and glimpses beyond the world of appearance: For memory dealing but with time, And he with matter, could she climb Beyond her own material prime? (33)

This is a vital distinction for Tennyson. Tennyson uses at this juncture the very significant distinction which he habitually makes between the two forms of memory. He always is careful to distinguish between “externalized” memory, which recalls images from sense experience and memory which


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keeps alive past insight into essential relationships between the mind and external reality. The distinction is exactly parallel to the distinction which Wordsworth makes between the “organic eye” and the inner eye which sees into the “heart of things”. But memory deals with something else and it is the reality of this “something else” and of the power to retain it that he now asserts. Moreover, something is or seems, That touches me with mystic gleams, Like glimpses of forgotten dreams – (33)

Then comes the ultimate set point in the argument; the assertion of the primacy of the will-to-live, the ultimate basis upon which despair and the views of man and nature which despair entails is defeated: ‘Tis life, whereof our nerves are scant, O, life, not death for which we pant; More life, and fuller, that I want. (34)

This is not so much the tracing of the ascent of a soul following a “plain historical method” as it is the displaying of those thoughts and states of mind which are characteristic of either the small voice (“despair” and “the death wish”) or of the I (“hope”, and “the will to live”). The entire poem is, as it were, written by the “I”, who from the outset knows the difference between the “I” and the other small voice which speaks from his divided will. In “The Two Voices” the voice of the “I” as asserted in the power of essential memory, as distinguished from “mere memory”, which records only external images and not essential realities of the soul’s condition, speaks in his poem. And he has also expressed his possession of a power which sees beyond the phenomenal worlds into the worlds of spiritual reality. These are the powers, aspiration and intuitive insight, upon which we know that Tennyson will in later works rest his assertion of the noumenal powers of the mind to reach knowledge of the noumenal. The self has not yet willed its alignment with the voice which speaks of these powers. That alignment, which implies that it lies within the Will, does not come until after the sequence beginning with the opening of the casement (34) and culminating in his view of the family of three. After the last exchange with the voice of appearance, the poet falls silent and “sat as one forlorn”, and the voice of nothingness mocks again, “behold it is the Sabbath morn” (34). At the next line, the ascent proper begins, and the details of this process deserve careful attention. He rises and goes to open the casement; very frequently in the poetry of Tennyson, this casement window

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is featured. Through it the soul looks into that world of true reality, and from it he hears the voice of the wind, not speaking to him with mystic power. The device is used again and again. (We shall see it in “The May Queen”). The opening of the casement, the light shining through the casement, the moon or the sun light, the voice of the wind calling through the casement all imply that the casement gives access to the world of spiritual reality. It is the bridge between the two worlds. Man lives in the world of things on the inside of the window, but he has the power to open it and to have access to the mystic world beyond. This is a symbolically rendered world of particular objects seen in their universal implications. The light increases in the east until we have that half light which frequently is the signal for the onset of the visionary experience in Tennyson. The light dawn is in the east, the locale of hope and promise. The winds blow softly, and the church bells ring. The bells are another much employed device in Tennyson for indicating the link between the two worlds, the sound of the bells tolling into the world like the voice of eternity into the business of worldly activity. In this early poem, devices which are familiar in the In Memoriam, are all employed. The poet sees the people going on to another activity which shows the link between the two worlds, the world of mutability linked through love and worship to the world of reality and eternity. In another passage “the place where each must rest”, quietly they pass the church yard where they all must lie some day. Quiet acquiescence in the inevitability of death is an additional indication of the mind’s liberation from the terror of death, which is part of the improper view of time and space as defining the limits of reality which characterize the desperate mind. All the while he sees the unity of love among husband, wife, and child – a love now seen as an expression of the underlying love of God, the manifestation in time of the relationship between human creative, and the divine power of peace comes to the speaker. Tennyson says: “I blest them, and they wander’d on” (34). The sequence is reminiscent of the sequence in the “Ancient Mariner”, which culminates in the line “I blest them unaware”. When the bonds of love among creatures are recognized as an embodiment of essential reality of the relationships among God and the world of time, space, and human, then the mind becomes free of the frightening powers of the phenomenon and thus constitutes an insight into the higher reality. If we consider the separate parts of this vision passage in the same terms that would apply to the analysis of any vision sequence and if we consider the onset of the vision, the content of it, and the aftermath of the vision experience, we have a fairly complete general outline of the essential ascent pattern with which Tennyson repeatedly works.


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The onset, or preparation conditions, preceding the actual onset of the vision consists of the following steps: the recognition by the poet that he possess a memory which deals with something more than time. He acknowledges the operation within himself of a power which perceives “mystic gleams”, and he perceives that this power cannot be adequately described in words, i.e. he is capable of making a distinction between the realm of reality in which words operate and the realm to which this same power within him has access. The last step in the “onset portion” of the sequence is an expression of his unwillingness to give up the memory access to this other realm of reality. Tennyson’s unremitting emphasis upon essential power and freedom of the will in the selection between two opposing views of the nature of the world is indicated here, through less explicitly of course, than it will be in later, more mature works. The will is expressed in the lines of “The Two Voices”: ‘Tis life, whereof out nerves are scant, O, life, not death, for which we pant; More life, and fuller, that I want. (34)

Having expressed his wish for life, his repudiation of the death-wish, he opens the casement; the vision proper may be said to begin. The principal elements in this vision sequence are, as we have seen, an insight into the general relationship of between the phenomenal and the noumenal, the dependence of the phenomenal world of time, space, and action of the divine, and the supreme link between god and man. The third and final portion of the vision sequence in “The Two Voices” is the after math, where the effect of the vision on the mind is described. This sequence contains most of the elements which are better developed in later poems, especially In Memoriam. First, the voice of doubt and despair is stilled. He hears now only the voice of hope, and he also has a dim notion that he sees the end of purpose of life and sees that they are good. These ideas are not fully expressible by the speculative intelligence, “I may not speak of what I know”. Knowledge of the power to know that he possesses real knowledge of reality and of his relation to it and the world remains somewhat beyond his grasp and also beyond his powers of articulation. Tennyson almost invariably insists on this limitation of knowledge. We cannot know about these matters involving noumenal reality in the same way that we know about phenomenal reality. And the powers of words to express insight are always regarded as limited by Tennyson. It is interesting to note his insistence on this limitation when we consider the way in which Coleridge brings the Ancient Mariner to a close with the final development of a stated proposition which summarizes the knowledge gained through the recollection of the sin and its aftermath.

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The whole movement of the Ancient Mariner is toward poetic statement which is the poem itself, culminating in the fully articulated proposition at the end. Tennyson emphasizes the uncertainty of the propositional statement, fully articulated, about the nature of underlying realities in several ways in “The Two Voices”. The little whisper “from some blissful neighborhood, is but “faintly understood as it murmurs, I see the end, and know the good”; the whisper of this silver voice of hope is but a “whisper breathing low!” As it speaks which “may not speak of what it knows”. It is like an Aeolian harp that “wakes no certain air but overtakes / far thought with music that it makes”. Sounding a recurrent theme in Tennyson comments again and again on the limitations of words, even poetic words. Camelot is the city “built to music”, built as the embodiment of all human energy recognized as the expression into this world of the insight into the relation between man and eternity. This insight is the essential point of any vision sequence, of course. Itself is the objective correlative even when the speaker, now at a higher level of self-awareness of his own person within, cries out “What is it thou knowest, sweet voice?” the voice replies only, “A hidden hope”. But even though he can get no more definitive an answer to his questions, the power of harmony in that voice suffices to bring about a response of wholeness from him. The balance of this poem is devoted to a description of the achievement of the highest stage of ascent – the visible entrance into a harmony within himself, an equilibrium not fully delineated in this poem but indicated in a general way as the suppression of the death-wish by the will to live, which signals his entry into an equilibrium within himself and into a proper vision of nature in relationship to God and to himself. This kind of “fusion” passage is essentially the same as the fusion passage with which The Prelude ends. In response to the heavenly tone of the true voice, he feels “that every cloud, that spreads above / and veileth love, itself is love” (34). He feels, yet he does not know. To know is not knowledge which the mind achieves in its ascent; it is feeling or intuition as a result of a willingness to respond to the realities which are there outside of us. In this wise passiveness, the vision of nature is transformed; he perceives nature’s “living motion”, and he responds to it. The principle of correspondence, so strongly insisted upon as an element of reality in Wordsworth and Coleridge, appears here also in Tennyson. The mind which has found its own true self finds a corresponding harmony in the world outside itself. I very much doubt that his passage and others like it should be read as showing that for Tennyson nature is, actually, a function of perception. He is an objective idealist, not a Berkleian. Nature


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now has become the mutability of itself, not a source of horror to him, but a source of wonder and knowledge. That sense of mystery, such an essential component of the insightful, and reverent mind in true possession of itself, is evident here. “A Dream of Fair Women” deals more directly with the problem of the “poetic” mind than any other poem in the collection. Its content is explicitly treating of the operation of the poetic mind, the effect of it on its own fancies and visions, and the ways in which it responds to its initial state of despair, and then there are, in fact, two ascent sequences in this poem; the one structural pattern on which the poem is built is the movement of the poet’s mind from vague vision to clear articulation; from dull despair to domination by mere memory, and from the dream itself to a turn to domination by essential memory. “A Dream of Fair Women” contains very significant ascent patterns. In this poem the considerations are definitely more concerned with the poetic mind as a particular professional and personally interesting type. The explicit subject matter of the poem is the operation of the poetic mind as it responds to its insights and to its reading in a movement from uncertainty and gloom to more sure self-control, equilibrium and poetic expression. In “A Dream of Fair Women” the delineation of steps in the poetic process is very much detailed and refined, and the poem requires closer study than room permits here. In “The May Queen” and “The Miller’s Daughter”, Tennyson uses a general method of indirection and with a special kind of subject matter, which is very much what he does in “The Two Voices” and in “A Dream of Fair Women”. He addresses himself once more to the general problem of despair and personal fragmentation, to the deliverance of the soul from these conditions. The poems he develops in these first experiments with the so-called English idyll, characterized by actualism and, presumably, motivated by a desire to deal with more contemporary and generally familiar material than was his habit, are, in fact, but another vehicle for the concerns which run through all of his work, including the early volumes. To elucidate the extent to which these two minor poems exhibit themes, patterns, and images found in other more generally known poems is part of the purpose of this paper. The other purpose is to present materials which are found in these poems and which are generally useful in developing a clear idea of Tennyson’s ideas of mental process and of the specific terms in which he was accustomed to treat those matters. It is not my intent to call for a reevaluation of the artistic merit of these pieces. They do not show Tennyson at his best, as a technician, but at his sentimental worse. They are unquestionable “sentimental” poems, but enough has already been said on that count.

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The vogue among literary critics of decrying the works of the major Victorians, particularly, shows signs of having run its course. There has been a great renewal of interest in Tennyson and an increasing tendency to regard him as a poet with something to say. There is a great deal of recent material among the major works: In Memoriam, Idylls of the King, “Maud”, and such poems as “The Two Voices”, “The Palace of Art”, “The Lady of Shalott”. Much of the minor poetry remains, however, to be studied and properly analyzed. The student of Tennyson and the student of literary and cultural history are much in need of additional, detailed material on the basic patterns of Tennyson’s poetic treatment of such considerations as the nature of nature, the nature of personality, the view of man. G. Robert Stange has observed that “one of the chief reasons the Victorians poets are not read with the attention they deserve is that the modern reader is often baffled by the idiom of their more successful poems” (99). It is the task of criticism to explain this “idiom” to the present day reader as well as he can. No really serious effort has been made to date to unravel Tennyson’s peculiar idiom in such words as “The May Queen” and “The Miller’s Daughter”, although some valuable comments on these poems are scattered. Perhaps among much neglected but, as I hope to show, valuable and rich poems, are “The May Queen” and “The Miller’s Daughter”. Both of these poems appeared in the 1832 edition of Tennyson’s poems, The Lady of Shalott and Other Poems. Seldom is more than a passing reference to the poem made in recent criticism, usually in connection with another poem. A. C. Bradley, writing in 1917, found that its pathos, besides being too obvious, is mingled with a sickly and even false sentiment (6). Paul F. Baum makes the devastating comment that the poem is an example of Tennyson’s “confusion” of the fact that “it seems never to have occurred to him to inquire into aesthetic principles” (174). These poems which to modern taste have appeared inconsequential and stupidly sentimental were among the best received of Tennyson’s works by his contemporaries. John Stuart Mill writing in the London Review of July 1835, praises “The May Queen” for “its simple, genuine pathos, rising out of the situations and feelings common to mankind generally” (410). Leaving aesthetic appraisals to one side, what I am concerned with is an inquiry into exactly what is going on in this poem. What did the poet have in mind when he wrote the first two parts of this poem and published them in 1832? What did he have in mind when he returned to the poem and added the sixty lines of the Conclusion in 1842? But, postponing these questions and the tentative answer to them for the moment, there are a few other critical opinions of “The May Queen” which have some relevance here. Andrew Lang


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long ago classified the poem as a “domestic idyll” and this classification has held. Marshall, Buckley, and Ryals acknowledge this general assignment of the poem and “The Miller’s Daughter” to this group in the 1832 edition. In the 1842 edition of English Idylls and Other Poems Tennyson writes more poems characterized by his English “actualism” – relying heavily on details from the English countryside pictorially presented, in a relatively sentimental, somewhat Wordsworthian manner. The 1842 volume also contains “Audley Court” and “Walking to the Mail”. “The May Queen” and “The Miller’s Daughter”, together with several poems from the 1842 edition “The Gardner’s Daughter,” “Dora,” “Audley Court,” “Walking to the Mail,” and “Edwin Morris”, have customarily been classified as Tennyson’s English idylls. The characters chosen are also selected from English rural life, and they speak in what may be called “the real language of men”. The Wordsworthian influence too has always been recognized in these poems, especially within connection with this kind of selection of subject matter, characters, and language. The Wordsworthian influence may also be seen to extend to more serious matters, such as the theory of mind operating in these poems, the pattern of the mind’s growth, the underlying assumptions about the nature of the moral life, and the relation between the development of moral self-consciousness and the development of poetic power. We all know that Tennyson deals with these serious matters in his major works. Precisely what the terms are in which he treats them has not yet been adequately treated. The question of the precise nature and extent of his debt to Wordsworth (and also Coleridge) with respect to the broader philosophical questions about the operation of mental processes and the development of poetic powers has not been, it would seem, adequately dealt with. It is therefore a part of my purpose in dealing with these minor works at this time to make some contributions to this general area of Tennyson’s precise relationship to his predecessor. Lang commented that the prosiness of the concluding section of “The May Queen”, in which she recounts her conversations with the clergyman A. Wilkinson, “strikes a note rather resembling the Tennysonian parody of Wordsworth” (96). Wordsworthian parody or not, I hope to show that the structural and thematic pattern of both poems are definitely and seriously Wordsworthian. Neither Buckley nor Ryals in commenting on these two poems has given a serious or developed explication of them. Buckley comments that both are “set against an explicitly English backdrop drawn with close regard for homely circumstance” (56). Of “The May Queen” Buckley says that Tennyson is probably trying “to render pathetic the death of ‘little Alice’, the May Queen, by calling attention to the domestic delights she must leave behind,

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her garden tools upon the granary floor and the rosebush trained about the parlor window” (56). I offer no direct objection to these comments, and they are accurate as far as they go, but this poem and “The Miller’s Daughter” do much more than this. Tennyson’s most serious ideas and habitual techniques can be shown to provide the foundation for this work in these poems, as in the other English idylls. It is these foundations which I propose to explicate. Buckley adds that “neither piece engages the poetic imagination; the pictorial detail in each is applied rather than felt, delineates a familiar scene but carries no overtone of larger meaning or suggestion” (56). It is exactly this kind of evaluation to which I object, and this is the view which I seek to oppose. The same poetic mind is operating to produce the English Idylls that produced the great works like In Memoriam. Such comments as these deal only with the surface aspects of the poems and on that level they are more correct than not. To assert that there is no more than surface to “The May Queen” and “The Gardener’s Daughter” is the error. The first section of “The May Queen” is given over a detailed delineation of what can be recognized and perceived to be the isolated, egotistical, and sensual soul. The lilting gaiety of the girl and of the meter of the poem itself characterizes little Alice. In this first part of the poem, no awareness of her own condition has as yet dawned in the girl’s mind. We see her entirely preoccupied with her own beauty, with the admiration of others, and, in her descriptions of what she sees of the world about her, she reveals a thoroughly eternalized vision. Hardly a thought or a feeling does little Alice allow to penetrate her concern with the externals of life. Instead, she exults in her own beauty and frequently sees her own beauty. She says, There’s many a black, black eye, they say but none so bright as mine There’s Margaret and Mary, there’s Kate and Caroline: But none so fair as little Alice in all the land they say. (47)

This exultant self-approbation is like that of the soul in “The Palace of Art” although that soul finds its greatest self-satisfaction in its own intellectual satisfaction. In “The Palace of Art” Tennyson works in terms of the distinction between mere knowledge and pure insight. The isolated soul taking refuge in its own intellectual arrogance is in fact shutting out it powers of higher reason whereby it might gain access to the real world and thus find itself in peace and freedom. When the soul ascends the “intellectual throne,” it has reached the culmination of intellectual egotism, and its fall to the abyss of personality is rapid. In little Alice the vehicle used for delineating the soul’s passivity to the merely phenomenal world is conveyed in simpler terms. Little Alice, in this opening section, describes the beauties of nature from the outside and


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merely visible things and then turns from those beauties as always to her self at the end of each stanza in the refrain by saying: “And I’m to be Queen O’ the May” (47). In the first section, addressed like all three to her mother, Little Alice anticipates sleeping soundly, oblivious to her true condition. She has no qualms about awakening her mother whose interest in her she takes for granted here, seeing her mother as she sees nature, merely in relation to her own pleasure. The sleep motif is used for an implicit comment on Alice’s affectionate state – and shows her moving from an egotistical lack of affection toward others. In this opening section she is without affectionate relationships. The tone of the second section, “New Year’s Eve”, is markedly changed. It is quiet as the speaker gives evidence of having made at least some turn inward, to an introspection and meditation. This turns inward to a consideration of herself and of the moral values of her past life is the significant characteristic of this section. In “The Two Voices”, an inward turn also takes place, indispensable turn in the beginning of the ascent. The “turn” to which I refer is the discovered moment when the mind leaves its eternalized and despairing view of itself and of the world. In “The May Queen” the actual moment of the turn lies between the end of the first section and the opening of the second. Little Alice has also fallen ill (become sick) during this period between the time of the first and the time of the second section of the poem. Presumably, the physical sickness is a metaphor for moral sickness. The meditation in second section focuses on New Year’s Eve. The May Queen deals quietly and directly with those own thoughts and feelings which had been ignored before, while all of her attention was directed outward to the world of objects. The change in Alice’s attitude toward herself, and in her attitude toward time, together with the awakening of recollection are the important changes in her moral condition which indicate progress upward. She no longer looks only to the future – intent on what time will bring her and oblivious to time’s gifts in the past and to time’s value to the transforming will in the present. The mind set on futurity is invariably present in Tennyson’s work. Now, Alice recalls the past and thinks of years gone by with affection: the good old year, the dear old time. Only one stanza of this second section is given to the past, to her recollection of that much anticipated day, now “recollected in tranquility”. The mind, which has made the ascents, perceives a proper relation to existence. The May Queen, initially so unfeeling and thoughtless, not as a result of despair induced by grief as is the case of the soul in In Memoriam but of a self-induced misery not recognized as despair but akin to it, now has

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reached a quiet acceptance of time properly understood, and of her own death as well. This section is marked by that mawkishness and pathos which have been commented on often enough. Tennyson’s habit of indirection, together with his use of the ascent schema used in “The Two Voices” and thoroughly worked out in In Memoriam are visible here. As the section proceeds, other familiar devices in the ascent pattern are used. Alice, still speaking to her mother, sees her own grave near the church and imagines the sunlight striking on the channel easement. Through the window of her room, she looks upon the changing seasons, and seeing nature as living in its eternal repetition she sees herself in her grave. The presentation is mawkish as she imagines her mother visiting her grave, but it seems evident that Tennyson intends to indicate her dawning recognition of her kinship with all things. This sequence in which she imagines herself lying in her grave ends at line 32. Her insight into herself is now greatly improved and she sees the past condition of her soul: “I have been wild, and wayward, but you’ll forgive me now”. The new thoughtfulness toward her mother is apparently indicated together with some awakening of the affections as she expresses concern for her mother. It is in passages like these that critical analysis almost breaks down but nevertheless, the unattractiveness and triviality of this particularly unworkable construct should not divert attention from the poet’s probable intent. Tennyson’s intent here seems to have been to indicate not only newly awakened thoughts and affection but also, in the comments which Alice makes on Effie, some recognition of the value of work. The other child that her mother has is Effie, whom Alice recognizes as a better child, more loving, more thoughtful, and more devoted to work. Alice declares, “She’ll find my garden tools” (49). There is an irresistible connection between the garden tools and other gardens in Tennyson, sacred loci of the poetic art, and it is highly probable that this kind of evocative connection between this minor piece and other indirect treatments of the garden of art in Tennyson. (e.g. “The Hesperides;” “The Gardener’s Daughter”) is legitimate. In the context of the garden of art to which the May Queen now says farewell, the two girls may be seen as representative of various stages of growth of the poetic mind. She lets go her old self-egotistical, careless behavior and turns to welcome a new self – a self which will take its proper place in the order of things by using its poetic powers well. Alice must die, but not before making the ascent to self-realization. The early volumes of Tennyson, which are sometimes neglected, dismissed, or even maligned, do contain poems that exhibit characters who move from



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disjunction to self-realization through a pattern of ascent. Though these poems seem initially to be transparent and simplistic, closer inspection reveals complex characterization of struggle and spiritual growth. These same patterns were then further developed in the more mature of Tennyson, including In Memoriam and Idylls of the King. By examining the early canon of Tennyson in this light and bringing it in line with the later works, one can see that the poetic continuum of thought and development is of a single whole. Bridgewater State College WORKS CITED Paul F. Baum (1963) Tennyson: Sixty Years After. Lardo: Archon. A.C. Bradley (1917) The Reaction Against Tennyson. Oxford: OUP. Jerome Hamilton Buckley (1961) Tennyson: The Growth of a Poet’s Mind. Cambridge: Harvard UP. Andrew Lang (1970) Alfred Tennyson. New York: AMS Press. John Stuart Mill (1835) “Review of Poems, Chiefly Lyrical and Poems (1833) by Alfred Tennyson”. London Review, 1: 402–24. Clyde de L. Ryals (1964) Theme and Symbol in Tennyson’s Poems To 1850. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P. G. Robert Stange (1960) “Tennyson’s Garden of Art: A Study of the Hesperides.” Critical Essays on The Poetry of Tennyson, ed. John Killhan. New York: Barnes and Noble, 99–132. Alfred Tennyson (1963) Poetical Works, Including the Plays. New York: OUP.


S E C T I O N II

JADWIGA S. SMITH

ONTOLOGY AND EPISTEMOLOGY OF TIME IN THE STAGE PLAY: REVISITING ROMAN INGARDEN’S THE LITERARY WORK OF ART AND THE COGNITION OF LITERARY WORK OF ART

Roman Ingarden’s theory of the literary work of art was intended as an elaborate example in the investigation of the nature of the intentional object, serving his primary interest in the relationship between the real and ideal. His philosophical conclusions are ultimately of much broader applications, though the area of aesthetics is an obvious primary beneficiary of Ingarden’s initial focus on art. At the same time, his study of the literary work of art can be adapted to other fields of art. Roman Ingarden follows much of Edmund Husserl’s so-called eidetic reduction of our empirical conscious acts, but he does not reach the ultimate idealistic position in relation to the empirical reality, unlike Husserl. For Husserl, our empirical conscious acts are grounded in the acts of pure consciousness, and they should be stripped to their purely intentional nature because intentional acts are behind the creation of all the objects of human cognition. Thus, the reductionist method gradually exposes pure subjectivity as the foundation of all subjectivity. Husserl’s phenomenological reduction does not follow Hume’s reduction of things to sense impressions but rather attempts to reveal the structures of intentional systems by the step-by-step stripping of their accumulated baggage of cultural existence, down to the original and fundamental forms of human experience. However, Husserl cannot draw the ultimate distinction between bracketing of the real (spatiotemporal) world and denying its existence. What emerges is a state of confusion in relation to the status of empirical objects which appear to be lesser entities as opposed to general objects. The distinction between the two kinds of objects is established on the basis of their different modes of givenness, following the assumption that for every act of consciousness there must be a corresponding object, not necessarily an empirical, spatio-temporal 85 A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana LXXXVI, 85–93. © 2007 Springer.

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object. An empirical object is apprehended by a cognitive consciousness under the conditions of time and space, while general objects are immune to such conditions because they can be revealed categorically, in a categorical intuition. Phenomenology, then, according to Husserl, is as a philosophy with the task to define reality through essences uncovered through consciousness. As mentioned, Roman Ingarden rejects the idealistic implications of the status of empirical objects, and, instead embraces the position of ontological pluralism of ideal, intentional and empirical objects, each kind with its own specific structure. In other words, because there is a connection between a mode of being and its structure, there is a way out of the dilemma of the real and ideal existence by acknowledging a possibility of the heteronomous type of being. To further explain: the real and ideal beings are autonomous in their nature in respect to constitutive human consciousness. Whether a table or an idea of a triangle, they do not require any completion of properties. On the other hand, a purely intentional object, for example a work of literature, allows the possibility of reconciliation between the real mode of existence and the ideal mode of existence. All works of art are not only spatio-temporal objects, but they are also dependent on the conscious acts of their creators as well as their spectators or readers. In other words, purely intentional beings are not independent of or transcendent to the acts of consciousness because they are created by acts of consciousness. Objects such as works of art and various cultural and linguistic objects exist fully, so to speak, only when realized, or concretized, in individual acts of consciousness. A table in a book does not possess any ontic autonomy, or, to make an obvious example, Madame Bovary cannot exist fully, by herself, as an individual outside of the famous book. The three-part entity consisting of (1) the physical existence (2), the purely intentional acts of the creator (3) and the purely intentional acts of the receiver constitutes a cornerstone of Ingarden’s philosophy of art and, ultimately, his attempt at the solution to the problem of idealism and realism, transcendence and immanence. The underlying interest in the distinction between the ontological foundation of an object and its cognition is clearly illustrated by Ingarden dividing his analysis of the literary work of art into two separate volumes: The Literary Work of Art and The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art. Thus, in the exploration of the literary work of art as an intentional object, a crucial distinction is made between the ontological grounding of the literary work of art and its epistemological investigation. This fundamental differentiation ultimately dictates the ways of approaching the analysis of the stage play as distinct from its written/read version and also the analysis of the stage play as an ontological object different from its particular stage versions.

ONTOLOGY AND EPISTEMOLOGY OF TIME IN STAGE PLAY

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Of course, when I’m using Ingarden’s term “literary work of art”, I’m quite aware that, in the postmodern era, an act of acknowledging the unique status of the literary work as opposed to an act of granting it a generic postmodern term “text” may strike the reader as quaint. However, to change and adapt Ingarden’s vocabulary would not only be an act of cheap trendiness, it would endanger an important distinction made by Ingarden between artistic and aesthetic qualities in art, and, ultimately, avoid the all-inclusive, postmodern attitude toward art. In other words, the postmodern disdain of aesthetics, whether on the grounds of anti-eliticism or anti-idealism, encourages a revisionistic approach to Ingarden’s staple vocabulary and the concepts behind this vocabulary. There is no need, however, to exhibit a knee-jerk reaction against terms such as “value”, “aesthetic”, “literary” or “artistic”. Instead, an investigation of Ingarden’s The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art makes it quite clear that the status of a literary work as an object of aesthetic appreciation in no way contradicts the postmodern concept of text. Ingarden would agree that any given text is just that, a text, whether it is Hamlet, Madame Bovary or a geology textbook. What Ingarden stresses is not a guarantee of an aesthetic experience but only an existence of a potential for an aesthetic experience. Such a potential in any given geology textbook is certainly limited in comparison with Hamlet. In an act of cognition of a text, a potential for an aesthetic experience may not be realized, and Ingarden is aware of the possibility of a reader’s total cold-shoulder reaction to Hamlet. Moreover, there are borderline cases of labeling a text as literature even though such acts would be protested by some so-called old-fashioned critics, but, still, as long as enough readers will balk at calling a vacuum-cleaner operating manual a piece of literature, there will exist an example of a text lacking a potential to generate certain reactions otherwise expected for a substantial number of the readers of Hamlet. Let me now briefly review the ontological foundation of the literary work of art as a necessary introduction to the discussion of time in the stage play. Thus, the literary work of art is a multilayered structure, though without any ontologically privileged status granted to any of the particular layers. The literary work of art as a stratified object depends for its existence on the intentional acts of the creator and the reader, although it is not identical with these acts. These acts as individual reading experiences of individual readers belong to an epistemological sphere of apprehension of a literary work, not ontological. As mentioned, each layer, or stratum, is ontologically essential to the existence of the whole of the literary work of art; any attempt at elimination of any of the four layers would result in the radical cancellation of the very possibility of existence of the literary work of art.

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Drama as the stage play should not be classified as the work of literature, and it should not be confused with an individual, particular version of a given play in front of an audience on a given day. The distinction concerning the play read and the play staged is related to ontological issues, and the confusion of the play as an ontological entity with its cognitive existence is obviously related to epistemological questions. Of course, some post-Derrida critics or philosophers of art would stress only the infinite possibilities of individual readings or viewing reactions and accuse Ingarden of structuralistic and formalistic tendencies really because of a much greater popularity of his Literary Work of Art and a relative obscurity of his The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art. Consequently, there is little appreciation of the fact that Ingarden does acknowledge all these infinite possibilities of the reader’s or viewer’s reactions, and, as a result, some postmodern implications of his theory, more in line with Derrida than formalists, are overlooked. To quote Ingarden: (1) “the literary work ‘lives’ while it is expressed in a manifold of concretizations; (2) the literary work ‘lives’ while it undergoes changes as a result of ever new concretizations appropriately formed by conscious subjects” (Literary Work 347)

All that painstaking discussion of structure and layers of the literary work of art or the stage play is essential to establishing the way the literary work or the stage play can be perceived as an object, noticed in the flux of all the data of the real world, and it should not be labeled structuralistic only because it includes words such as “structure” or “layers”. Ingarden’s theory suggests, as already mentioned, a difference between an ontological description and status of the stage play, and the resulting cognition of its theatrical concretizations. One should approach every drama not only as a literary work but also as a stage play in order to fulfill an inherent aspect of a dramatic work which calls for its theatrical version. In other words, a read version of a dramatic work is only an example of a literary work with some such idiosyncratic features as, for instance, descriptions taking form of stage directions and dialogues assuming the primary role in the text. According to Ingarden, the stage play is a stratified formation, and there are four indispensable strata, or layers, in every stage play: (1) the stratum of words sounds and the phonetic formations of a higher order built on them; (2) the stratum of meaning units of various orders; (3) the stratum of manifold schematized aspects; (4) the stratum of represented objects (characters, objects, situations). The structure of the stage play is similar to that of the literary work. The major difference is a connection between the language of the stage play and other means of representation in the theatrical


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performance, for example stage scenery, props, actors, a musical score or sound effects. Each stratum is ontologically essential to the very constitution of the stage play as a possible object of cognition by the audience. Thus, the stage play cannot exist without word sounds, or typical sound configurations carrying meaning. At the same time, a word sound cannot be considered equal to the concrete phonic material of a concretized stage play, a domain of cognition, of course, not of ontology. An interesting observation can be made at this point in relation to the treatment of time in the stage play because of those objects which are presented to the audience only through word sounds as realized on stage by the actors and other stage effects. In other words, while reading a particular dramatic text, the reader has access to the stage directions, whereas in the stage play only the main text is delivered by the actors. Hence, the actual physical perception of time in the theatre on the part of the audience will be quite different. Also, because word sounds take on a different physicality on stage as compared with the silent processing of the units of meaning by the reader in the reading experience, the sensation of time passing in these two experiences will be different. The actual difference is ontologically based, while the measurable time limits for those experiences are, of course, related to the acts of cognition. In addition, some phonic configurations such as rhythm or tempo can be important to the physical sensation of time, which ultimately may influence the meaning of a play; for example, slowing down a speech of the character named Galactic Jack in Sam Shepard’s The Tooth of Crime, who is impersonating a rock’n’roll disc-jockey, could strike one as not right for the character. Here is a fragment of Galactic Jack’s disc-jockey rapid delivery: Galactic Jack: That’s me, Jim. Heavy duty and on the whim. Back flappin’, side trackin’, finger poppin’, reelin’ rockin’ with the tips on the picks in the great killer race. Ah tricks, no dale, no avail. It’s in the can and on the lam. Grease it, daddyo! (211)

Another example of a physical sensation of time in the stage play, as different from the sensation of time in the drama read, could be a scene from any of Pinter’s plays demanding a strict distinction between silences and pauses. The reader acknowledges a pause or silence without actually stopping reading or significantly slowing down. These acts of sound and silence as realized on stage belong to the acts of cognition of the stage play. It should be stressed that, in the same way as the word sounds in the literary work of art are ontologically understood as typical sound configurations, the linguistic sound formations of the stage play should be understood as typical sound formations, not related to any actually concretized theatrical productions. In other words, there is a

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distinction between an ontologically colorless so-to-speak foundation of the sound and its individual cognitive realization, placed in a particular physical time. The individual marking of sounds is as varied as there are numbers of particular performances of a given play. In addition, these sounds are individually interpreted by the members of the audience at any given time. Next, the stage play cannot exist without the next stratum, the stratum of meaning units. In his essay titled “Functions of Language in the Theatre”, Ingarden observes that while the purely literary work has only one linguistic function of representation, the words and larger units of meaning in the stage play perform additional functions when constituting the represented world. An element of physical determination in the case of some objects represented on stage is behind these additional functions. These objects can be organized into three groups: (1) those objects which are presented to the audience only through the scenery or the actors; (2) those objects which are presented both physically and linguistically; (3) those objects which are represented only linguistically, without a physical representation on stage. In relation to the discussion of time in the stage play, without getting too involved in the detailed summary of the theory, let me stress at this point that the meaning unit of the stage play includes both a particular meaning unit of the text articulated by an actor and a corresponding purely theatrical unit of the stage reality. Behind this correspondence there is a temporal correlation between these two elements: an articulated linguistic element of the meaning unit of the stage play is linked to whatever occurs on stage at the time of articulation, including actor’s specific enunciation, his or her facial expressions, stage effects, or music. There are also silent moments, not filled with any articulation. From a temporal point of view, these moments are attached to the last pronounced meaning units. Of course, they also modify the accumulated meaning so far. Understanding of words is usually done by thinking out whole sentences together with their corresponding stage situations. Each consecutive sentence together with a stage situation is comprehended as a continuation of the preceding ones, and as a part of the whole stage play. This last point is a staple observation on the nature of the reading process in reader-response criticism, criticism much indebted to Ingarden – a fact not always acknowledged. Finally, various temporal acts as depicted in the stage play lose their immediate ontic correspondence with independent physical reality, including the reality of time as experienced by the audience. Instead, they support the word meanings of the text. For example, the fact that two years can be depicted in two hours causes no problem to the audience. Thus, the stage play as an intentional object has no direct connection with primary acts of


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consciousness because these acts become derivational intentional objects as created by word meanings. At the same time, the perceived immediacy of time in a dialogue adds to, using Ingarden’s term, “intuitivization” of the represented reality. The next stratum, the stratum of schematized aspects, is influenced by the physically independent object present on stage, unlike the objects in the literary work. This stratum is important not only to the ontological foundation of the literary work of art in general, but also it is essential to the understanding of the creative process of the author. Thus, the author cannot fully capture the reality in its infinite variety and richness of detail. As a result, in any literary work one can encounter only a finite amount of aspects of the reality which is to be constituted in that work. Because the number of sentences, of pages is limited, the details have to be selected, and many have to be left out. Hence, the aspects of time as delivered in the stage play are, unlike in real time, discontinuous, fragmentary, and limited in duration by the time framing of a theatrical performance. It follows, then, that the work of literature or the stage play is like a skeleton waiting to get some flash, to have gaps filled, to live at last in the last stratum of the represented objects. In this last stratum, as a result of concretization, the represented objects can appear as ontically real without actually belonging to real space and time. The represented objects in the stage play appear even more so because the actors, stage props, sounds effects, and time possess some concrete physical aspects. The represented objects in the stage play are grouped into three domains, as indicated earlier in the brief discussion of the second stratum: (1) those objects which are represented only in a perceptual manner; (2) those objects which are represented both in a perceptual manner and by linguistic means; (3) those which are represented only by linguistic means. In the present discussion of the treatment of time in the stage play at the level of the represented objects one has to make an initial obvious remark that they are presented as temporal though different from: first, physiomathematically determined world time, then, concrete intuitively apprehendable intersubjective time, and, at last, strictly subjective time. The represented time, dependent to a great degree on the selected, schematized aspects is only a collection of events, with numerous gaps to be filled by the audience. Even if a particular play captures a sequence of events as if it were taking place in real time, minute by minute, this play is framed between a clearly defined beginning and ending, unlike real events which are blended in a certain continuum of preceding and following events, which the audience can only guess. As mentioned, the stage play takes place concurrently with other events, happening in concrete time and thus grounding the play in the time frame

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independent from the time represented in the play. Finally, subjective time, as experienced by the audience, can be quite varied despite the common physiomathematically determined time as referred to in the play or even the clock-time as experienced by the audience in the theatre. The represented time in the stage play is handled quite differently when compared to its treatment in purely literary works. The stage play, observes Ingarden, attempts to capture the continuous flow of real life events through the present moments, the “now-moments”, which become past moments, foreshortened in the subjective, individual perspective. The literary work, however, does not privilege the represented present. Rather, the events are represented mostly in the past mode. The semblance of real time in the stage play, then, is achieved by the represented characters going through “nowmoments”. When the characters talk about certain past events, the effect of being in the present moment disappears. The characters may invoke the past events by actually having them represented on stage, but in this case they again are in the mode of present. Some modern and postmodern writers have attempted to capture the mode of present and the related feeling of immediacy by experimenting, for example, with the use of grammatical tenses. On the other hand, in the case of poetry, some poets create images with the quality of timelessness by avoiding references to time. There is an intensified sense of now, of the present in the theatre as compared to watching a film. In the case of the latter, there is an awareness of “boxed” time. Any film can be viewed again and again, and it never changes. A particular theatrical production can be seen several times during a given theatrical season, but each particular performance as an epistemological entity is different. A quality of sameness, of course, underlies individual performances of a particular staging. In an individual staging two factors have to be acknowledged: the particular, unique, accidental created by slightly different gestures of the actors or their facial interpretations of the text, or even an annoying coughing spell from a viewer; and there is also a factor of a different audience and its different reactions to each performance. In our discussion of time these two factors underscore a sense of now, quite different from viewing and re-viewing of a movie. That is a reason why a performance captured in film is no longer a stage play. As far as the sequence of events in the stage play is concerned, it is based on the dramatic text concretized on stage. Once the play is concretized, it exists in all its parts simultaneously. Otherwise, there is a variety of possible temporal extensions of various theatrical productions of the same stage play. That is of some importance to the stage play only if the length of its theatrical production does interfere with some artistic and eventually aesthetic qualities of the play,



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for example, when rushing through Pinter’s plays and disregarding his very particular stage directions concerning well defined pauses and silences, or severely slowing down a tempo in a burlesque. Finally, the order of the parts of the play is fundamental to its structure. Of course, the order of sequence of events should not be confused with the represented time in the stage play. For example, a play incorporating numerous scenes portraying events from the far past, and thus, out of sequence is ultimately reorganized sequentially by the audience in its creation of the represented time. Ingarden’s theory of the literary work of art because of its adaptability to the discussion of other artistic endeavors can be a valuable tool of critical investigation in postmodern times. Ingarden’s distinction between ontology and cognition allows both a stringent philosophical focus on the ways of apprehending an object of literary work in its fundamental concreteness, on the one hand, and, on the other, a critical awareness of a myriad of interpretations on the cognitive level. Bridgewater State College WORKS CITED Roman Ingarden (1973) The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art. Trans. Ruth Ann Crowley and Kenneth R. Olson. Evanston: Northwestern UP. Roman Ingarden (1973) “The Functions of Language in the Theatre”. The Literary Work of Art. Trans. George G. Grabowicz. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 377–96. Roman Ingarden (1973) The Literary Work of Art: An Investigation on the Borderlines of Ontology, Logic, and Theory of Literature. Trans. George G. Grabowicz. Evanston: Northwestern UP. Sam Shepard (1981) The Tooth of Crime. In Seven Plays. New York: Bantam.

VICTOR KOCAY

TEMPORAL SEQUENCE AND PERMANENCE IN NEIGES BY SAINT-JOHN PERSE

The distinction between objective and subjective time is commonly used to differentiate between two theories of time. On the one hand, the time of mechanics and physics is an abstract, quantitative measure of time that is considered objective, and on the other hand, the subjective theory construes time as lived experience, as a datum of consciousness. This second understanding of time is frequently used in literary criticism, but in contemporary thought these two approaches are often conjoined. They coincide with the decline of the notion of “eternal” time which was an integral part of the ancient world. Further, the adoption of a quantitative measure of time in contemporary science has had profound effects on thought and on literature. In contemporary capitalist society, for example, time is considered as a relation of production and consumption. This is often expressed as a ceaseless striving to produce more. On the level of thought, the “progression” of time has lead to philosophies of “clear and distinct” ideas, developed in time by means of language. But this has not excluded cyclical notions of time such as proposed by Nietzsche. As H. Meyerhoff notes, after the collapse of the religious dimension of time, and after the failure of the theory of time as progress, it is not surprising that “cyclical historicism still has influence”.1 In the twentieth century, existentialist writers such as Heidegger have focussed on the event of an individual’s death as a defining trait of the individual, not as a quality in the individual, but in the sense that death establishes the limit or boundary of an individual’s life experience. Only in death can an individual’s life experience be considered as a complete unit. It is only when the possibility of new experience no longer exists that the limit of an individual’s life can be determined, at which point the individual becomes “complete” for the totalizing perspective of the critic. In this sense, time defines us as individuals for it imposes a limit on our abilities and aspirations. The truth or authenticity of an individual’s life is only revealed in death. It would appear that Heidegger’s notion of authenticity betrays a need to define and understand an individual as a whole, as opposed to as a part of the whole, 95 A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana LXXXVI, 95–114. © 2007 Springer.

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in a particular event say, that has significance at a particular moment in time.2 Or rather, the isolated event should be understood, according to Heidegger, in conjunction with the whole which gives significance to the part. The relation of part to whole is thus essential to understanding a person’s life. The part relates to the whole that it both helps to found and constitute. Heidegger’s thought leads to a theorization of the individual, understood and consequently judged on his or her understanding of the world, on his or her relation to things and to life experience. That is to say that the individual subject is seen in relation to work and to objects as an individual striving to understand, or as the recipient of sedimented cultural behaviors.3 What is essential for this study of a poem by Saint-John Perse is the notion of boundaries that determine the limit of an object, and ultimately of a life. This is a central notion for philosophers such as Heidegger and Derrida, but it has its origin, in contemporary thought at least, in Hegel’s phenomenology. We understand an object, according to Hegel, by means of what the object is not. It is the beyond that determines the limit of an object for understanding such that what the object is not is in fact a part of an object’s qualities or determinations. In the poetry of Perse, the relation to objects is central to the extent that the notion of time, as represented in Perse’s poetry, is a configuration of objects in space. This understanding of an object in time is key to the reading presented herein of a poem by Perse. Now, critics of Saint-John Perse have stressed the “realism” of his poetry. They have attempted to trace unusual expressions in Perse’s poems to a particular event, either historical or in the poet’s life experience. This tradition was perhaps initiated by Roger Caillois who found basically that the “realism” of Perse’s poetry distinguished it from the more esoteric works of the Surrealists.4 In this same vein, critics interested particularly in Perse’s use of language have attempted to trace words and expressions to the poet’s childhood. They have noted similarities with expressions used on the island of Guadeloupe where the poet was born and where he spent his early years.5 The so-called “realism” of Perse’s poetry has not always been readily accepted, however. In her work published in 1977, Henriette Levillain seems to hesitate between the so-called realism of Perse’s poetry and its more creative element that gives rise to ritual. She notes that the reality of elemental forces animates and inspires poetic creation.6 And Thorston Greiner, in his analysis of the poem Neiges, remarks that the poem does not describe a given reality, but rather substitutes for reality the creation of a new reality.7 More recent analyses stress the “spiritual” and/or “imaginary” character of Perse’s poems. According to Eveline Caduc, for example, Perse’s fundamental theme is the search for the absolute, and for Michèle Aquien, Perse’s poetic

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language is not directed at reality as an ensemble of phenomena seen from the outside, in their appearence, but at the world of essences.8 In this sense, according to Aquien, Perse’s poetry is a poetry of ideas. Recent criticism has also challenged the historic authenticity of Perse’s works and of his personal letters. They note, for example, that Perse’s creative efforts extend beyond his poetry to include his own biography. In addition to creating the pseudonym, Saint-John Perse, it would appear that the poet also idealized his past, in a sense creating a past for the poet as opposed to evoking events that constituted the life of the man, Alexis Léger.9 Biography aside, another type of criticism studies the poems as literary texts in themselves rather than as a reflection of the life of Alexis Léger. Careful consideration of the text of various poems has revealed the structure or composition of Perse’s poetry, and in so doing it has lead to a better formulation of the poet’s “vision”, as it were, in both a moral and a spiritual sense.10 In this paper I will explore the poem as a text, as a complete text, for this reveals the manner in which Perse expresses the notion of time in his poetry. I have chosen the poem Neiges (Snows) for this purpose, although there are other poems such as Vents (Winds), Amers (Seamarks), and Chronique, where the passing of time is also a central notion. In Neiges, however, time as change is synonymous with space, and this is an important part of Perse’s understanding of time. The theory of time that this poem ultimately reveals considers time neither as a chronological sequence nor as a recurring cycle, but rather as a construction, as a construction not only in time but also in space. One might even argue that the “construction” of the biography of the poet Saint-John Perse simply continues Perse’s creative efforts and poetic thought in the context of the poet’s life. My contention is that Perse’s reflection on time reveals a quest for permanence that takes on the shape of religious thought. My presentation is in three parts. I will first describe the poem itself, in part because description is an aspect of the method of phenomonology, but also because the reading given of different parts of the poem informs my interpretation of the whole. I will then consider Perse’s conjoining of space and time in an attempt to define his own life and his own qualities, and finally I will underscore the quest for permanence that here takes the form of a kind of religious belief or transcendence. PART 1: THE POEM

Neiges was originally published with the place and date given at the end of the poem, that is, “New York, 1944”. That being said, there are no specific temporal or spatial references in the poem itself. It was written during the poet’s exile, and it was dedicated to his mother who remained in France.11

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Neiges has been considered by some to be Perse’s most lyrical, most touching poem, but in spite of that, or perhaps because of that, it is not often studied in as much detail as poems such as Eloges, Anabase, or Amers. Neiges, or Snows, was apparently inspired by an early morning snowfall over New York City. It recounts the thought of the poet looking out over the city from his window in the early light of the morning. It is divided into four parts. Parts 1 and 2 are primarily spatial in orientation. They describe the city as seen by the poet who names the objects in his purview, objects now covered by snow. But the poet also refers to imagined or recollected objects in the sense that these are beyond his purview in space or time. Parts 3 and 4 are written primarily from a temporal perspective. The Poet reflects on his lineage, on his relation with his mother through whom he has evidently inherited his poetic gift, and he considers the construction of language in time in a manner analogous with the construction of a city. The shift from a spatial to a temporal perspective is central in the development of the poem. More specifically, part 1 describes the scene, a snowfall over New York City. Buildings and streets are covered with snow. The “realist” element of the poem is strongest here. Perse evokes the gray dawn shortly before 6:00 am. He refers to the skyscrapers of steel and stone, to bronze sculptures and ceilings of glass, to marble, and white metal. He invokes a past event, probably from the poet’s own experience, a recollection of a scene on an apartment terrace where, in the summer past, an architect showed him the eggs of a sparrow. In spite of this “realist” perspective, the first part of the poem contains many metaphors. The snowfall is described as an hour of silk, as the fog of a first breath, as the white feathers of a snowy owl, its body like a white dahlia. It is also a white cloth which, pressed against the temples, provides a soothing freshness for the minds of men. From a temporal perspective, the first part of the poem is written primarily in the past tense such that the snowfall is more of an event than a state of affairs. The first line of the poem, “And then came the snows”, using the simple past, seems to elevate this one snowfall to the level of an event of phenomenal proportions, but it also initiates what will soon become an exploration in time, a reflection on origins, on the source of language, in short, a quest to learn from whence language originates, as a natural occurrence, like the snowfall. In spite of the frequent, although always vague references to places and things, it must be noted that the role of thought is also prominent in Part 1. As noted, there are several metaphors in Part 1. In addition, the first sentence of the first verse announces the coming of the snows and then conjoins thought and reality as in a woven fabric.12 And the second verse ends with the words “What part the mind played in these notable things we know not”.13 Perse’s “realism” in fact seems to be quite subjective.


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Part 2 of the poem begins with the words “I know that”, indicating that the perspective has shifted from the objects outside the poet’s window to the poet’s memory, imagination and understanding. The poet’s vision is here expanded to include objects and places far away in both space and time. He thinks of boats plying the river and reaching the open sea. He thinks of waterfalls where droplets of mist fill the air like a myriad of shiny insects. He thinks of smoke-filled train stations like palm groves under glass, and he considers factories to the north where the shift is changing, the brightness of the lights dimmed by an accumulation of snow. Simply put, it is snowing on all objects big and small. It is snowing on the grass, on the tools of men, on fevers, on silos in the west, on ranches, on the vast plains, on the places where new cities will be constructed, on the cold ashes of the campsites of now departed explorers. It is snowing on the forests and on the high terrains, on the axe blade of the pioneer. It is snowing beyond Christianity, on plants and on animals. This highly imaginative sequence of objects and places covered by the snowfall ends with one of the most intriguing phrases of Perse’s poetry: “Epouse du monde, ma présence! ” (“Spouse of the world, my presence! ”). This phrase is followed by an exclamation point and 3 suspension dots that separate it from the sentence that follows. Punctuation and sentence structure thus seem to indicate an anxious emotional state at this point, such as frequently causes language structure to disintegrate. In this manner, the poet’s language is a symbol of an emotional state, and this phrase thus distinguishes itself from the narration. It occurs twice more in Part 3 of the poem, and with some variations, four more times in Part 4. Its repetition indicates its importance for the poem as a whole (I will return to this phrase). So, in Part 1 the poet’s vision is more or less restricted to the buildings and events in his immediate purview. In Part 2 his vision is expanded to include places that are distant both in space and time. On the level of the poem this change of perspective is made possible by the snow itself. The snow has covered all objects, leaving only vague outlines and shapes. Objects that were previously distinct and easily distinguished one from another, are suddenly masked, hidden by the snow. The distinguishing features that would normally allow us to differentiate between objects, and thus to name them accordingly, are now absent, letting both the poet’s vision and his language ‘escape’, as it were, the limits of the real world. His words wander or slip from one object to the other with little or no resistance. In masking the distinguishing features of objects, the snowfall thus unites them under one continuous flow that joins once disparate objects and can even transform them. It is at this point in the poem, at the end of Part 2, that the poet makes a vague reference to his absent mother, united with her son, in spite of his

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exile, by a uniform sadness, by silence and thought. The reference to the poet’s mother only becomes explicit, however, in Part 3, which begins with a lament. Already the sea and the land separate mother and son, and now, in addition, the snow covers the tracks that they have left, masking also, therefore, the development in time that has led to their current situation. The reference to the poet’s mother is made more clear in the second verse of Part 3, where the poet refers to a woman of his race, to the pure lineage that her grace holds in him, and the remainder of Part 3 is a kind of prayer that the poet addresses to her. He asks that they might be left to their language without words, the language his mother uses, presence, patience, like a prayer, like an “Ave Maria” on the steps they have taken and that have separated them. That is the song of their race, he says. He makes several references to this “silent language”14 that he shares with his mother and that unites them, and he ends by evoking the activity in the street below where he sits: wheels with chains, the noise of shovels, street cleaning, a light shining on the snow. The most striking feature of Part 3 is the frequent use of religious references. The snow is described as a “plain-song” that masks traces from the past. The city where he has taken refuge is again described as a place of grace and mercy, a place where the great odes of silence can be released. He thinks of his kind mother raising her face to her God, and he notes the pure lineage that her grace holds in him. He asks her to sing the pure song of their race like an Ave Maria of grace. He makes reference to his mother’s soul in the shadow of her crosses, and speaks of her “woman’s heart tortured in the heart of all woman”. He asks who will accompany her in her widowhood to her subterranean churches where light is frugal and the bee, a symbol of eternity, divine. He repeats the reference to an Ave of grace which, like the song of pure lineage, follows on their footsteps. And finally he notes a grayish pink bird, which in summer was red, illuminating the crypt of winter like the “Phasian Bird in the Book of Hours from the year 1000”. And again he uses the word “grace” which he now calls a quality in men, like sadness, like “this force that has no name”, most likely the inspiration for his poetry, but possibly also, and more generally, the need for a belief in some form of transcendence, what Perse has elsewhere referred to as a “spiritual need” of which both poetry and religion are born.15 Part 4 of the poem returns us to the poet’s room overlooking New York City under an ocean of snow. His reflection turns to poetry itself, to the language he uses to construct his poem. Those who have travelled far from their birth place, he tells us, know better each day the currency of unreadable things, by which he seems to mean that the language they use often misses its mark, or loses its edge. Words no longer seem to capture the objects they name. At this


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point, the poet loses his “linguistic” balance, so to speak, like the traveller during the new moon, and he pursues a unique path where words have no attachment in reality, where they have been emptied of being. Like a traveller with no aim, he wanders among the oldest layers of speech, among the highest phonetic strata, reaching ancient idioms, like the Dravidian languages of ancient India that had no distinct word for “yesterday” and “today”, that is, languages where temporal distinctions were not precise but rather were masked by language, as by analogy the objects in space are masked by the snowfall. In the realm of ancient and purely vocal languages the poet can wander freely, he says, and create new locutions where his breath, like the pure snow, is in search of pure, final vowels. The final verses of the poem underscore the analogy of the pure snow with the pure sound of a word in this city of the new world, a place of grace and mercy for the insight of thought. And again the poet repeats the “Ave of grace on the steps we have taken”, as in a great white rose garden of all the snows around. And he returns finally to the initial comparison of the snow to a cool cloth woven by the hands of women, a cloth the cools the burning regrets of the living. The poem ends enigmatically with the union in spirit of the poet and his absent mother. He writes: “There where the rivers are still fordable, there where the snows are still fordable, we shall pass on this night an unfordable soul . And beyond are the great tapestries of thought and all the worldly goods where the individual engages his fortune”.16 The object of thought, here a soul, is considered as a real object, like those that the poet sees from his window. But unlike the river that flows in space and time, the union of souls transcends both space and time and cannot be crossed. The final line of the poem, “Henceforth this page where nothing more is written”,17 is separated from the rest by an asterisk. It essentially equates silence with the act of poetry and with the snow. It initiates, as it were, the language of silence that the poet uses. The white, blank page, with no distinguishing marks, like the blanket of snow that covers the city, is a language of silence where objects meld, where space and time disappear. It is a lack of distinction, and since language is a series of distinguishing features in a temporal sequence, this phrase that marks a future characterized by silence is a kind of quest for permanence, that is, a lack of distinction, of temporal sequence, and change. PART 2: SPACE AND TIME

As noted, the snow that covers the city masks the distinguishing features of objects, of buildings, of space in general, and creates what the poet refers to as a state of “grace and mercy”. It provokes a kind of aesthetic experience,

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a state of wonder that is a state of grace. It is by means of this state, or because of this state, that the poet can move to a higher level of consciousness, to a more abstract level of reflection on the notions of presence and absence. From the perspective of the development of the poem, the snow masks the distinguishing features of objects. But with no distinctions to arrest consciousness, there is no limit imposed on language. Space gets bigger, as it were, and the poet’s vision goes beyond the immediate purview established in Part 1 of the poem, to eventually encompass the entire country, and beyond. In the sense that it covers all objects indiscriminately, the snow thus becomes a unifying feature of space. It allows for the surpassing of the immediate reality of the poet, what Elisabeth Coss-Humbert refers to as the “initial movement toward the sublimation of the notions of space and time”.18 It is a presence that conceals, that creates the appearance of absence. It is in a sense a metaphor for the poet’s exile which has caused “absence” in his life, as if his previous life were officially masked, covered over, and therefore no longer real.19 But the masking of distinguishing features that gives rise to a pure state like a new beginning is also the end of a previous state, the disappearance of what was. This new land of grace and mercy soothes the regrets and pains of memory. The masking of reality thus leads to a reflection on change, to the sequence of events that led to the poet’s current condition, to the distance that separates a mother from her son, the past from the present. But the poet’s reflection is not restricted to his own personal situation. He invokes past societies, traces of which are now masked, erased as it were by the snow, if only momentarily, and he refers to his language, for like buildings and structures created by human beings, language also is a construct developed in time as words and expressions evolve and are transformed phonetically, grammatically and semantically by human societies and their changing needs. The new beginning that the snow represents thus allows the poet to consider his language from the perspective of newness, as though from a point at which the constructions of previous generations had not yet occurred. The slate is miraculously wiped clean. He feels a sense of newness and liberation. He can move freely among the phonemes of some primitive language, and can even conceive of communication without words. Now, critics have often commented on Perse’s representation of change and of temporal sequence. In the words of Georges Poulet, the “movement of duration” in Perse is not the time of clocks because it is not a succession. Time for Perse, according to Poulet, is a temporal mass that progresses, and while progressing it increases in volume. In this manner, “duration” is hardly distinguishable from space. It is a space that progresses.20 Colette Camelin notes the influence of the pre-Socratic thought of Empedocles and


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of Heraclites on Perse. She notes, for example, that the notion of cycle and renewal is central in the thought of Heraclites, in the sense that for Heraclites every instant in time only exists to the extent that it destroys the preceding instant.21 And in the words of Mireille Sacotte, for Perse represented time is liberated from chronology and the story told is as inscribed in a uniform temporal “substance” that she calls the “pure duration of an extended present”.22 The importance of the notions of space and time in Perse’s poetry is thus well documented. But the timelessness of Perse’s poetry does not necessarily imply a quest for self-definition from a temporal perspective, and neither does it require a religious garb. In the poem Neiges, however, these are both important aspects of Perse’s understanding of time. Through the course of its four parts, or cantos, the poem moves from the concrete to the abstract, from the precise to the general, from the objects of the real world to the poet’s use of language. Part 1 presents real objects such as the city streets, buildings, statues, and birds. These objects are covered with snow, however, such that their specific features are masked. The snowfall thus creates what could be called an “ontic slip”. Without specific features to arrest and hold the eye, the objects outside the poet’s window are for the most part indistinguishable. It is thought, the habit of thought or the experience of thought, and it is language that identify for the poet the objects now covered by snow. The objects named are presented as concrete objects, distinguished by words, but the poet indicates in his first sentence that thought and reality are conjoined. The snow has fallen, he says, on the fabric woven of thought and reality. The distinction between thought and reality is unclear from the beginning. Further, the naming function of language is conditioned by language use. Language does not reflect reality, per se, it reflects our thoughts of reality. The distinguishing function of language, that is, the use of distinct terms for distinct objects, continues to apply even when the distinguishing features of reality are no longer present. Linguistically speaking, distinctions are made precise, or discrete, and are applied to a reality where often no discreteness is observed, for example, to the spectrum of colours, to the range of vocal pitch, and to temporal sequences. But to name an object is to make it concrete or real. As H. Levillain remarks, “the essence of poetry is mythical in the sense that language is an act which invents its object”.23 And according to M. Aquien, “naming is the means by which we reach the permanence of all things created”.24 Further, the objects made present in the poem are not only masked by the snowfall, they are sometimes transformed by it. The snow has fallen through the night, and under what the poet calls “this lofty feat of feathers”, the stone

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buildings have grown, as it were, forgetful of their own weight. The night lights of factories covered by snow are like mother of pearl growing bigger. And the poet asks what “disquieting gentleness has laid its cheek on the pioneer’s axe”, attributing to the axe blade qualities that it would not normally have. The snowfall has masked the features of objects and transformed their appearance to the extent that the poet can ascribe to them qualities and features that they do not normally have. The naming function of language can thus regain its original vigour. As Max Lorneau phrases it, “the poetic verb orders one to return to the source of language: to the breath and to the profundity of flesh, of which the wind and the sea are allegories”.25 The distinguishing features of objects are normally perceived as spatial relations. In essence, we recognize objects by means of what they are not.26 It is the “beyond” that marks the boundary of an object, and as such, it is the “beyond” that determines the limit of an object’s qualities. Thought, in turn, attributes a name to the object thus delineated. In this sense language plays a fundamental role in thought and in our understanding of reality. But the snowfall on the city has erased all distinguishing features and has thus freed the poet’s language from the linguistic conventions he ascribes to. He can now move “beyond”, searching, as it were, for distinguishing features that will help construct his language, that will help create the boundaries and limits that his language requires. But the snow is ubiquitous. It has masked all distinguishing features. It has transformed the city. It has changed the objects of the real world. And the change that the snow has occasioned leads the poet to reflect on the sequence of events that led to his own condition of exile. If the snowfall masks the features of objects, it also masks the developments that have led to the creation of those objects. It covers, for example, the ashes of former campsites abandoned by early explorers, as it covers the sites where future cities will be built. The poet’s reflection thus moves to a consideration of change. But of course, where there is change there is also a need for sameness for otherwise the notion of essential defining features that can be named as such, becomes problematic. The poet notes, for example, the changes that have occurred in his own life. As the snowfall has transformed the city, his exile has transformed him. It has masked his past, erased the distinguishing features that once defined him in his previous life. When the traits that define us as individuals are suddenly absent, or masked, we are led to speculate on who we are, on who we have become. When our essential, defining traits are revealed to be contingent and subject to change, it becomes evident that they are not the essential traits we once believed them to be. The poet thus turns toward a more distant past, to his predecessors, in what could be described as a quest for self discovery. He considers that a poet, through


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language use, is still a poet, even in exile. He does, after all, possess the gift of poetry, an “unexplainable force in man”, he calls it, a gift that is his heritage, his lineage of grace passed on through his mother. His poem itself is proof that he has inherited the gift of poetry. Like the snowfall over the city, poetry is a state of grace, and it is this state of grace that the poet now considers to be his essential, defining feature. It is apparently a permanent trait that goes beyond his own self, beyond his own desires, beyond his own actions and his previous vision of himself. But the poet uses words, words that name and refer to objects, words that create objects in thought, words that are limited and formed by the reality that they are used to delineate. They are the building blocks of his poem, but they are not his words. They have evolved from previous generations, constructed in time like the buildings of a city, each generation adding terms, abandoning others, varying expressions. His pursuit of self-definition leads him thus to reflect on his language, and hence, to reflect on language in general, on the first languages, those of ancient civilizations where the effects of time would have been minimal. In an oft quoted passage, perhaps one of Perse’s most explicit references to language, he refers to the Dravidian languages of ancient India, to rudimentary linguistic forms that had no precise words to distinguish between yesterday and today, a fundamental distinction in most languages, a distinction that separates us ultimately from our past. Erasing the contingencies of language, however, the poet is left with only “silence”, that is, his language of communion with his mother, his language of communion in general, his ultimate condition, his only true defining feature. But the lack of distinction is not, of course, a defining feature at all. It is only a lack of distinction, like the blanket of snow over the city. The poet’s reflection on time and his quest for self-definition seem to have led to silence and emptiness, but have they? PART 3: PERMANENCE

The blanket of snow over the city has occasioned the poet’s escape from the confines of spatial distinctions, and this affords him his subsequent transcendence of the sequential quality of time. His objective seems to be to discover some original, permanent quality that defines him as an individual and distinguishes him as a poet. In a sense he is seeking a transcendence of contingent being, a kind of religious form, for the transcendence he seeks is closely associated in the poem itself with known religious forms and symbols. There are three aspects of this desired transcendence that are important for this paper. First, it appears that the Catholic prayers of his mother’s religion form a kind

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of subtext for this poem. In addition, the repetition of certain phrases and the techniques used give Perse’s poem a liturgical quality, a quality that critics have attributed to Perse’s poetry in general. And finally, Perse’s language itself invokes a new form of religion based on a harmonious relation of the individual with the world, a relation beyond the notions of time as chronology or as cycle. As noted, religious references are numerous in the poem, most particularly in Part 3 where the poet speaks of his mother and of his ancestry. He speaks of God, of subterranean churches, of the divine bee, of the Phasian Bird in the Book of Hours, and he refers to his new city, his city of exile, as a place of grace and mercy. He is of course evoking the religion of his youth, his mother’s religion. He makes several references to the pronouncement of an “Ave of grace”, a prayer said to soothe the suffering caused by the distance that separates both he and his mother from their heritage, a separation that is physical as well as the result of a development in time. Now, the “Ave” is in itself a prayer, the “Ave Maria”. The first line of the prayer is, “Ave Maria, pleine de grace” (Hail Mary, Full of Grace).27 The association of the prayer with a state of grace and mercy is thus not fortuitous in the poem. The poet asks on many occasions that an “Ave of grace” be pronounced as a kind of blessing for the distance that separates mother and son, the past from the present. And of course “grace” is mercy, it is absolution. But the state of grace referred to is not restricted to traditional religion. The poet refers to the city of New York as a place of grace and mercy. The snowfall too is a state of grace, like a cool cloth pressed against the forehead to absolve the pain of past memories, in much the same manner that prayer and religious beliefs can soothe. And grace is also the state of poetry, a gift that the poet has inherited from his mother, an aesthetic gift that has no explanation. As such the “Ave” is a subtext of Perse’s poem and would certainly be recognized as such by the poet’s mother, to whom the poem is dedicated. It should be noted, however, that the state of grace referred to in a religious context, that is in the prayer, takes on spatial and temporal dimensions in the poem. The second prayer that functions as a subtext, the “Salve Regina”,28 is not explicitly referred to in the poem, but it is also a well known prayer. It is addressed to the Queen, the Virgin Mary, Mother of Mercy. It is a lament for hope and gentleness for the exiled children of Eve. It expresses a desire for salvation and mercy when the exile will finally cease. By comparison, the poem is addressed to the poet’s mother. It speaks of gentleness, of suffering, of exile and separation. And in part 3 the poet writes, “Lady of high lineage your soul was silent in the shadow of your crosses; but the flesh of a poor woman,


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in her old age, has been tortured, your living heart of a woman in all women ”.29 The “lady” referred to here could evidently be the poet’s mother or the Virgin Mary. The two are associated by the phrase “Lady of high lineage”, and by means of this associtation, therefore, the poet’s mother is elevated to a level of abstraction such that her suffering is symbolic of the suffering of all women, her gentleness and mercy creating a parallel with Mary, “Mother of mercy”. The poem’s dedication, using one of the poet’s early pseudonyms in the place of his mother’s real name, underscores her “elevated”, somewhat abstract condition in the poem, and indicates that the poem is not solely about the relationship that the poet has with his own mother. Further, the repetition of certain phrases enhances the liturgical quality of Perse’s poetry.30 Repeated phrases are like the words of a prayer, each repetition a part of a new service. These phrases are like icons of spirituality. And because they are always the same they appear to deny the temporal sequence that implies change and development. There are phrases in the poem “Neiges” that function in this way. The “Ave of grace”, for example, or the phrases, “a place of grace and mercy”, and “Spouse of the world, my presence! ”. Images are also repeated. At the beginning and at the end of the poem, for example, Perse uses the image of a cool cloth pressed against the temples to soothe the pain of memory. He also creates “lists” of objects, like those covered by the snow, giving his poetry a kind of biblical quality. But more importantly for this paper is the enigmatic phrase, “Epouse du monde [ ]” (“Spouse of the world ”). This phrases occurs 7 times in the poem. Once in part 2, twice in part 3, and 4 times in part 4. Except for the first occurence, it is repeated twice each time it is used. The first half of the expression is always the same, but the second part varies as follows: Part II: “Épouse du monde ma présence! ” Part III: “Épouse du monde ma présence, épouse du monde mon attente!” Part IVa: “Épouse du monde ma présence, épouse du monde ma prudence! ” Part IVb: “Epouse du monde notre patience, épouse du monde notre attente.” That is to say that the word “presence” is replaced by “expectation”, by “prudence”, and finally by “patience”. In addition, the first person possessive singular (ma) is replaced in the final two instances of the poem with the first person plural (notre). Except for a few brief comments, this phrase has largely been ignored by critics. For A. Knodel, the word “spouse” is considered as meaning “to mold” or “to take the shape of” as in the verb “to espouse”. In this sense the

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“spouse” is the snow that has fallen on the city and “molds” the shapes it covers. According to Christian Murciaux this phrase is a rhetorical technique, a “call to illusion”, almost a cry of weakness, and René Galand refers to it as symbolic of a moment of ecstasy in which the “world appears in its original splendor to the poet’s soul, as the divine bridegroom to his bride”. For Pierre Guerre, on the other hand, this phrase underscores the presence of reality such that the poet’s presense espouses the world, an interpretation similar to that established here. And for E. Coss-Humbert, who makes the parallel with the beliefs of Taoism, this phrase expresses the feminin that is the poet’s inner being.31 This short enigmatic phrase is thus considered as signifying a hightened emotional state, as an acute presence of reality, as a reference to the divine, or as an aspect of the poet’s philosophical vision. Most of the references to this passage are, however, only short passages where the phrase is referred to more than it is considered in any detail. If the phrase is obscure, or more open to interpretation, it is in part because it seems to break with the narrative established by the poem. But this phrase is more than a symbol of the divine or of the poet’s emotional state. It is repeated several times in the poem, such that it begins to resemble in itself a form of prayer or ritual, similar to the pronouncement of an “Ave Maria”. From the perspective of the rhythm of the phrase, this parallel is all the more evident. The phrase is very close to the “Ave Maria” when they are both pronounced in French. The phrase, “Ave Maria, pleine de grâce”, is in two parts. The first contains four syllables [a ve maR ja], the second has three pln d gRas.The phrase “Epouse du monde ma présence! ” is also comprised of two word groups. The first contains four syllables [e puz dy mõd] and the second three [ma pRe sãs]. Both phrases thus have a similar structure. Even when Perse substitutes words in different instances of the phrase, this basic rhythm is maintained. The words substituted are even phonetically similar. “Présence” is replaced with “prudence” and with “patience”. The word “attente”, which seems to be an exception, also has two syllables, however, and it maintains the nasal vowel. In addition, the phoneme ‘t’ is phonetically close to the phoneme ‘d’ that is found in the words “monde” and “prudence”. The substitutions for this phrase could thus be organized phonetically, but they are also interesting from the perspective of their meaning. The principal term is apparently “présence” for it occurs three times and is also used in the first instance of the expression. The first variation involves replacing “présence” with “attente” (“expectation” or “hope”). This word can also mean “waiting” in French, and therefore evokes the notion of exile.32 The second subsitution replaces “présence” with “prudence” (“prudence” or “care”), and


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finally it is replaced with “patience” and once again with “attente”. Now prudence and hope are two of the seven virtues,33 giving this series of substitutions a religious character. Further, the replacement of the first person singular possessive adjective with the plural form indicates a kind of spiritual union of mother and son, united in waiting, in patience and therefore in hope that this exile will soon end.34 But one must ask, what exactly does the phrase mean. “Spouse of the world my presence! ” is actually, I believe, the foundation of a different kind of religion, although this interpretation does not necessarily exlcude other readings. The phrase could refer, for example, to the snow, as mentioned, or it could be symbolic of some kind of euphoric emotional state. But when the phrase “Spouse of the world” is considered as a sort of vocative rather than as denoting some external reality, its meaning is a bit different, especially when one considers that Perse often uses the convoluted syntax made famous by symbolist poets such as Mallarmé. A slight rearrangement of the terms and the insertion of the copula would give the phrase, “My presence is spouse of the world”. In this way, this short, enigmatic phrase would mean that the poet is a part of the world, that he is one with the world. Consequently, his care or prudence, as well as his hopes and his patience are also synonymous with the world. According to Georges Poulet, Perse’s poetry of the elements expresses a form of thought that Poulet refers to as “le cogito persien”, and this he describes as an understanding of self, not in the solitude of the mind, but, on the contrary, in the company of things.35 The phrase, “Spouse of the world”, marks the poet’s “religion”, not as a belief in God or in the religious traditions of his ancestors, but in his relation to the world. The religious forms however are similar. For example, Mary is the mother of God, as expressed in the Ave Maria. She is also the mother of mercy, as expressed in the Salve Regina. And she is a symbol of the Church. For the poet, the term “Spouse of the world” could then refer to Mary as well as establish a parallel with the poet’s mother who suffers alone and who’s only begotten son is in exile. But the poet’s understanding of religion goes beyond a lament addressed to the Saint. It equates the poet’s presence with the world. He is one with the world. He does not speak of an after life, or of a life beyond. He is not seeking solace in God or in his mother’s religion. He is in fact telling us that his religion is ultimately an understanding that his own life, that his own defining features are only possible as aspects or traits of the world in which he lives. He is one with the world, a world that knows no certainty but only change and movement. The poet’s quest for self-definition by means of some essential, transcendent quality has thus failed, at least in the traditional sense of the word. He has

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not discovered the essential trait that defines him as an individual being. His function in life was greatly altered by exile. His poetic gift, an unexplainable force, implies the use of a language that precedes him, and of course, the lack of defining features is not a definition. His only essential, distinguishing feature, therefore, would seem to be his presence as a being distinct from other beings in the world that constitutes him. In short, his only defining feature seems to be that he is part of a changing world. Now critics have noted that Perse does not accept the religion of his mother. In a sense, his poem founds a new religion that takes the place of the old. As stated in the poem, it is snowing “beyond Christianity”, a phrase that could be interpreted in both a spatial and a temporal sense. For Perse there is of course a link between religion and poetry. They are born of the same spiritual demand. As he notes, in his Stockholm address, it is by means of poetic grace that the spark of the divine lives on.36 The phrase, “Spouse of the World, my presence! ”, indicates that the poet’s religion has seceded his mother’s religion, and this new form of religion manifests a different understanding of time. It is not a cyclical notion of time, but neither is it a linear notion of progress. Rather it is a notion of time as a development in time, a construction in time, like the construction of a language, or the construction of a city. Space and time are here conjoined for the traces of development and change are present in the form of objects and beings. A celebration of the objects and beings of the world is also a hymn to their creation, to their original form, for they are part of a process of change which leaves behind the traces of its inspiration. In this sense, it is language, by means of the naming function in a linguistic act, that establishes the record of the existence of the world. It is therefore language that determines history and creates human culture. The poem itself, as a celebration of the world, achieves a kind of transcendence or permanence because it is a record of the world of things and of change. The last remaining point to note is the different type of relation evoked when the poet speaks on the one hand of objects of the world, and on the other of his relation with another human being, in this case, his mother. It is by means of language that objects are defined as distinct entities, as entities determined by what they are not. The poet’s language thus invokes the objects named and makes them present, but the poet recognizes that this is an illusion, at which point the words he uses become like empty shells, devoid of being. In the objects of the world, devoid of being, he can see a trace or a record of the changes that have created the objects before him. They are therefore not complete and whole in themselves but are a part of a changing world, as the poet is himself. As a being distinct from the objects of the world, however, he can conceive of the temporal developments that have given rise to the


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objects in his world, and these developments are also expressed in language. Language itself is considered to be a construction created in time, with time. The relation with his mother, that is, with another human being, takes on a different character, however. The object created, a kind of silent bond, that is, a bond liberated from the language of previous generations, exists as an object of the natural world in the sense that it can be referred to as an object and in the sense that it is determined by its other. The poet describes it as an “unfordable soul” and thus establishes its identity. However, unlike the river that can be crossed, although it is always changing, the relation with another human being becomes a relation that seems to defy both space and time in that it cannot be crossed. The relation established with another human being thus differs from the relation of the poet with the objects of the world. This type of human relation is developped more fully in the poem Amers where the object is the love between a man and a woman, an object which is like the sea, an ever changing symbol of renewal, hope and plenitude. The interpretation of Neiges that is presented here begins with a consideration of the naming function of language that characterizes Parts 1 and 2 of the poem. Objects are named according to perceived distinctions of what does and does not belong to the perceptual object. A name, or word, represents an object in time constituted by its various properties and qualities. The snowfall over the city masks all distinctions, however, and for that reason it derails the poet’s use of language. The fact that the snowfall appears without distinctions makes it a special kind of object, an ethereal or mystical object: the poet calls it a state of grace. Covered by the snow, the real objects in space and time are no longer present to receive the names that they have been given and that distinguish them one from the other. The sudden change that the snowfall represents leaves the poet unsettled, similar to the sudden and precipitous change in his own life when he was forced into exile. The change brought about by the snowfall, and consequently the lack of defining features for his words, initiate a reflection on change, and on language use. Neiges becomes a kind of prayer, a hymn to the world, a new kind of religion in which the poet’s individual and essential traits are expressed as a part of a changing world. The understanding of time that Perse’s poem betrays would seem to consider time as a spatial feature such that time could be measured not in abstract units, nor in cyclical recurrences, but in terms of spatial developments and constructs, as objects in space, as buildings, and as language use, such as poetry. St Francis Xavier University

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1

Hans Meyerhoff. Time in Literature. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1960, p. 104). 2 Cf. Charles B. Guignon: “Understood as a ‘happening’ that unfolds throughout a life time, a person’s identity can be grasped only in terms of his or her life story as a whole”, in “Authenticity, Moral Values, and Psychotherapy”, in Charles B. Guignon, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 215–239), p. 224–5. 3 In “The Concept of Time”, a lecture that predates Being and Time, Heidegger explains that the “perplexity concerning our grasp of Dasein is grounded not in the limitation, uncertainty or incompleteness of our cognitive faculty, but in the very entity to be apprehended: it is grounded in a fundamental possibility of its Being” (Translated by William McNeill. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992), p. 10. 4 Roger Caillois, Poésie de Saint-John Perse. (Paris: Gallimard, 1954). The “realism” of Perse’s work has been stressed by many critics subsequently. 5 See R. Caillois, op. cit., and Emile Yoyo, Saint-John Perse et le conteur. (Paris: Bordas, 1971). Mireille Sacotte also gives several expressions used on the island. Cf. Poésie de Saint-John Perse. (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), p. 66. 6 H. Levillain, Le Rituel Poétique de Saint-John Perse. (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), p. 21. 7 T. Greiner, “Analyse fonctionnelle de Neiges”, Espaces de Saint-John Perse, 1–2. (Aix-enProvence: Universite de Provence, 1979), p. 4. This text by Greiner is a synopsis of his earlier work published in German. 8 Eveline Caduc, Saint-John Perse connaissance et création. (Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1977), p. 103; Michèle Aquien, Saint-John Perse l’être et le nom. (Paris: Champ Vallon, 1985), p. 26–27. See also Yves-Alain Favre, Saint-John Perse le langage et le sacré. (Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1977). 9 Cf. Catherine Mayaux, Les “Lettres d’Asie” de Saint-John Perse. (Paris: Gallimard, 1994); Renée Ventresque, Le Songe antillais de Saint-John Perse. (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995); Carol Rigolot. Forged Genealogies: Saint-John Perse’s Conversations with Culture. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). 10 The works by E. Caduc, and M. Aquien, op. cit., are good examples of the more linguistic readings of Perse’s poetry. But see also the work by Madeleine Frédéric, La Répétition et ses structures dans l’oeuvre poétique de Saint-John Perse. Publication de la Fondation Saint-John Perse. (Paris: Gallimard, 1984). 11 As C. Rigolot has pointed out, however, the dedication does not use his mother’s real name, but instead uses one of the poet’s early pseudonyms, “Saint-Leger Leger” (op. cit., p. 123). This will become an important aspect for the reading of the poem propounded here. 12 “Et puis vinrent les neiges, les premières neiges de l’absence, sur les grands lés tissés du songe et du réel”. Saint-John Perse, Oeuvres Complètes. (Paris: Gallimard, 1972). 13 “La part que prit l’esprit à ces choses insignes, nous l’ignorons”. The English translations given are generally those of Denis Devlin, in St.-John Perse. Collected Poems. Bollingen Series LXXXVII. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971–1983), pp. 197–209. 14 In a letter to Jean Paulhan dated 12 June, 1963, Perse refers specifically to this passage from Neiges. He states that the silent language of communication between two beings does not imply that the poet could write poems without words. It does imply, however, according to Perse, that the poet associates thought with words, language with the word by means of a “discharge of all being in one flash, both unconscious and conscious”. See Saint-John Perse. Oeuvres Complètes., op. cit., p. 582.

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“Discours de Stockholm”, Oeuvres Complètes, op. cit., p. 445. “Là où les fleuves encore sont guéables, là où les neiges encore sont guéables, nous passerons ce soir une âme non guéable Et au delà sont les grands lés du songe, et tout ce bien fongible où l’être engage sa fortune ”. I have used Devlin’s translation for the first part of this passage, but have substituted my own translation for the second part. 17 “Désormais cette page où plus rien ne s’inscrit”. This final line of the poem is an important feature for Steven Windspur’s reading of Neiges. Windspur reads Perse’s poems from the perspective of reading itself, such that each of Perse’s poems would seem to imply a model of reading. In the case of Neiges, and the poems of Exile in general, the meaning of the poem is considered to be the ideal poem that is referred to but never written. According to Windspur, each of the poems of Exile “has constructed a silent ideal language.” See Steven Windspur. Saint-John Perse and the Imaginary Reader. (Genève: Droz, 1988), p. 72. Windspur’s reading of Neiges would, however, place the “meaning” of the poem outside of the poem itself. It must also be noted that Windspur does not consider the prayer form as the model of reading implicit in Neiges. 18 E. Coss-Humbert, Saint-John Perse. Poésie, Science de l’être. (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1993), p. 330. 19 This is essentially the position of E. Caduc who states that the snow creates a universe that nullifies all references, like the sands of exile, a kind of language without words, like silent musique (op. cit., p. 148). 20 “La durée persienne se distingue donc mal de l’espace. Elle est un espace en marche, quelque chose comme un parcours”. Georges Poulet, “Saint-John Perse ou la poésie de l’effacement des choses”, in Honneur à Saint-John Perse. (Paris Gallimard, 1965), p. 303. 21 Colette Camelin, Eclat des contraires. La Poétique de Saint-John Perse. (Paris: CNRS Editions, 1998), p. 248. 22 Mireille Sacotte, Saint-John Perse. « Eloges » et la « Gloire des Rois ». (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), p. 113. 23 H. Levillain, op. cit., p. 321. 24 M. Aquien, op. cit., p. 42. Aquien goes on to interpret Perse’s use of language in a Heideggerian sense, noting that the structure of language for Perse, as for Heidegger, can reflect the structure of being, that the truth of language and the truth of the world for man are conjoined in the unity of meaning (“pour Perse comme pour Heidegger, la structuration du langage peut rendre compte de la structuration de l’Etre, que vérité du langage et vérité du monde-pour-l’homme se rejoignent dans l’unité du sens”, p. 130). 25 Max Lorneau, “Habiter la gorge d’un dieu”, Cahiers Saint-John Perse 5. (Paris: Gallimard, 1982, p. 23). 26 This is essentially Hegel’s account of the relation between thought and its object. 27 The text of the prayer is as follows: “Je vous salue, Marie pleine de grâce; Le Seigneur est avec vous, Vous êtes bénie entre toutes les femmes et Jésus, Le fruit de vos entrailles, est béni. Sainte Marie, mère de Dieu, Priez pour nous pauvres pécheurs, Maintenant et à l’heure de notre mort. Amen.” The first line frequently uses the Latin phrase, “Ave Maria”. In English: “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now, and in the hour of our death. Amen”. 28 The text of the prayer is as follows: “Salut, Reine, Mère de miséricorde, Notre vie, notre douceur, notre espérance, salut! Vers toi nous crions, enfants d’Eve exilés, vers toi nous soupirons, gémissant et pleurant Dans cette vallée de larmes. Ô toi notre avocate, Tourne vers nous ton regard miséricordieux Et Jésus, le fruit béni de tes entrailles, Montre-le-nous après cet exil, 16

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Ô clémente, ô douce Vierge Marie.” In English: “Hail, holy Queen, Mother of mercy; hail our life, our sweetness and our hope. To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve: to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this vale of tears. Turn then most gracious Advocate, thine eyes of mercy towad us, and after this our exile, show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus, O merciful, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary! Amen”. 29 “Dame de haut parage fut votre âme muette à l’ombre de vos croix; mais chair de pauvre femme, en son grand âge, fut votre coeur vivant de femme en toutes femmes suppliciée”. 30 See for example Y.-A. Favre (op. cit., p. 78); see also M. Frédéric (op. cit., pp. 228–229). 31 A. Knodel, “The Imagery of Saint-John Perse’s Neiges”, PMLA, March 1955, pp. 9–18; C. Murciaux, Saint-John Perse. (Paris: Editions universitaires, 1960), p. 31; René Galand. SaintJohn Perse. (New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1972), p. 85; Pierre Guerre. Portrait de Saint-John Perse. Textes établis, réunis et présentés par Roger Little. (Marseille: Sud, 1989), p. 26; E. Coss-Humbert, op. cit., p. 303. 32 It is interesting to note that Perse used the word “attente” as a subtitle in an early version of Images à Crusoé, but replaced it with “le livre” in subsequent editions (Cf. M. Sacotte, op. cit., p. 199). That is to say that the abstract term “hope” was replaced with a concrete term, but also that hope, which implies the future, is expressed as a literary creation. The future is thus measured in terms of the works to which it gives rise. 33 The seven virtues are justice, prudence, temperance, fortitude (cardinal virtues), faith, hope and charity (theological virtues). In French: courage, justice, prudence, tempérance, charité espérance, foi. 34 It should be noted that the Poet’s mother died in France in 1948. The notion of exile expressed in the Catholic prayers is also relevant here. Death, or the end of the exile, implies a reuniting with God and with faith. The silent bond between Poet and mother, a form of communion in itself, can be viewed as a kind of religious experience. 35 “Une saisie de soi, non dans la solitude de l’esprit, mais, au contraire, dans la compagnie des choses” (author’s translation, op. cit., p. 199). 36 Saint-John Perse, “Discours de Stockholm”. Oeuvres compètes, op. cit., p. 445. Perse makes a similar remark in a frequently quoted letter to Paul Claudel (7 January, 1950) where he states that the “secret tension of his entire pagan life has been the search for the ‘divine’ in all things” (Oeuvres Complètes, op. cit., p. 1019–1020, author’s translation).

IMAFEDIA OKHAMAFE

NON-TELEOLOGICAL TEMPORALITY IN PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE: CAMUS, ACHEBE, EMERSON, ELLISON, HURSTON, AND NIETZSCHE

A combined materialist and idealist concept of temporality whereby we consider time as absolute, yet relative and non-universal seems to illuminate the senses of revolution and rebellion in certain works by such French thinker as Albert Camus (1913–1960), Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe (1930–), US American thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), novelist Ralph Waldo Ellison (1914–1994), US American novelist Zora Neale Hurston (1891?– 1960), and German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900). In this context I associate revolution with roots or deepest mode of being and rebellion with branches or surface mode of being. Similarly, revolution goes with the phenomenon of non-time and rebellion goes with the phenomenon of time. Time here functions not as an independent phenomenon but as what we deduce from the changes in natural or cultural beings or nonbeings. We appear to deduce clock or calender time from no-time. Put differently, we deduce the present (the nows, the instants) from our memory of the past and anticipate the future by projecting these nows or instants into our tomorrows. Our nows or instants or time capsules such as our brain-housed memory, fossils, geological records, and our human bodies with their cells and genes enable us to manage or structure or make sense of our everyday realities. But no-time seems to lack time. With no-time, time appears not to pass. This difference between time and no-time or between the phenomenon of time passing and time not passing appears to account for the related different stances on political or cultural or societal changes by Camus (in his 1951 philosophical book The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt), by Achebe (in his 1987 novel Anthills of the Savannah), by Emerson (in his philosophical essay “Circles”), by Ellison (in his 1952 novel Invisible Man), by Hurston (in her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God), and Nietzsche (in his 1872 inaugural philosophical book The Birth of Tragedy). Each writer or thinker believes in rebellion and in rebelling but not in revolutions. They 115 A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana LXXXVI, 115–128. © 2007 Springer.

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disbelieve in revolution not because they desire or see no need for revolution but because they do not think revolutions are possible. As Camus puts it, “there has not yet been a revolution in the course of history” (Camus 106). Camus’ theoretical and practical distinction between concepts of rebellion and revolution serves as my point of departure. Ironically, a deceptively simple Marilyn Monroe statement “I’ve been on a calendar but I have never been on time” hilariously captures the phenomena of time and no-time. We apparently have calendar time (which, like Monroe, we have all been on or have used directly or indirectly). On the other hand, we have a phenomenon of no-time, which, like Monroe, no one has been on (probably because it does not or may not exist at all). What would be wrong with a concept of temporality that encompasses both time and no-time and lacks a telos (or ultimate end)? A non-teleological temporality, informed by a history of nature and the nature of history, teaches us that that we can change the forms (or branches) of nature but we cannot change the nature (or roots) of nature. Nature has one nature but infinite forms, and our creativity lies in our ability to endlessly transform nature. In “Historical Rebellion,” Camus analyzes this revolution-rebellion distinction. He reminds us that the astronomical concept of revolution and the political concept of revolution share a primary meaning. Both the astronomical and political notions of revolution describe “a complete circle,” a complete transition that ushers in a new being. Rebellion essentially differs from revolution in the scope of changes envisioned. Revolutions have grandiose objectives whereas rebellions seek limited objectives. “Revolution,” contends Camus, “originates in the realm of ideas,” a revolution tries “to shape actions to ideas,” tries “to fit the world into a theoretic frame.” Hence, adds Camus, “rebellion kills men,” but “revolution destroys both men and principles.” And hence “there has not yet been a revolution in the course of history.” In this sense of revolution, there can be only one revolution, “a definitive revolution.” A revolution as a movement injects or inserts “ideas into historical experience” whereas rebellion as a movement moves or “leads from individual experience into the realm of ideas.” Rebellion always engages in “fruitless struggle with facts.” Camus notes how “government and revolution are incompatible” and as such the insatiability of a revolution. Once a moment completes the circle or once a so-called revolutionary government assumes office or control, a new movement for another circle begins to take shape (106). Camus thinks that a revolution limits its fighting not to one particular society. The 1789 revolution “wanted to fight for Europe” and the 1971 Russian “revolution is fighting for universal dominion.” “Total revolution,” he states, ends by demanding the control of the world,” and as it waits for its control of

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the world to happen, “the history of man, in one sense” becomes “the sum total of his successive rebellions. In other words, the movement of transition which can be clearly expressed in terms of space is only an approximation in terms of time” (Camus 107). Camus notes that what the 19th century called “the progressive emancipation of the human race appears, from the outside, like an uninterrupted series of rebellions, which overreach themselves and try to find their formulation in ideas, but which have not yet reached the point of definitive revolution where everything in heaven and on earth would be stabilized.” Camus insists that no “real emancipation” emerged from any so-called revolution. If there were any “real revolution, there would be no more history. Unity would have been achieved, and death would have been satiated.” This insistence on artificial unity at any cost forces rebellion “on pain of appearing futile or out of date to become revolutionary” (107). For Camus, the rebel no longer wants to just “deify himself” “or look to his own salvation by adopting a certain attitude of mind.” The rebel wants to deify the (human) species. However, Camus wrongly identifies Nietzsche’s Ubermensch in Zarathustra as exemplifying this deification of the species (107). Camus appears to forget that the ubermensch never appears. The so-called higher men in this philosophical Nietzsche novel wait for or want or expect the ubermensch like those characters in Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot. Nevertheless, Camus’s main point about how rebellion degenerates into paper revolution remains very strong. Camus sees revolution as rooted in metaphysical rather than historical rebellion. He contends that murder or homicide shapes all or most revolutions. Deicide has characterized some (108). In “Rebellion and Revolution” (another essay in The Rebel), Camus associates revolution with what he calls “historical nihilism,” which chooses only history. For Camus, choosing history and history alone in the name of rationality or irrationality means nihilism and such nihilism usually ends up producing a “universe of concentration camps.” The “logical revolution,” the revolution based on the logic of history, “wants to realize the total man,” the Marxist man (Camus 246). The same goes for the irrational revolution, the fascist revolution. But Camus thinks both kinds of revolution differ only in ends. Hitlerian fascism “represents the exaltation of the executioner by the executioner,” while Russian communism represents “the exaltation of the executioner by the victims,” the victims it claims, in theory, to fight for (Camus 246–247). Fascism longs not for the liberation of all humans. Fascism seeks to liberate “a few by subjugating the rest.” Communism has the grander intention of wanting to liberate all humans, all of humanity. Both fascism and communism feed on the same source: “moral cynicism” generated by the condemned status quo, but at the end of the day they become the very

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same hated status quo they replaced. The revolution turns “against its rebel origins” (Camus 247). Humanism becomes inhumanity. For Camus, everything “remains for us to be reborn or to die.” He criticizes those existentialists who see “progress in the transition from rebellion to revolution,” and regard the rebel as “nothing if he is not a revolutionary.” Camus notes a contradiction here since the revolutionary has to also be a rebel otherwise “he is not a revolutionary, but a policeman and a bureaucrat who turns against rebellion.” A revolutionary who is also a rebel “ends by taking sides against the revolution” and hence “Every revolutionary ends by becoming either an oppressor or a heretic” and hence because of “the purely historical universe they have chosen, rebellion and revolution end in the same dilemma: either police rule or insanity.” Our lesson here says that “history alone offers no hope,” offers no “source of values,” only “a source of nihilism.” Camus appears to argue that we cannot “create values in defiance of history, on the single level of a philosophy based on eternity.” Nor does this inability to so create values mean we should ratify “historical injustices and the sufferings of man.” He seems to agree with Nietzsche that slandering the world (this world) leads to some nihilism. Camus maintains that any thinking that completely rejects history or that relies on history alone robs humans of the means and rationale for living (Camus 249). Camus regards history as necessary but insufficient and as such should function only as an “occasional cause.” History “represents not the absence of values, or values themselves, nor even the source of values.” History serves as only “one occasion, among others, for man to prove the still confused existence of a value that allows him to judge history. Rebellion itself makes us the promise of such a value” (Camus 249–250). Where absolute revolution assumes “the absolute malleability of human nature and its possible reduction to the condition of a historical force,” rebellion refuses to objectify the human or reduce the human to “simple historical terms.” Camusean rebellion affirms “a nature common to all men” and “eludes the world of power.” History inevitably limits human experience. However, humans by rebelling impose “a limit to history, and at this limit the promise of a value is born.” Camus contends that “The triumphant revolution must prove by means of its police, its trials, and its excommunications that there is no such thing as human nature.” Furthermore, to the revolution a human “is nothing if he does not obtain from history, willingly or by force, unanimous approval” (250). Here we witness revolution betraying and assassinating rebellion for affirming “the existence of a limit and the divided existence that we represent.” Originally, rebellion never totally negates “all existence.” Instead rebellion “says yes and no simultaneously.” It rejects “one part of existence in the name of another, which it exalts.” Rebellion denies itself when by “rage or


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intoxication” it adopts the “all or nothing attitude” and negates “all existence and all human nature.” Rebellion demands unity and historical revolution demands totality. Rebellion begins with “a negative supported by an affirmative” while the historical revolution starts with an “absolute negation and is condemned to every aspect of slavery in order to fabricate an affirmative that is dismissed until the end of time.” Rebellion creates, revolution annihilates. Rebellion creates so it can “exist more and more completely,” but historical revolution “is forced to produce results in order to negate more and more completely.” Historical revolution obligingly acts “in the hope, which is invariably disappointed, of one day really existing.” Camus concludes that a revolution, to earn the name creative, cannot dispense with “either a moral or metaphysical rule to balance the insanity of history.” Revolution disrespects or scorns “the formal and mystifying morality” common “in bourgeois society,” but Camus thinks it errs when it extends “this scorn to every moral demand” (Camus 251). Camus says that revolution must learn from what guides rebellion. Rebellion says that “revolution must try to act, not in order to come into existence at some future date in the eyes of a world reduced to acquiescence, but in terms of the obscure existence that is already made manifest in the act of insurrection.” Here Camus refers to a rule “neither formal nor subject to history,” a rule which he sees at work “in artistic creation.” He adds that “rebellion at grips with history” also says that “instead of killing and dying in order to produce the being we are not, we have to live and let live in order to create what we are” (252). He thinks strongly that art “leads us back to the origins of rebellion, to the extent that it tries to give its form to an elusive value which the future perpetually promises, but of which the artist has a presentiment and wishes to snatch from the grasp of history”); the rebellion-revolution distinction Camus paints here appears to be more or less at work in the philosophic or artistic creations of Achebe, Emerson, Ellison, Hurston, and Nietzsche. In Chapter 7, of Achebe’s novel Anthills of the Savannah, Beatrice, the chapter’s narrator, focuses on the political thinking of Ikem Osodi, her brotherlike friend and fellow character. In this chapter she recalls a philosophical “love-letter” Ikem once read to her. The second part of this love-letter details what Ikem thinks about political revolution and re-form and it becomes the direct and indirect basis of Beatrice’s narration in Chapter 7. He tells Beatrice, “Your [gender] charge has forced me to sit down and contemplate the nature of oppression” (Achebe 88–89). The first part of the love-letter deals with the place of woman in society. After using the first part to critique how the Old Testament and the New Testament present women, he transitions into the second part by pointing out that the best way of fighting oppression. Ikem

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acknowledges that “The most obvious practical difficulty is the magnitude and heterogeneity of the problem” of oppression. He adds, “There is no universal conglomerate of the oppressed. Free people may be alike everywhere in their freedom but the oppressed inhabit each their own peculiar hell.” He cautions, The present orthodoxies of deliverance are futile to the extent that they fail to recognize this The simplest remedies touted by all manner of salesmen will always fail because of man’s stubborn antibody called surprise. Man will surprise by his capacity for nobility as well as for villainy. No system can change that. It is built into the core of man’s free spirit (Achebe 90).

Ikem further warns that the road to hell is paved with good intentions and tells us to be wary of do-gooders’ heaven-looking hell, The sweeping, majestic visions of people rising victorious like a tidal wave against their oppressors and transforming their world with theories and slogans into a new heaven and a new earth of brotherhood, justice and freedom are at best grand illusions. The rising, conquering tide, yes; but the millennium afterwards, no! New oppressors will have been readying themselves secretly in the undertow long before the tidal wave got really going (Achebe 90).

Does Ikem here therefore mean that humans should do nothing in the face of oppression? No. He only attacks those who promise global and ultimate salvation for all here on earth. He speaks from the lessons humans have learnt (at least so far) from nature and history. He recognizes the limits and powers both exercise in the affairs of humans. Their inscrutability should always allow for the element of surprise but not a surprise in the sense of a nirvana. Human nature remains capable of both good and evil. Ikem rejects teleological solutions. Ikem accepts, encourages rebellion and rejects revolution. He says, Experience and intelligence warn us that man’s progress in freedom will be piecemeal, slow and undramatic. Revolution may be necessary for taking a society out of an intractable stretch of quagmire but it does not confer freedom, and may indeed hinder it (Achebe 90).

Ikem admits that “Reform may be a dirty word” but still it continues “to look more and more like the most promising route to success in the real world.” He asserts, “I limit myself to most promising” “since all certitude must now be suspect.” Ikem distinguishes root changes from branch changes and how we should approach their fundamental differences. He appears to tie all the root of being (human being) to nature and the branches of being to both nature and history. He argues for reform because for him “Society is an extension of the individual. The most we can hope to do with a problematic individual psyche is to re-form it. No responsible psychoanalyst would aim to do more, for to


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do more would be to unleash insanity,” the same kind of insanity Camus associates with revolution that rejects history completely. Ikem continues, No. We can only hope to rearrange some details in the periphery of the human personality. Any disturbance of its core is an irresponsible invitation to disaster. Even a one-day-old baby does not make itself available for your root-and-branch psychological engineering, for it comes trailing clouds of immortality (Achebe 91).

Ikem then asks, “What immortality? Its baggage of irreducible inheritance of genes. That is immortality.” Hence he concludes that what applies to the individual here applies also to society, the extension of the individual. He urges us to “re-form” society “around what it is, its core of reality; not around an intellectual abstraction” (Achebe 91). Ikem’s position here toward the end of Chapter 7 and Camus’ concluding sentence of the concluding section “Rebellion and Revolution” of Chapter 3 seem eerily and beautifully in synch. Camus says that “rebellion at grips with history” should stop “killing and dying in order to produce the being that we are not” and instead “live and let live in order to create what we are” (Camus 252). Achebe and Camus appear to be in agreement too on the positive status of certain contradictions inherent in the logic of changes, political changes. Activist proponents of revolution often readily dismiss proponents of reform as cowards or reactionaries or puppets and often tag them as accomplices or defenders of oppressors but Ikem sharply disagrees. He argues that opposition to revolution does not mean cowardice or support for a rotten political status quo such as the one in the state of Kangan, Ikem says that his anti-revolution and pro-re-reform does not excuse political inactivity or apathy. Indeed to understand it is an absolute necessity for meaningful action, the knowledge of it being the only protective inoculation we can have against false hopes and virulent epidemics of gullibility (Achebe 91).

He maintains that contradictions are not “some deadly disease” which “certain radical theorists” make them out to be. He sees contradictions as “the very stuff of life.” He contends that “If there had been a little dash of contradiction among the Gadarene swine some of them might have been saved from drowning.” He insists that “Contradictions if well understood and managed can spark off the fires of invention.” He then asserts that “Orthodoxy whether of the right or of the left is the graveyard of creativity” (Achebe 91). In other words ideologues of the right or of the left often become prisoners of their own absolutes which they want to impose on the rest by any means necessary. Chapter 7 ends with Ikem invoking some notable apostles of contradictions. He points out that “Every artist contains multitudes.” He quotes Walt Whitman’s “Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am

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large, I contain multitudes” (Achebe 91). He reflects on Graham Greene as a contradictionist: “Graham Greene is a Roman Catholic, a partisan of Rome, if you like. Why then does he write so compulsively about bad, doubtful and doubting priests?” Ikem answers his own question, “Because a genuine artist, no matter what he says he believes, must feel in his blood the ultimate enmity between art and orthodoxy.” Then follow Ikem’s final points: Those who would see no blot of villainy in the beloved oppressed nor grant the faintest glimmer of humanity to the hated oppressors are partisans, patriots and party-liners. In the grand finale of things there will be a mansion also for them where they will be received and lodged in comfort by the single-minded demigods of their devotion. But it will not be in the complex and paradoxical cavern of Mother Idoto (Achebe 92).

Ikem’s love-letter suggests the paradoxical relationship between revolution and re-form or revolution and rebellion. Categorical denial of political certitude appears impossible because belief in the possibility of certitude is itself an affirmation of certitude since in practice there seems to be no difference between belief in the possibility of certitude and the belief in certitude. The inherent antagonism or creative tension between art and orthodoxy guards against the freezing of any historical absolute. Beatrice’s sexism-related charge prompts the occasion for Ikem to share with her the result of his thinking “through things,” things that include the rotten in the fictitious African country of Kangan. Ikem realizes “that a novelist must listen to his characters” because “after all” they “are created to wear the shoe and point the writer where it pinches” (Achebe 88). The people point the author to the points for rebellion so that the shoes can be changed or fixed but the feet that wear the shoe remain constant. In “Circles” Emerson invokes St Augustine’s description of God’s nature “as a circle whose center was everywhere and its circumference nowhere.” This circle metaphor underlies Emerson’s enunciation of temporality, a nonteleological temporality. He says that “every action admits of being outdone,” that “around every circle another can be drawn,” that “there is no end in nature,” that “every end is a beginning,” that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon,” and that “under every deep a lower deep opens” For him, this observation of recurring beginnings and endings “symbolizes the moral fact of the Unattainable, the flying Perfect, around which the hands of man can never meet.” This fact also symbolizes “at once the inspirer and the condemner of every success” (Emerson 168). He then asserts, There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees. Our globe seen by God is a transparent law, not a mass of facts. The law dissolves the fact and holds it fluid.” He adds, “Our culture is the predominance of an idea which draws after it this train of cities and institutions. Let us rise into another idea; they will disappear (Emerson 168/169).


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The ever-changing forms of natural and cultural being do not come out of no-thing. Emerson reminds us that “The new continents are built out of the ruins of an old planet; the new races fed out of the decomposition of the foregoing. New arts destroy the old” (Emerson 169). He advises us to beware of teleological temporality. “Every ultimate fact,” he declares, “is only the first of a new series. Every general law only a particular fact of some more general law presently to disclose itself. There is no outside, no inclosing wall, no circumference to us” (Emerson 170). He warns that there is no “piece of science” whose “flank may not be turned tomorrow” and that “there is not any literary reputation, not the so-called eternal names of fame, that may not be revised and condemned.” He points out that we have only “degrees in idealism” and that “history and the state of the world at any one time directly” depend “on the intellectual classification then existing in the minds of man.” He regards dialog or conversation a “a game of circles” (Emerson 172). He returns to the theme of circles and sees the “natural world” as “a system of concentric circles” and that every now and then we “detect in nature slight dislocations” which tell us that “this surface on which we now stand is not fixed, but sliding.” Emerson does not conceive any virtue as final (Emerson 174/175). For him all virtues are initial, but he quickly adds, but no movement or progression will be sensible without “some principle of fixture or stability in the soul.” He insists that “there is no sleep, no pause, no preservations, but all things renew, germinate and spring” (Emerson 176). He observes that “People wish to be settled” and suggests, “only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them” (Emerson 177). Put differently, settlement lies in unsettlement. Emerson does not discount at all the element of surprise in the affairs of humans. Emerson, like Camus and Achebe’s Ikem after him, considers life “a series of surprises.” He notes that We do not guess today the mood, the pleasure, the power of tomorrow, when we are building up our being. Of lower states, of acts of routine and sense, we can tell somewhat, but the masterpieces of God, the total growths and universal movements of the soul, he hideth; they are incalculable (Emerson 177).

He adds, “I can know that truth is divine and helpful; but how it shall help me I can have no guess” (Emerson 177). Emerson ends his essay where he began: in circles. He concludes, The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory and to do something without knowing how or why; in short to draw a new circle (Emerson 178).

Emerson makes a case against teleological temporality.

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Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man’s “Prologue” contains several telling contradictions which elucidate the theme of non-teleological temporality. The Invisible Man or the novel’s narrator lives in a long-forgotten section of the basement of a building in New York City. He does not even think that Broadway and the Empire State Building outshine his hole-domain. For him, these “two spots” symbolize both the humanism and barbarism of our civilization/culture. This point reminds me of Walter Benjamin’s observation that behind every document of civilization lies barbarism. The narrator counsels us to be aware of this inherent contradiction and to beware of those who tell us otherwise. He says that the world moves “by contradiction.” He contends that the world moves not “like an arrow,” but like “a boomerang.” His caution follows, “Beware of those who speak of the spiral of history” because such people “are preparing” you for “a boomerang.” He advises us, “Keep a steel helmet handy.” He makes it known that he speaks from personal or firsthand experience.” He says, “I know; I have been boomeranged across my head so much that I now can see the darkness of lightness” (Ellison 6). This awareness of spiral history helps him to disentangle himself from the closed circles of the Marxist Brotherhood led by Brother Jack (a white man) and of the Rastafarian Black Nationalists led by Ras, the Destroyer (a black man). To the Brotherhood, only a revolution would end capitalism and by default also end racism. To the Ras Black Nationalists, only a revolution would end racist white supremacy. He agrees, though in a different manner with Mr. Norton (the New England benefactor of the narrator’s former college), that the destiny of whites and the destiny of blacks in the USA are intertwined. The racial problems between them cannot be fruitfully addressed by revolution, especially the kind espoused by the Marxists and the Black Nationalists. Spiral history says there is no road map out of racism. He has to be himself to free him from the seductive trappings of isms that insist on absolute revolution. As he says when he was no longer ashamed to eat food associated with his Deep South background, “I yam what I am.” No more shame. No more satisfying only the expectations of others. He observes, “I no longer felt ashamed of the things I had always loved What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do” (Ellison 266). The first two paragraphs of Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God set the stage for Janie’s closing answers to the two key questions the novel poses to Janie (the protagonist) in Chapter 3. The rest of the novel explores Janie’s questions and answers. The narrator in Chapter 3 asks, does “marriage end the cosmic loneliness of the unmated” and does “marriage compel love like the sun the day?” (Hurston 21). The novel tests the


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role of the absence or presence of money and romance in the temporality of marriage. Janie, at sixteen, says no romance, no marriage, but Nanny, Janie’s maternal grandmother, a woman who once experienced slavery, a woman who has seen Janie’s mother amount to nothing at about the same age now as Janie, says no finance, no marriage. The novel opens with a paragraph that structures both the novel’s beginning, middle, and ending, Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men (Hurston 1).

Apparently, ships carry every human wish but not all ships land eventually to deliver what they have. Some ships sail forever on the horizon and as such never arrive. Some ships do finally arrive on shore with the goods or things the watchers wish for. Others keep forever watching ships that never arrive. So we have two kinds of ships (ships on the horizon and ships on the shore) and two kinds of wishers (wishers for things and wishers for time, dog watchers or God watchers). For the former, their goods or goodies arrive with the tide. For the latter, they see the sun appearing and disappearing, rising and setting again and again but never arriving on the shore once and for all. The novel’s second paragraph adds that “women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget.” For Janie, women forget wishes that have endings and remember wishes without endings. Women desire what forever tantalizes them. Women prefer ships on the horizon. For such women, “the truth” lies in the dream. Janie’s grandmother, an illiterate well-meaning woman, the woman who raised Janie’s mother and now raises Janie herself, wants Janie to avert the fate of her mother. She does not want Janie to make the very same mistake her mother made. Janie’s grandmother wanted “to make a school teacher” out of Leafy, Janie’s mother. But as Granny puts it, “one day,” Leafy did not come home at the usual time. Granny waited all night in vain for her. She took a lantern and went round asking everybody for her whereabouts. Nobody had seen her. The next morning, Leafy (at age seventeen) came home crawling “on her hands and knees.” She looked horrible. A school teacher had hidden her in the “woods all night long,” raped her, “and disappeared “just before day” (Hurston 19). Her recovery took long, and Janie became the product of this rape. After Janie’s birth, Leafy began drinking and staying out at night. She soon vanished from home and from Janie’s life. Granny wanted Janie to turn out differently from her mother. She had ships with goods waiting for her granddaughter. However, Janie had her own plan. One day,

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Granny caught Johnny Taylor, a young man who had nothing at all going for him, “lacerating her Janie with a kiss” (Hurston 12). In spite of Janie’s pleadings to the contrary, in spite of her confession to Granny that she does not love Logan, Granny immediately marries off sixteen-year-old Janie to Logan Killicks, an old rich black man. Granny’s ships are not Janie’s ships. The life of Janie after Johnny Taylor and especially after Granny’s death becomes a lifetime testing of marital life in light of Janie’s temporality notion of ships on the horizon. In Chapter 3, Janie returns home to her grandmother after two and half months of being married to her first husband, Logan Killicks. She tells her grandmother she won’t return to her husband because she does not love him and never loved him. Before and after her marriage the non-love persists. She reminds her granny that she married him only because she Granny led her to believe that romantic love would come after marriage. Marry first and then romance would follow. Two and half months have come and gone and yet Janie sees no ships on the horizon. Granny sits her down to a granny lecture that long preceded the Tina Turner “mislove” tune “What’s Love Got to Do with It.” Granny reminds her that Logan is the only big black shot in town; he has “a big house bought and paid for and sixty acres uh land rights on de big road.” Granny identifies “Dis love” as what gets black women down. Black women get hung up on this thing called love. This love gets them pulling and hauling and sweating and working from sunrise to sundown with nothing to show for it. Granny dismisses this love of being in love with love as a prerequisite for marriage and forcefully opts for economic security. She says she knows what Janie wants. Janie wants “some dressed up dude dat got to look at de sole of his shoe everytime he cross de street tuh see whether he got enough leather dere tuh make it across.” Note the shoe-time metaphor, the kind Achebe’s Ikem references when in Anthills of the Savannah he defines the role of a writer. In Chapter 9 (the chapter on Joe’s funeral), we find older Janie reflecting on her life, shortly after the death of her second husband Joe Starks, the town’s mayor, a hardworking, dynamic, prosperous, but very sexist man/husband. The novel picks up the ship metaphor at the beginning of the novel. The narrator says, Janie had been getting ready for her great journey to the horizons in search of people; it was important to all the world that she should find them and they find her. But she had been whipped like a cur dog, and run off down a back road after things (Hurston 89).

The novel’s italicized words people and things suggest the people versus things, a vital relationship already implied in the novel’s opening paragraph. Only as people do relationships matter, not as things. Janie wants people,


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seeks people but only people on horizons. She wants people on ships on the horizon. She does not want ships on the dock, ships with only things, ships with just goods, ships with only dogs. Horizons have no end or ends. Horizons tantalize. The narrator adds, perception depends on perspective and as such “Some people could look at a mud-puddle and see an ocean with ships.” Janie accuses Nanny (her maternal grandmother), of seeking ships with just things and as such misappropriating the horizon, Nanny had taken the biggest thing God ever made, the horizon – for no matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you – and pinched it in to such a little bit of a thing that she could tie it about her granddaughter’s neck tight enough to choke her (Hurston 89).

The narrator continues, Janie “hated the old woman who had twisted her so in the name of love. Most humans didn’t love one another nohow, and this mislove was so strong that even common blood couldn’t overcome it all the time” (Hurston 89). Janie calls “mislove” her grandmother’s insistence on economic security at the expense of romance. Janie privileges romantic love. Janie’s life with Tea Cake, her third and last husband, the rabies-ridden one she kills in self-defense, seems the least sexist. But he too becomes a dog and ends like a dog. In Chapter 20, the last chapter, Janie details to her best friend Pheoby, the lessons of love on the horizon or of love as horizon, So Ah’m back home agin and Ah’m satisfied tuh be heah. Ah done been tuh de horizon and back now Ah kin set heah in mah house and live by comparisons. Dis house ain’t so absent of things lak it used tuh be befo’ Tea Cake come along. It’s full of thoughts, specially dat bedroom.

She then identifies some lessons about life and love, love ain’t somethin’ lak uh grindstone dat’s de same thing everywhere and do de same thing tuh everything it touch. Love is lak de sea. It’s uh movin’ thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from the shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore (Hurston 191).

“Pheoby,” says Jane, you got tuh go there tuh know there. Yo’ papa and yo mama and nobody else can’t tell yuh and show yuh. Two things everybody’s got tuh find fuh theyselves. They got tu go tuh God, and the got tuh find out about livin’ fuh theyselves (Hurston 192).

In Chapter 2 where “Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone,” she also notes that “Doom and dawn was in the branches” (8). The branches of trees, like other branches of being change or die. The roots of being persist like ships on the horizon. In Section 15 of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche accuses Socrates of initiating “a profound illusion”: “the unshakable faith that thought, using the thread of causality, can penetrate the deepest abysses of being, and that

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thought is capable not only of knowing being but of correcting it” (Nietzsche 95). He then asserts that “This sublime metaphysical illusion accompanies science as an instinct and leads science again and again to its limits at which it must turn into art – which is really the aim of this mechanism” (Nietzsche 95–96). In this telescopic statement, I locate what probably most motivates all of Nietzsche’s philosophy, especially his notion of eternal recurrence of the same, which he first specifies in Joyful Science and tries to demonstrate in Part 4 of his philosophical novel Zarathustra. Nietzsche sees nihilism in this Socratic theoretical optimism. Earlier in The Birth (Section 14), after reviewing the following Socratic maxim: “Virtue is knowledge; man sins only from ignorance; he who is virtuous is happy,” Nietzsche argues that these three forms of optimism without warrant insist on “a necessary, visible connection between virtue and knowledge, faith and morality” (Nietzsche 91). Thousands of years have gone and no new nature of nature, only new forms of being. Nihilism belongs to a nihilistic theoretical optimism; rebellion belongs to hope, a hope in accord with the fallible nature of humans, which as Nietzsche suggests in Beyond Good and Evil, remains undetermined and perhaps undeterminable. Camus’ concept of rebellion, Achebe’s notion of re-form, Emerson’s temporality of circles, Ellison’s spiral temporality, Hurston’s horizon temporality, and Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal return of the same point toward a non-teleological temporality. University of Nebraska REFERENCES Chinua Achebe (1988) Anthills of the Savannah. 1987. New York: Anchor Press. Albert Camus (1954) The Rebel. 1951. Trans. Anthony Bower. New York: Vintage. Ralph Ellison (1993) Invisible Man. 1952. New York: Vintage. Ralph Emerson (1957) Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Stephen E. Whicher. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Zora Neale Hurston (1999) Their Eyes Were Watching God. 1937. New York: Harper Perennial Classics. Friedrich Nietzsche (2000) The Birth of Tragedy. In Basic Writings of Nietzsche. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Modern Library.

PIOTR MROZ

THE CONFLICTING WORLD-VIEWS OF THE TRADITIONAL AND THE MODERNIST NOVEL

It has been generally agreed – since the rise of philosophically oriented aesthetic theory in Ancient Greece and Rome – that any authentic work of art (irrespective of its genre) has definite goals to achieve. The so-called classical theory of art underscored such values – pursued by genuine, high art – as unity, truth, and beauty. These three “transcendentals” were embedded – as it were – or still better, “reflected” in the very ontological structure (that is, a form) and a subject-matter (a content) of various artworks. Recalling this basic assumption of axiological theory of art is only to make us aware that most of the changes in artistic paradigms, all sorts of avant-garde revolutions and upheavals, started from the questioning of established value–core of art and works of art belonging to an earlier period which was to be “transcended” and overcome. Bearing the abovementioned assumptions in mind, one can rightly assume that this axiological rule can be applied to such a literary genre as novels. As works of art they are subject to this value transformation and a paradigm change. It goes without saying that there have been, and still are many, often mutually exclusive, ways of understanding the very essence of novels. Soon after the rise of this genre (the 18th century, England) novels were unanimously treated as a literary, fictional presentation (or representation) of real events. Moreover, it was a strict aesthetic rule that they should preserve and expose a close correspondence with the real world, whatever the latter might have meant. Even some differences in understanding of the nature of novels did not prevent certain authors as well as literary critics from regarding them as a specific kind of instrument. Thus, as unique literary genre, novels made their contribution to a general world–view in its aesthetic (axiological), philosophical and social aspect. According to such 20th century theoreticians like Dibelius, Propp, Geiger, Ingarden, or philosophers – aestheticians like Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Goldman, Lukacs, literary critics like Daiches, Elleman, Naganowski or artists like Kundera, Broch and Canetti – to mention but some of the most prominent ones – early novels 129 A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana LXXXVI, 129–142. © 2007 Springer.

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depended heavily (and to some extent they still do) on their unique, inimitable technique (narration) which was geared up with a description of a given reality they tried to represent. Such technical devices as the plot structure, the presentation of space and time, the manner the characters are shown to us – readers – make it possible for a novel to come into its intentional being. It is a generally accepted opinion that the early novels as well as the later, great realistic tradition of the 19th century literature viewed from the subject matter and the narration technique reveal strong and close relations with the transcendent reality. In other words, novels – as those specific instruments – were supposed and expected to reflect (in the most faithful and detailed manner) the surrounding world and various characters acting in it. During the early period of the novel’s existence and presence in Europe, the presented world–view offered by such pioneer writers like Fielding, Smollet, Defoe, Swift, Richardson, Goldsmith or even iconoclastic Sterne (enfant terrible of English letters) was based on what one may justly refer to as a generally agreed standard, to resort to a famous phrase of Daiches. It was the regular, predictable and established reality and even if some phenomena turned out to be of inexplicable and unknown, cruel or alien nature there was a definite hope that one day they would be justified and accounted for at least by artistic means. Like in the renowned concept of the Great Chain of Being, every element in the universe (human beings included) was supposed to occupy its appointed position, not to be challenged or menaced by some unfortunate and accidental circumstances. The aforenamed agreed standard applied both to the objective and subjective side of the world, and those two aspects of reality had to be taken into account by all writers. This “silent” assumption (a kind of thought idiom of the time) meant nothing else but the characteristic trait of the Rieglean Kunstwollen, which can be formulated as follows: the world–view (the metaphysical message to use another term) articulated in the literary production of the time was always based on and made up out of events and characters corresponding to the real texture of a presented (represented) reality. From this point of view (this aesthetic and philosophical paradigm), the initial material of a literary vision, that is, the World itself, seemed to be a rational structure (though not known in all aspects) ever pointing to its Creator: the ultimate reason and ground of all existence. Thus every entity, its essence and its purpose, its relations with other entities, could be explained and justified in terms of something necessary in the Great Chain of Being. The first European novelists assumed a God–like position in relation to their fictional, intentional worlds. They equipped themselves with vast, often unlimited knowledge of “the Past”, “the Present”, and “the Future”. Being the creators of their own worlds, their unique universe, they wanted to imitate the

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omniscient, all-powerful God. But at the same time they wanted to imitate the given (real) world as if everything could have been known and learnt about it or at least about the parts they took up to describe. It goes without saying that the relation of the author (the creator of unique world) with his audience had to be grounded in a natural and mutually understandable act of communication. In other words, both authors and the reading public (members of the same society, the same historical and socioeconomic formation, to use the Marxian term) resorted to an unanimously shared, accepted (or rejected, as the case might be) and understood set of opinions, views, fears, hopes and expectations – this easily recognizable stock of beliefs and truths which in turn constitutes the common world-view. The writer, as a special individual endowed with stature, acted as an impartial just, unbiased but omniscient judge towards his characters like God – the creator of the real universe in relation to his world. By resorting to (or still better through invention of) certain narrative devices the early novelists always knew what would happen with or to his characters, what kind of action, choices, resolutions would be most suitable and fortunate for them. It did not really matter whether the characters depicted (shown in their daily routine, everyday situations, their thriving industries, marriages, births and deaths) were free or not, could act on their own, realizing their rights. What really counted was the author’s plan – God–like plan of a stable, purposeful but fictional Universe. Their violent passions (one can see a constant and growing psychologization of the European novel) were not to thwart their projects and aims. The characters – their life and destination – were predictable for they themselves as well as their creators lived in a stable and regular place. On the other hand, the author’s attitude to his characters embraced all that was indicated in terms of public knowledge. In brief: men (writers, their audience and the depicted characters) existed in a social, religious, cultural and economic world which appeared to be real. Moreover, this correlation between the internal (that is, the psychological sphere of human existence: thoughts, feelings, passions etc.) and the external, transcendent one, between the sphere of axiology – morality and religion and the human development assumed inevitably the character of something taken for granted. This world–view motif, ever present in 18th and 19th century literature, is said to be one of the most characteristic traits of the realistic and the naturalistic literature (although in the 19th century letters the idea of God as the raison d’être of everything was to be somewhat limited). Many philosophers of art, critics and theoreticians have underlined the fact (eg. Hauser in his monumental work devoted to art and society) that the European novel (particularly the English literary production) was a distinctive product of the upper-middle class. No wonder that novels pointed

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to this rigid, constant and commonly approved of set of views on God, society, science, philosophy containing ideas which in turn explained the place and role of every individual, his/her career, limits of their personal development and possible (that is permitted) goals or aims. This – to use Goldman’s term – sociologie du roman can be easily traced as an all–pervasive element both in the sphere of the subject matter and the writer’s narrative devices. Such writers as Goethe, Turgenev, Prus, Dostoyevski, Melville, Dickens, Thackeray, Hardy, Eliot, time and again resort to the concept of unified and rationally explicable world, and – in the form of its approval or its criticism – artistically used it in their works. Thus it cannot be denied that the artistic as well as the moral task of the realistic, “traditional” writers (as they will be referred to in the 20th century) is conceived of in terms of revealing (often “denuding” and divulging) the essential and genuine – in a word – metaphysical structure of reality. Let us recall once again the basic assumption that the transcendent world – regarded by writers as the building block of all artistic endeavors – is governed by (in this vision of the world) immutable, universal laws and regulations having a definite origin as well as the final aim. If – as the case was with the 19th century critics of the established order – the realist writers decided to choose such themes and subjects as social injustice, class inequalities, all kinds of wrongdoing, crimes, unrealized projects and the destruction of values, they did so in order to condemn such deviations from the universal, metaphysical norm. Poverty, human suffering, abuse and death cannot be regarded as something “natural”, something fully justifiable within the ontological and axiological structure of the world. This apparently naive and uncritical stance is closely related with widely (commonly) accepted views while writers are seen as those who must give the definite, articulate form to them. There is – they seem to say in their works – a kind of guarantee of such an order of things. Be it God, History, Universal Law, Sciences, Humanity or Mankind – the sources and grounds of all our knowledge, power, possibilities but our duties as well. Similarly, the human character (an inhabitant of such a reality) had to be endowed with a constant nature, definite essence. It is true that some of the prominent representatives of the great, realistic tradition may have differed in so far as human nature (revealed by the narrative structure, by the very texture of artistically transformed events and situations) was concerned. That it was imparted to all of us, to every individual was hardly questionable. That it was to be brought to its fullest potential was a moral rule (norm). In other words, a rational, morally oriented, free (up to certain limits) individual was supposed to realize his/her eidos – the individual element of all Mankind. Inversly – as one can see in Dostoyevski, Hardy, Balzac and Stendhal – a


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human being (often in extreme situations, under inhumane circumstances) was designated by an artist to defend this humanity. All in all, a human character depicted in realistic novels deemed it his/her task to follow this essence – that is, to act as if it were center of all meaning and significance. The remarkable characters of 18th and 19th century novels (Tom Jones, Pamela, Captain Ahab, Raskolnikov, Rastignac, Julien Sorel, Oblomov) are all presented against the background of human society: its values, norms and – a very important factor – its institutions. Moreover, they lived, worked, fought, expressed their views and opinions, took care of their children and finally passed away only as the representatives of the collective consciousness indicative of an established set of values and norms. Thus any breach of the implied norm (ethical, moral, religious, cultural or social) governing the complicated, intricate process of adaptation of every individual to an overall status might threaten an established order. Under no circumstances could the latter become prey to any form of disturbance. Society as such, along with its most prominent members (and one cannot underrate the fact that writers were highly thought of in that time) were obliged to react immediately in the most effective way. Hence all traditionalists (the realistic writers) – as Sartre once aptly remarked – engaged themselves in this great cause: the defence of stable order based on truth, justice, unity and order. The most typical representatives of the traditional novel were all ready to accept the idea of a stable and hierarchic society, the belief which – they seemed to claim – was shared by their reading public. Depicting the way the society functioned, the writers did not avoid the presentation of all kinds of changes, which might – as a matter of fact – influence both the society as such and particular individuals. The proverbial Stendhalian mirror strolling through the streets (which stood for any good, realistic novel) was supposed to reflect the totality (or at least a substantial part of it) in order to produce a veridical picture of life, nature, society in the widest understanding of those terms. Such was the expression of a sense of belonging to and being a part of one, unified world. Such was the overwhelming feeling evoked by the 18th and 19th century novels. No wonder that long (by our aesthetic standards of today, tediously long), multivolumed chronicles, family sagas, were trying to grasp the living substance of life in its multifarious aspects, in its panoramic vision. It is only natural that this artistic model of reality imposed certain technical solutions, certain plot structures, character presentation as well as a specific treatment of fictional time and space. All those, so to speak, narration components so vital to the structure of every novel were to comply with the sanctioned maxim (rule) of verisimilitude. Dealing with a life, situations, with all the significant circumstances in which the character showed himself/herself, the writers did

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not omit anything that might have been important to our understanding of the depicted world and characters’ actions. Hence – according to this rule of a strict correspondence with the transcendent world – the writers (apart from “sticking to” all those norms and values constituting the world-view) had to observe the chronological order of events. The latter – so vividly present in all kinds of so-called Bildungsroman – was the main technical solution in so far as the beloved progression motif was concerned. The writers were to be true to the surrounding reality, they had to show the “whole” revealing itself in a certain (natural and logical) order. In other words, the realistic, traditional novels attempted at presenting an exact display of all elements, relations, interdependencies, mutual influences of all factors, which made the artistic vision probable and convincing. Thus the proper selection of the initial material was thought to be essential and binding for all those who wanted to be perfect narrators of the reality. Analogously to the real world, its representation in the form of artistic fiction (the novel) was supposed to start at some point in time and after some passage (a probable and veridical flow of the fictional, but resembling the real time) to reach its end. (The latter was the renowned concept of dénouement, the fruitful moment in which all problems, conflicts, all projects, hopes, expectations are logically and rationally settled.) Such a finale was always true to the promise made at the very beginning of almost every traditional, realistic novel – a work of art complying to an established world-view. In other words, such was the unbreachable principle, aesthetic and moral. The writers could not present all phenomena and events in an indiscriminate way. They selected and concentrated on what they thought and believed to be significant in the life of the society and individuals they chose as their subject matter. Both the latter, along with the manner of narration, were in agreement with the commonly shared and variously manifested official world-view. The moment when this publicly shared significance was no longer felt to exist – as Daiches puts it – and could not be depended on, was the time when a new type of novel came into being, bringing about the dramatic changes affecting its form and contents (subject-matter). It would be impossible to present all the reasons for those dramatic changes that have made the 20th century novel such a different phenomenon from its 18th and 19th century counterparts. I am of the opinion that unless some of the elements of the social and cultural (rather civilization) background are presented, one would be never able to understand the nature of modern, contemporary fiction. What we are referring to here is this unique mutual link – some call it a set of feedbacks – between culture and social life. It is a mere platitude to state that cultural world is influenced by all sorts of


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ideas and concepts which attempt at enlightening vast spheres of political, social and economic life, while the latter, to a greater or a lesser extent, inform and affect all we – as members and creators of a given cultural formation – know and can learn by taking advantage of those ideas and concepts. That the realistic novel was a strong expression of such feedbacks cannot be denied. But what about the modern novel? One should bear in mind that the ubiquitous, ideological and philosophical paradigm (of which the traditional, realistic novel was an articulate and sonorous expression) of the 18th and 19th century was mainly based on the optimistic world-view, deeply rooted in the philosophy of English Empiricism, French Enlightenment and then the ideas of Positivism and Scientific Naturalism. The pervasive mood (if one is permitted to use such a personalistic term) of those explanatory paradigms was that of almost unlimited faith in God and Reason, in human faculties, in immutable and unfailing laws of nature. These paradigms collapsed totally when hitherto unthought of, unimaginable tragic events proved – with all their force and might – the contrary. What was supposed to be governed by Reason, Providence, Law cruelly revealed the domain of Evil, the Irrational and Inhumane. Hence, the first decades of the 20th century witnessed a feeling of moral duty to reject all positivistic visions of reality, to question the results of science. In a word, the transcendent world could not be taken for granted any more. Put differently, this Phenomenon of all phenomena, the ultimate reason of all beings (God or Nature), the set of immutable laws and essences which enabled us to cherish our hopes for a better life and bright future was smashed to myriads of pieces. The First World War, the Russian Revolution, the rise of totalitarian regimes all brought about horrible bloodshed, the carnage of millions of innocents, shattered human faith in what was once the solid basis of all our projects and endevours. Since no justification could be provided for such atrocious events, new ways of understanding, a new axiological basis had to be sought. This state of far-reaching, all–embracing intellectual, moral and, of course, artistic uncertainty soon led to a complete, thorough going revolution of all previous convictions and truths. The concept of a correspondence of the transcendent reality (in its many aspects) with all our intellectual endevours was utterly rejected. No established, certain or uniform method of approach could be thought of. The human position was weakened to a great extent. Moreover, such new philosophical ideas – as la durée of Bergson – revealed a new, non-chronological aspect of our experience of time; Freudian teaching stressed the role of unconsciousness, thus depriving human beings of their pride as rational entities endowed with almost unlimited powers to rule over reality, the idea of dehumanization and the premonition of the rule of the mass-man destroying the artistic ideal

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of High Culture (Ortega y Gasset), the ruthless communist Machiavellism of Lenin and Trotsky, phenomenology and existentialism – all changed our vision of the Universe. It goes without saying that the aforementioned ideas must have had a great influence (and indeed they did) on all kinds of art – visual and literary. In one word, the depicted (but now the very term did not mean anything) world did not appear to be a complete, comprehensible unity or totality for there were too many alien and inexplicable elements in it. Moreover, as the visual arts were apt to grasp and expose, the world “took on” strange, horrible qualities (due to the change of our concept of e.g. beauty). So an established and age-long idea of beauty as a geometric, proportional and rational, harmonious form was soon superseded by a more dramatic and expressive concept of it. Dada, the Surrealists, the German Expressionists, Picasso, Chagall, Braque, Klee, Ronault matched well with the revolutionary works in the domain of new literature represented by Joyce, Woolf, Broch, Butor, Dos Passos, Döblin, Richardson. The common motif of their artistic endevours was based on the idea that art constituted its own, unique and inimitable sphere. In other words, art went beyond reality and was an autonomous region with its own values and laws. Since there was no one world (the artists learned very quickly that new theories of physics – Einstin’s relativity, Bohr’s concept of the atom, Heisenberg’s law of indeterminacy – presented the vision of the world as a phenomenon of completely unpredictable, unstable and unknowable nature; it did not make any sense whatsoever even to try to imitate or represent it in terms of this rigid and rational correspondence. As the consequence of this new world-view the idea of art being related to reality and vice versa turned out to be quite preposterous. What was art supposed to describe, to relate itself to the moment nothing (either in the objective or the subjective region of reality) could be taken for granted? As might be rightly assumed, the vehement rejection of all norms, laws, values – commonly shared and observed – the annihilation of once effective and powerful institutions making our social and cultural life safe, led to a destruction of former, traditional approaches with which the realistic art in general and the “old” novel in particular were associated. But the realm of art is indestructible, it has some traits of immortality. It cannot be easily defeated and it cannot confine itself to a kind of vacuum. Art must act, must express itself for it belongs to the most essential traits of human nature. If one conception of it – although a very old one, even sanctified by tradition – fails, then another one must come into being, replacing the former one. So the early decades of the 20th century saw the birth of a completely changed and altered novel. If the orthotes-like links with reality were thought impossible, then one had to start anew. First, it seemed necessary to introduce


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drastic changes into the way we “spoke”, “narrated” the world. The new novel was revolutionized by the very linguistic means, new codes of signs in order to be able to express itself in an unhampered, totally free manner. If the transcendent reality was deprived of stable qualities, the language for its description had to match with this new state of affairs. The experiments of Dada, the Surrealists, the Russian poets (Chlebnikov), Stein, Joyce and Broch must be recalled here, for it was they who – using the new language instead of the worn-out linguistic items – tried to create a unique, purely artistic reality. The once unquestionable rule of selection (so characteristic of the traditional fiction) lost its validity in this respect as well. On what grounds, for what reasons is this selection to be carried about? Why must we – seemed to ask the modern writers – imitate the everyday, ordinary ways of communication? Hence, their readers might have been shocked by those linguistic innovations, all those lexical items, the broken rules of grammar which were there to direct one to a new and often strange, alien regions of reality. Apparently, the very language of literary expression reminded one of the everyday experiences but in actual fact it far surpassed them. It seems (and that was the artistic intention of the modernists) that the liberated language was not to play a denotative function any more. (For instance, in Ulysses there are so many newly coined words that sometimes it is impossible to get the right sense of them.) All in all, the first revolution brought about the next stages in the development of the modern novel. The new concept of the transcendent reality – the existential milieu of men – soon showed new possibilities for its representation. It was a group of Anglo-Saxon writers (already mentioned here) who discovered, so to speak, yet another trait of the world treated as initial material for their artistic endevours. Since the world could not be realistically described (veridically, that is), it did not make any sense even to try to attempt to show it as a united, stable, rational and logical structure. Instead of focussing on the selected (as we already know, the rule of significative selection was of the utmost importance) parts of the rational (governed by immutable laws) whole, the modernists shattered the latter into multifarious elements, relations, but soon discovered that “things”, phenomena, are connected, related with each other in the way the old, traditional writers could not have dreamed of. That was to be real, genuine totality, requiring – it goes without saying – new methods of artistic treatment. No wonder that such narrative devices like handling space and time had to undergo a dramatic change, too. (Incidentally, that was the most important innovation introduced in this literary genre.) It is well known that the timing of the structure in the 18th and 19th century novels was supposed (such was the rigid rule) to be probable, “life-like”. When the

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realist writers described a series of events, situations, they were obsessively careful to observe and preserve their temporal logic, to use Russel’s term. “A” – as a significant event, situation, a particular circumstance (all involving the world of nature and that of human beings, characters) once inserted in the structure of “happening”, “occurring” – was either a cause or an effect. This logico–ontological status imposed a definite timing upon the event. “A” as a cause had to precede something, while “B” as an effect had to follow it. This strict, rigid, ever linear sequence of events was the raison d’être of a rational vision of the world as we find it in the traditional novels. Nothing of this kind is to be found in the modernists. The sensation, experience of unfamiliarity, strangeness and alienation is prevalent in modern fiction. In brief: the modern novel rejects such a linear timing, breaking the realistic presentation of time and space. As there is no progression in so far as the “life”, existence of characters is concerned, the reader is simply baffled by this unusual handling of time. Ulysses embraces only 16 hours and its size as a “novel” may be shocking by more traditional standards. As a matter of fact the main characters (if one may apply such an evaluative term here) Bloom, Stephen, Mulligan, Molly, are not presented in terms of events they take part in, but by letting us, readers, directly experience their thoughts, feelings, sensations, states of consciousness and free associations (a similar presentation is seen in Alexanderplatz (Döblin), Blue Voyage (Aiken), Petersbourg (Bely) or in Dos Passos’ Trilogy). The point is that these writers – intending to get to the heart of the very reality, not mediated by rigid concepts and ideas of the official world–view – reject either an objective or a subjective perspective. They want to create “real” novels, not realistic chronicles or psychological diaries. Thus the modernist writers locate themselves (and their characters) in “the middle” which – they hoped – would embrace, encompass a totality far surpassing the actual world. What we experience while reading their novels is a fluid, floating structure of time as all borders, limits, arbitrary divisions (that was the Past, this is the Now, that will be the Future) are simply annihilated. In a word, time has no rigid and strict nature defined by definite points. Joyce in Ulysses “moves at least on” three temporal planes: the actual time of the novel itself, the Homeric one (ever present and felt in the narrative structure), and the mythological one (recalling the deepest part of the whole mankind). Those temporal planes (like in any of the modernist novels) co-exist with one another, similar to the various elements of the fictional reality. The modernist novelist does not care at all if such a presentation corresponds with the real world. Art is beyond life and artists are in no way obliged to imitate it. This claim to originality on the part of modernists influenced the way they presented the plot. Suffice it to say that it is impossible to speak of


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plot structures in terms of e.g. the progression we witness in the traditional novels. In the works of the writers we have already referred to there is hardly a constant point of reference. Instead of linear progression of both the life (the character is not shown stage by stage, so to speak) and the texture of events, a different (from the traditional one) sense of time emerges. It is so strongly opposed, if not blatantly contradictory to our idea of clock-time that the first readers of Joyce, Woolf or Dos Passos and, later on, Faulkner must have simply felt totally disoriented. For instance, we are used to a “natural”, ordinary sequence of both time and events. In the modernists – since all temporal planes have been “mixed up”, mingled with one another – there is nothing to remind us of ordinary experiences. No “yardstick”, in the form of strict, exact measurement, can be applied. The time of the clocks has been superseded by an amorphous, inter-subjective, universal anti-time. According to the modernists this newly introduced concept of human temporality (not to be reduced to mere subjectivism) was better equipped to render reality into an artistic vision which in turn stood closer to the real nature of men. As no strict time limits were imposed, as no arbitrary selection of presented moments was offered to the reader, the latter – along with the characters – might have been led far back into the region of the Past of the Past (e.g. Faulkner and Simon), or quite to the contrary, “pushed forward” (e.g. Dos Passos). In other words – as is seen in Joyce and Woolf – this all-embracing, universal time of the Past – the Present – the Future is able to display the real importance, the real significance of events and the sense of one’s existence. Something that happened 30 years ago may be more important (and is still present) to Mrs. Dalloway than that which occurred 30 minutes ago. Moreover, the significance of the past event is all pervading now. It is ever-present and probably will “always” be (in her existence). It seems that we, human beings – the modernists claim – are subject to all types, all kinds of time; we are not doomed to live and act in the actual present. In brief – as the fantasmagorical episodes in Ulysses show – past as well as future events may have priority over the “now” permeating, as it were, the texture and fabric of our reality. This extraordinary, if not uncanny, totally unrealistic structuring of time and space influencing the handling of plot patterns and the very narration made the readers of that period revise their views concerning the world they happened to live in. Not only is the latter unknownable and mysterious, it is also endowed with such qualities and traits that require unique methods to depict them and bring it closer to us. New narration seemed to be such a method (way) for us to access this reality. The general Kunstwollen of the modernist novel appears quite understandable in a wider cultural and civilizational context. The moment the rationalistic (positivistic) world-view collapsed (as not being capable of

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presenting a satisfactory explanation and justification of the world) it was necessary to replace it with a revaluated vision of the world. That is why the 20th century writers (whom we refer to as the modernists) did not want to resort to once commonly shared views, for such convictions and beliefs (reflected in the traditional novels) did not express the real dimension of the reality. Paradoxically enough, limiting themselves to a tiny part, a section of the actual world to be presented in a couple of hours, such writers like Joyce, Woolf, Dos Passsos reached something that may be called the Universe of human (individual’s) thoughts, feelings and projects. The modernists did not promise a lot (as the old writers did – giving so little in the final effect) but by experimenting with the narrative structure, rejecting the realistic, imitative way of writing they gave almost everything. So the introduction of a new model of time and space was also responsible for a new handling and character presentation. It would be an unjust oversimplification to say that the modernists chose the subjective pole solely. Their main assumption was: like the transcendent world a human being has no prior to his/her existence, nature or essence to be realized or brought to fruition under some sort of metaphysical guidance. As there were no immutable laws of nature, likewise there was no human essence. Moreover, the old view presented in the novels of 18th and 19th century writers that an individual was so sharply opposed to the world has been changed as well. True, as members of some society the characters of the modern novels are supposed to perform some sort of social, cultural roles and functions. But they are shown as free, independent agents. Circumstances may be against them but nevertheless such characters as Bloom, Mrs. Dalloway, Joe (in Dos Passos) feel as if they were a part of the whole world or the universal human community. As time flows in many directions so does the individual’s nature (be it his/her soul or a set of acquired traits – his or her individuality proper). As time is understood as a continuous, multidirectional flow rather than a series of separate points (a kind of the Bergsonian la durée, the Jamesonian continuity of consciousness) there is no plot – as we have already mentioned – carrying the characters forward from moment to moment in a precise chronological sequence. Translating this into the issues concerning the nature (individuality) of human beings, one may add that they – as subject to the time change – desperately try to grasp – “pinpoint” as it were – both the sense of temporality as well as their nature having being deprived of any form of substantiality. For there is no “I”, no “me”. Likewise there is no definite past, now or future. Thus by the law of the phenomenological intentionality (consciousness is always a consciousness of something) – whose purport the modernists seem to have understood very well – our nature is being constituted under unpredictable


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circumstances. Being conscious of the transcendent world is just the same as being conscious of one’s existence. This assumption prompts the modern writers to show intersecting streams of consciousness probing deeply into the past of individuals’ experiences through presenting the full texture of their present awareness of events. Moreover, it is the individual’s loneliness (let us recall Mrs. Dalloway and Bloom trying to identify themselves with other members of the society) which makes every man the inhabitant of his/her own private consciousness, his/her train of associations. The latter – uniquely “owned” by individuals – are not compatible with others’ vision of the world. The former belief (so strongly, almost obsessively self-imposed upon the realist writers and their technique of narration) in an existence of a set, uniform, commonly accepted norms and values could no longer serve as the philosophical or ideological background or, still better, justification of novelists’ presentation of the world. What could a modern novel describe in order to give a true testimony to a human situation? Having rejected the idea of “exact”, “veridical”, “convincing”, “realistic” presentation of the so-called “life” or “nature”, the modern writer equipped with the new narration tools (the re-evaluated concept of time and space, the stream of consciousness technique) chose apparently insignificant events, tiny shards of the shattered Stendhalian mirror, but manages to reach the universal dimension all the same. It cannot be denied that in Joyce, Woolf, Biely and Döblin the characters are haunted by private thoughts, but it is absolutely true that this sphere of privacy (bordering on the loneliness we have already spoken of), this innermost structure of individual consciousness does reflect the more universal aspect of the world. Let us add that the different idea of the world (from that cherished by the traditional writers) made it possible to scrutinize more aptly modern experiences and human relations. The writers in question soon found out that all social conventions are empty and mechanical in nature, bearing no genuine relationship to the inner existence of men. In such works as Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, The Trial, The Big Money we see a dramatic search for means of communicating with others. Mrs. Dalloway, for instance, wants to bring people together similarly to Bloom, who wants to establish paternal relations with his would-be son Stephen Dedalus. But all their attempts turn out in the end to be futile. Human beings occupy their own space and time, they are in a cocoon-like covering making all communication impossible. However, there is – thanks to a newly discovered vision of the artistically transformed reality – a glimmer of hope. In the literary works of Joyce, Döblin, Woolf the introduction of the concept of the prolonged Present helped to come upon the mysterious fullness of life – a fullness the traditional writers could have never reached. The realists never did mange to grasp the truth concerning human

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life, which was to be found in both the correspondence of the deliverances of intentional consciousness with external reality and the mystical moments. (Let us recall the moving scene of Septimus’ suicidal death having been reflected in Mrs. Dalloway’s night vision.) It is not the worn-out egotistical self, personalized “I” or “me”, but rather “one” described as a conscious state, a kind of organic, totalistically conceived-of whole that creates its own unique reality around it. There is no use summing people up (as there is no sense in living by the belief in chronological temporality) because the motion of the constant, universal human nature, which is to be realized by all of us, is no longer valid. Life is a kind of everyday process of being in the world and with the world and with the others. It is dynamic, mysterious, unpredictable and it cannot be reduced to static forms preferred by the traditional writers. Thus having been freed from the tyranny of the old narrative devices, the modern novel presented the vision of an all inclusive though modest and small kind of a real Universe. Jagiellonski University, Krakow

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TOWARDS THE INFINITE MEMORY Philip Larkin’s Collected Poems and Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour

Being contemporaries, Philip Larkin (1922–1985) and Molly Keane (1904–1995) could not have avoided the influences of the same general historical and cultural climate under which they developed their own literary styles and personal messages, chosen to express a variety of ideas, which sometimes overlap, and are sometimes different.1 Having as a background a history of Western thought, particularly the modern aesthetic streams of the second half of the twentieth century – ranging from modernism to the deconstruction of post-structuralism – Larkin and Keane share a common ground of feelings of negativism, nihilism, alienation and atheism. Expressing themselves in the different mediums or literary genres of poetry and the novel, respectively, Larkin and Keane use the relation between the past and the present as a symbol that connects the text and the complex possibilities of its interpretation. Their work reveals that they both navigate a search for the soul through the aspects of their chosen genre. In Larkin’s case, it is the force of the poetry and, in his case, its absence of conventional metaphors and its use of colloquialisms. In Keane’s case, it is the novel, and the use of irony and abjection. However, the significance of the unspoken language contained in the work of both authors points towards their encounter with semiology, an almost Derridian principle of deconstruction of the text, with its embedded signs and symbols. Each of these signs or symbols contains a certain meaning, and within it, its own opposition. The symbols, although seemingly absent, actually create present time, and the interplay of the absence and the presence creates new meaning. Each present moment exists in its private relation to a past as its own opposite and continuation, also forming the uninterrupted flow towards the future, as seen in Larkin’s poem “Disintegration”: Time running beneath the pillow wakes Lovers entrained who in the name of love Were promised the steeples and fanlights of a dream;

143 A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana LXXXVI, 143–153. © 2007 Springer.

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TATJANA DESPOTOVIC Joins the renters of each single room Across the tables to observe a life Dissolving in the acid of their sex; Time that scatters hair upon a head Spreads the ice sheet on the shaven lawn; Singing an annual permit for the frost Ploughs the stubble in the land at last To introduce the unknown to the known And only by politeness make them breed; Time over the roofs of what has nearly been Circling, a migratory, static bird, Predicts no change in future’s lancing shape, And daylight shows the streets still tangled up; Time points the simian camera in the head Upon confusion to be seen and seen. (C. P., 1942)

Here, time, as an ultimate symbol of the finite, overcomes the personal sorrows of fallen love and other human failures and alters “over the roofs of what has nearly been” with immeasurable infinity. The definition of time as a “simian camera in the head” takes the reader back to an encounter with unconscious mind, disappearing into the ambiguity of primordial images of a collective past where the images of inborn intuitions are stored. The multiple levels of meaning in poetic language also match some aspects expressed in Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1960). Saussure’s language analysis shows the example of the complexity of linguistic signs contained in language, which are profoundly psychological and work on a principle of associations and mental comparisons of opposites. In Keane’s opus, a similar simulation of the present or reality follows through the flow of the stream of Aroon’s consciousness. The symbols of abjection are usually altered, and then transformed from organic meaning into the unconscious and then again back into reality. This is shown in a moment of demystification when Aroon, paging through a glossy magazine, finds the picture announcing the engagement of her beloved Richard to somebody else, and all her dreams are drowned in a second: Not tears, but pain, seized on me, my insides griping and loosening. The absolute need of getting to the lavatory possessed me. Even my terrible distress had to find this absurd necessity. As I walked carefully down the long, warm room, I had the idea that the light had changed like a short winter afternoon, and the room and my life were both spread with sand and salt. (G.B., 208)2

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This moment symbolizes reality with the lost past and lost future. It consists of the variety of facts, which the extract of text shown does not contain (the history of Aroon and Richard’s relationship and her hopes of them getting married). These facts, which are not present, could be perceived as existing in opposition to depicted things. Larkin and Keane’s philosophy of life starts with hidden despair and points to the signs of the struggle and possible fall of modern civilisation. Looking at both authors from a psychoanalytical perspective, the dimension of the unconscious gains an even stronger meaning. As in the post-Freudian psychoanalysis of Carl Gustav Jung or Jacques Lacan, consciousness speaks through the dreams, metaphors and symbols of the subject. Larkin’s poetry and Keane’s prose meet in that unconscious level where the symbolic of waiting is translated into unfulfilled desires and defeats in the battle of living in this world, governed by civilized manners. Conscious of her intense pain after the humiliation, Aroon experiences in learning of Richard’s engagement, for example, she acknowledges: I would take it [the pain] home with me, and go to bed with it, and suffer it always, for it would never change. I knew. Grief possessed me, but I must behave. (G.B., 209)

Fragile sentiments of the soul are too inadequate to be expressed in the normative and artificially created social situations. Both authors appear to be trying to convey the message – in modern man, sincere feelings are choked to nothingness, and life itself transforms into a meaningless count of days. There are only memories left (voluntarily or involuntarily induced), memories in the Platonic sense, where through daydreams, the soul remembers heavenly beauty, or the sublime beauty of nature. However, there is little beauty left in the present or in the deeds of men, except the simple beauty of being alive. Keane pictures this idea with a chain of predicaments. After the ball, drunk humiliated and devastated Aroon tries to start her car, without luck, and Mr Kiely appears offering to drive her home, even pitying her and offering an invitation to attend the best race. Her further predicament is in letting him down politely without realising the degree of her snobbishness (because he is simply “not known”): How to answer him within politeness? No one could possibly call me a snob, but some situations promise only total embarrassment. Papa’s friends and the kind Mary Anns would pass me by with a word, or without a word. None of them, none of us, knew Mr Kiely. (G.B., 210)

Aroon resolves the humiliation and embarrassment of the situation by bursting into tears.

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Comparably, Larkin’s poem ‘Story’ (February 1941) deals with the similar sentiments of unease, even indifference or boredom encountered with familiarity of social life, reflected even in his recollection of a nature, and love for solitude: Tired of a landscape known too well when young The deliberate shallow hills, the boring birds Flying past rocks; tired of remembering The village children and their naughty words, He abandoned his small holding and went South, Recognised at once his wished-for lie In the inhabitant’s attractive mouth, The church beside the marsh, the hot blue sky. Settled. And in the mirage lived his dreams, The friendly bully, saint, or lovely chum According to his moods. Yet he at times Would think about the village, and would wonder If the children and the rocks were still the same. But he forgot all this as he grew older.

In one of his rare glimpses into literary genres, interviewed by Ian Hamilton, Larkin pointed out that, “A very crude difference between the novels and poetry is that novels are about other people and poetry is about yourself ” (Ian Hamilton, 1964:75). If this is so, could it be a kind of “mental autism” (a similar term used by Jung to describe James Joyce’s style in Ulysses) which some of Larkin’s poetry contains; or could it be a reflection of his own mental isolation from life measured with its own perspective of time? In some of Larkin’s poetry (‘The Old Fools’, ‘The Building’, ‘Mother, Summer, I’, ‘Two Portraits of Sex’, for example), the stream of the poet’s consciousness is also locked into the sacredly private world of the self: My mother, who hates thunderstorms, Holds up each summer day and shakes It out suspiciously, lest swarms Of grape-dark clouds are lurking there; But when August weather breaks And rains begin, and brittle frost Sharpens the bird-abandoned air, Her worried summer look is lost. (‘Mother, Summer, I’ C.P., 1953)

Nevertheless, this consciousness echoes in the reader’s consciousness through the intuitive level, loosening the boundaries of reality. The effect goes even further, expanding into the unreal sphere of time and space. In ‘Time and Space were only their disguises’, there is some of that atmosphere:


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Time and Space were only their disguises Under which their hatred chose its shapes From swords in bushes, flowers like periscopes, And mirrors that revealed themselves as faces. And later, clouds flew past me as I sat; Stations like ships swam up to meet the train And bowed; all time was equal like the sun; Each landscape was elaborately set. But now this blackened city in the snow Argues a will that cannot be my own, And one not wished for: points to show Time in his little cinema of the heart Giving a première to Hate and Pain; And Space urbanely keeping us apart. (C.P., 1941)

The performance in the “little cinema of the heart” is a movement of recollected scenes of life through the emotions, where time and space are only choreography of unconsciousness. The process through which time transforms into other, almost surrealistic or hyper-realistic reality where “Mirrors revealed themselves as faces”, “clouds flew past me”, and “stations like ships swam up to meet the train” is sacredly dream-like and private. Then the world of the poet’s emotions could be only partly reached, lingering in mystery. In his book Philip Larkin, Andrew Motion (1982:70) notices how “the two parts of his [Larkin’s] poetic personality are constantly in negotiation with each other”; indeed, it is a battle between unexpressed sentiments and the sharp critical mind free of illusions. They meet at a point when the approach to life becomes cynical and alienated, expressing the poet’s exploration of the link between his personal life experience and the infinite ambiguity of the language. As if challenging Larkin’s distinction between poetry and prose and showing a comparable poetic sensitivity, Keane evokes a parallel exploration of the same link via Aroon’s stream of consciousness reflection on precisely what her loss of the past amounts to: In the shape of the word “lost” my grief bore me down – what had I lost? Nothing, for I had nothing, and my heart was bursting for nothing. But burst it would, and into loud crying. (G.B., 210)

This point of battle into the poet’s/novelist’s unconscious mind, when creation occurs points back to Plato’s parable of the cave (Plato, The Republic: 388–389) challenging the idea of the reality of things around us, and our knowledge of the “real” perception of time and space.

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A close examination of the selected prose and poetry reveals that Keane and Larkin share a disappointment in humankind. It seems that the previously mentioned scene when Keane’s character Aroon learns about Richard’s engagement has strangely déjà vu echoes in Larkin’s poem ‘He Hears that his Beloved has become engaged’ (C.P., 1953): When she came on, you couldn’t keep your seat; Fighting your way up through the orchestra, Tup-heavy bumpkin, you confused your feet, Fell in the drum – how we went ha ha ha! But once you gained her side and starting waltzing We all began to cheer; the way she leant Her cheek on yours and laughed was so exalting We thought you stooging for the management. But no. What you did, any of us might. And saying so I see our difference: Not your aplomb (I used mine to sit tight), But fancying you improve her. Where’s the sense In saying love, but meaning interference? You’ll only change her. Still, I’m sure you’re right.

As in Keane’s novel Good Behaviour, Larkin’s poem deals with the same kind of delusional situation set retrospectively. Both authors react similarly, distancing themselves from the absurdity of the situation through irony. Keane uses a grotesque motif of the purgative cleansing of Aroon’s intestines (discussed earlier); Larkin uses a clumsy scene (hiding behind a group of friends) when everybody laughs as the man stumbles, hurrying towards his bride-to-be. However, both scenes have the hidden despair of their respective collapsing worlds and both continue in a serious and somber tone about the change, or adjustments the “day after”. In a continuation of this detachment from life, there is a sublime and a symbolic approach to nature. It seems that both Keane and Larkin treated nature in accordance with their Modernist heritage, Nature is seen as a continuation of romantic-symbolic tradition, spread through the nineteenth and into the beginning of the twentieth century, and having an equal influence on poetry and prose. It results in adding a metaphysical quality to the literature from that period whether it is poetry (William Butler Yeats, Thomas Sterns Eliot, Ezra Pound, and of course, Larkin) or the novel (Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen and such writers as Keane). Keane and Larkin use descriptions of nature as that translinguistic vehicle to outline their metaphysics. In Good Behaviour, for instance, Keane’s landscapes provide a balance to irony, a sign with the potential meaning that Aroon takes notice of the serious


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beauty of nature (which suggests that there might still be some hope for her). Consider, for example, the following passage: I wondered if I could go on breathing naturally, through the delight that lifted me. Twice over now this euphoria of love had elevated my whole body; I was its host. Then the vision changed; it was as though the face of my old world turned away from me – a globe revolving – I was looking into a changed world, where I was a changed person, where my love was recognised and requited. Through the long assuring breaths that followed my sobbing I drew in the truth; that Papa loved me the most. Explicit from the depths of my breathing, like weed anchored far under sea water, I knew a full tide was turning for me. Love and trust were present and whole as they had been once on a summer afternoon. Inexactly present, inexactly lost, the memory fled me as a seal slides into the water with absolute trust in its element. A disturbance on the water closes and there is nothing again. (G.B., 243)

The sensual impressionistic landscapes map the unspoken feelings of past and future happenings. She recaptures the essence of the lost time of her life through the succeeding change of landscapes, likened to the impressions and memories. One of the memory-milestones, autumn afternoon, builds up as a wave, beginning with the innocent impressions of the ordinary day: the silence of the house consumed the afternoon The smell of past hours was in the library: flowers, cigars, polish on wood. Newspapers lay baking in the sun Everything was in the trance of the usual. (G.B., 142)

But the trance of the usual is broken and Aroon rushes to the graveyard where another déjà vu image confronts her: In the dog-shaped shadow cast by the solid little church on grass and graves I found him. Rose was sitting on the grass, her knees spread, holding him in her arms. His head was lolled back absurdly against her breast and shoulder. Her blouse was ripped out at the armpit from dragging and holding him. The coat of her navy-blue suit was across his foot. There was a brooding look about her, melancholy and wild. Her flowered hat was lying on the grass. There was a mushroom dew on it and on the graves. I remembered Mrs Brock’s hat, dripping from the wet grass, one silly hat recalled the other, clear and meaningless, conjuring together that night with this evening. (G.B., 145)

In the above paragraph, Keane presents nature as a bridge between the past and present, sickness and health, life and death. Rose looks like a caricature of The Pietá holding her fallen brain-damaged master, among the graves. Parody goes even further with the chain of association: dew – silly hat – Mrs Brock’s silly hat – meaninglessness – absurd. And yet, behind all of this play of tragic and coming is Aroon’s heart, full of fear that that is the end of her father. At the end of the cycle of seasons comes the winter with the Christmas season of hunt balls challenging Aroon as if she really were a tragic heroine

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destined to lose everything she ever had for the high moral purpose. Winter lines the background to the grand scene of Aroon arriving to the Hunt Ball: I drove under a stone archway, high as a railway bridge, on which the family coat of arms stood out, gross and gigantic. Beyond the archway, round tree sides of a courtyard, Gothic battlements and towers thrust upwards and bellied outwards. Smaller archways squatted before dark doorways. Windows bulged on the vast spread of walls. It was Grimm’s fairytales gone mad in stone, and like a fairytale, light shone from all the windows. For all the light I found it hard to tell which was the hall door. (G.B., 195)

Such a grand and picturesque scene of the house presents the world Aroon longs for – the world she could be part of, marrying Richard. Later that evening when she learns that he is already engaged to somebody else the glamorous house becomes the trap from which Aroon escapes into the ultimate coldness of the night. Coldness is a conventional metaphor for death. Death is following Aroon taking, in time one by one, everybody she loves and who is related herself to. Again, Keane pictures the depth of finality and the absurdity of death, contrasting them against the colours, sounds and smells of nature or the profane things that make everyday life. One of these metaphysical moments is described in the scene when Aroon and Major Massingham (father’s best friend) arrive at Temple Alice in the moment Papa’s body has been carried out: He [Major Massingham (ed.)] stopped the car on the further side of the gravel sweep from the house, then scrabbled up his orchids and got out to stand rigid and bareheaded, waiting, forgetting me, his eyes only on a farm cart drawn up at the foot of the steps, its paint blue as eucalyptus leaves, the spokes of its wheels crispy pink in the morning light. Volumes of breath from the quiet horse stayed low on the air while four of the men on the place carried Papa down the steps; slowly, awkwardly as great crabs, they went sideways, directing each other in ordinary voices. (G.B., 233)

The mystery of this scene is immense. In the crisp light of the winter morning finality is presented – the end of life, the end of an era: coffin, card and horses’ breath visible in the cold air and the absurdity of the undertakers carrying the heavy load of the remains of a man. The sublimity of this scene awakens the medieval images of the dance macabre and the somber words in Latin: Memento Mori! Coincidentally, remembering eternity is one of the ultimate messages of Larkin’s poetry. Larkin’s metaphysics is hidden between profound descriptions of the landscapes opposed to the ugliness of or indifference to the ordinary. There are the times, when figuratively speaking, Larkin dares to cross the river between this world and the infinite, taking the reader to the strange land, as in ‘Night-Music’ (C.P., 1944):


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At one the wind rose, And with it the noise Of the black poplars. Long since had the living By a thin twine Been led into their dreams Where lanterns shine Under a still veil Of falling streams; Long since had the dead Become untroubled In the light soil. There were no mouths To drink of the wind, Nor any eyes To sharpen on the stars’ Wide heaven-holding, Only the sound Long sibilant-muscled trees Were lifting up, the black poplars. And in their blazing solitude The stars sang in their sockets through the night: ‘Blow bright, blow bright The coal of this unquickened world.’

The onomatopoeic rhythm of the rhymes catches the sound of the blowing wind and the dramatic movements of waving poplars bridging the space between the earth and sky, this world and another world, present and infinity. The intense, spell-like chanting of the wind through the trees “flies” the reader to the magnitude of eternity and back to solitude and nothingness. The textures of expressed images condense into the picture and feeling of that invisible but existing world on the other side of real. David Coetzee (1990:29) points to young Larkin’s belief expressed in correspondence to Wellington: “Visions are what one lives by the life of an artist should be a continual polishing of that inner lens which perceives these visions”.

Differing in literary genres, both Keane and Larkin’s art leans on tradition and touches infinity through metaphor. Metaphor is generally more attached to the theory of poetry, going hand in hand with metre as René Wellek and Austin Warren point out in their Theory of Literature (1949:186). On the other hand, it proves the inadequacy and the limitations of the genres poetry or fiction. The tendency of merging two genres highlights the complexity of the undercurrent issues both authors have dealt with, like the sublimity of Nature, loneliness, and the mockery of morality in social norms or death.

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The most striking example of how the poetic language of Keane and Larkin unifies in the use of a particular word, or a particular image mirrored as a metaphor is contained in and about the word “myxomatosis”. Originating from the noun “myxoma” defined in The Concise Oxford Dictionary (1964:722) as “a tumor of mucous or gelatinous tissue”, it develops into the vivid metaphor in Keane’s Good Behaviour (1981:6) through Mommie’s last words, as she departs from this world: ‘Myxomatosis’, she said. ‘Remember that? – I can’t’ ‘The smell – I’m –’ She gave a trembling, tearing cry, vomited dreadfully, and fell back into the nest of pretty pillows.

Keane leaves Mummie’s last sentence unfinished and unspoken, giving it space to develop further possible meanings. Larkin’s ‘Myxomatosis’ (C.P., 1954) carries the heavy impression similar to Keane’s: Caught in the centre of a soundless field While hot inexplicable hours go by What trap is this? Where were its teeth concealed? You seem to ask. I make a sharp reply, Then clean my stick. I’m glad I can’t explain Just in what jaws you were to suppurate: you may have thought things would come right again if you could only keep quite still and wait.

These verses sound like a continuation to the recollection of murder, dying and guilt described by Keane; there is no punishment, no remorse – just silent waiting for the end. The symbiosis between these stanzas from Larkin’s poetry and the description of mother’s dying in Keane’s novel serves to foreground that which typifies their shared mode: be it of thought, image or ideology in their comparable treatment of the aesthetics of memory. University of Pretoria

NOTES 1

Philip Larkin, Collected Poems, Introduction by Anthony Thwaite (London: The Marvell Press and Faber and Faber, 1988). Throughout this text poems are referred to as C.P., with the year of publication. 2 Molly Keane, Good Behaviour, (London: Abacus 1980), referred to hereafter as G.B. plus page reference.



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REFERENCES David Coetzee (1990) “Finding a Voice: Some Aspects of the Development of Philip Larkin’s Poetry, with an Emphasis on the Use of Metaphor.” Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal, South Africa. Master of Arts Dissertation, p. 29. [5 ] Ian Hamilton (1964) “Four Conversations”, in The London Magazine (November) Vol. IV, p. 75. [3 ] Philip Larkin (1988) Collected Poems, Introduction by Anthony Thwaite. London: Marvell Press and Faber and Faber. Ferdinand de Saussure (1960) Course in General Linguistics, London: Peter Owen. Molly Keane (1981) Good Behaviour, London: Abacus. Andrew Motion (1982) Philip Larkin. New York: Roultlege, p. 70. [4 ] J. B. Sykes (ed.) (1964, 1976). The Concise Oxford Dictionary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 722. [6 ] Plato (1952) The Dialogues, Phaedrus, The Republic, Chicago-London-Toronto-Sydney-Tokyo: Encyclopaedia Britannica INC. pp. 388–389. Warren Austin and Wellek René (1973) Theory of Literature, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. p. 186.

MICHEL DION

BETWEEN THE DIALECTICS OF TIME-MEMORY AND THE DIALECTICS OF DURATION-MOMENT: MARCEL PROUST AND VIRGINIA WOOLF IN DIALOGUE

INTRODUCTION

According to Kristeva (1994), Proust’s concept of time includes psychical time (as a space for meeting other people) and qualitative time. The works of Henri Bergson (1859–1941) have influenced the way Proust developed his concept of time. Bergson was not concerned with quantitative time. He rather preferred qualitative time, this type of time that is experienced as pure interiority. Car notre durée n’est pas un instant qui remplace un instant: il n’y aurait alors jamais que du présent, pas de prolongement du passé dans l’actuel, pas d’évolution, pas de durée concrète. La durée est le progrès continu du passé qui ronge l’avenir et qui gonfle en avançant. Du moment que le passé s’accroît sans cesse, indéfiniment aussi il se conserve. ( ) le passé se conserve de lui-même, automatiquement ( ) Sans doute nous ne pensons qu’avec une petite partie de notre passé; mais c’est avec notre passé tout entier, y compris notre courbure d’âme originelle, que nous désirons, voulons, agissons.1

Subjective duration actually reveals how every individual (myself as well as others) has his (her) own duration, so that there is indeed a plurality of durations. Imagination is an integral part of Proust’s concept of time, so that time tends to become absolutely subjective (unlike Bergson’s view).2 “Le temps, c’est ma vie, c’est moi-même, écrit Proust ( ) Le temps, c’est la vie même du sujet”.3 The basic characteristic of Woolf’s time is that time is projected, a project for being itself, although we cannot absolutely control our own future, so that the unpredictable and play of probabilities actually exert an important role in the way our future (tragical) existence will actually be experienced. Our future existence is tragical in itself, because existence is, by nature, tragical, believed Woolf. 155 A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana LXXXVI, 155–169. © 2007 Springer.

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( ) la fondamentale caractéristique du temps woolfien est d’être un temps d’exil. Pourvu d’un passé dont il semble détaché et qui est le réservoir d’évocations nostalgiques – comme c’est le cas dans Les Vagues et Mrs Dalloway – et dans l’expectative de ce qui ne peut relever que de l’imprévisibilité ou de la probabilité – un temps projeté ou en projet, un avenir/à venir dont on n’est pas maître – le personnage, livré à l’aléatoire de sa tragique condition, se meut dans un entre-deux temporel ( ), ce présent sans épaisseur d’une inadéquation entre soi et le monde.4

In this paper we discuss the way Proust and Woolf describe the concept of time. Indeed, they use a very different perspective to look at temporality. Proust elaborated a dialectics between time and memory, so that nothing relevant can be said about time if it is not closely linked to phenomena of memory (remembering, forgetting) and nothing relevant can be said about memory if we do not have a circular notion of temporality. Woolf built a dialectics between duration (past, present or future) and the moment (the instantaneous duration), so that nothing relevant can be said about duration if it is not closely linked to the contents that are conveyed in various types of moments throughout human existence. Nothing relevant can be said about moments of human life if we do not adopt the domination of the moment over the three traditional ways to look at duration (present, past and future). I. MARCEL PROUST (1871–1922) AND HIS CONCEPTS OF MEMORY AND TIME

Marcel Proust’s works can even be analyzed through various perspectives: neurocognitive psychology, visual arts or a semiotic analysis of perception.5 We will analyse Proust’s works with a literary/philosophical perspective in trying to reveal how his concepts of time and memory are developed throughout his works. A. Memory Our memory puts equilibrium between various parts of given remembering, within a whole from which we can extract nothing (DCS, 440).6 Our memory does not put our remembering in a chronological manner, but rather reverses the order between the various parts of remembering (AOJ, I, p. 256). Within our memory, we can find out everything (LP, p. 376). Memory gets some information and does not draw attention to other facts because at a given moment, we neglect to consider such facts as if they were not important or because we did not perceive them as such (AD, p. 92). Action-centered people put their attention on short-run experiences so that they are giving very little information to their memory (LP, p. 31). Some images of people we know are kept in our memory. Such images are quite different from the same

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persons we presently meet and know. Habits always mould others’ being on a regular (daily) basis (LP, p. 60). It is a phenomenon of memory (and not a social phenomenon) to identify in a given person, the present and put it separate from the other parts of his (her) being, so that such a being becomes the pure condensation of his (her) present habits. It is a distorted view of that person, since the life of that person is also in continuity with the past (TR, p. 342–343). The laws of memory are ruled over by the laws of habit. Remembering love follows the laws of remembering. Given that habits weaken everything, what gives us the better image of a person we knew is what we have forgotten, because we did not find it significant. The major part of our memory is located out of us, in a forgetting process whose duration has been determined as being more or less long. We can occasionally recover the beings we were and consider things according to the perspective we adopted at this moment and still suffer because we are no longer the actual self, but rather the being we were. The being we were loved what our actual self considers with indifference (AOJ, II, p. 8). The existence of our body makes us presuppose that our inner goods, past joy and suffering, are constantly present. It is also probably false to believe that they go out of our being and come back. If they remain within us, it is, most of the time, within an unknown area where we cannot go and where the most usual ones are repressed by remembering of different forms and that excludes any conscious simultaneity with them. Although the pattern of sensations where they are kept is grasped, they have the same power to expel everything that is not compatible with them (SG, I, p. 238). There are non-voluntary memory of legs and arms, a memory that is a pale imitation of the memory of events (TR, p. 17). Memory cannot go out of the past (AD, p. 94). Memory introduces the past into the present without modifying it, like it was at the moment when it was the present (TR, p. 422). B. The Memory: Between Remembering and Forgetting If there is any transition between forgetting and remembering, then they are unconsciously produced (SG, I, p. 118). It is difficult to know how our words or movements are perceived or interpreted by others. We can be afraid to exaggerate our own importance. We can excessively widen the scope to which others’ remembering will evolve through their lives. Both factors explain that we imagine that accessory portions of our discourse or attitudes are not penetrating a lot within the consciousness and remain a very short moment within the memory of those with whom we are discussing. If we apply that principle to life itself, we will conclude that there is a principle

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of self-conservation (memory’s victory) rather than of the dictatorship of forgetting (AOJ, I, p. 138–139). The remembering of a given image is nothing but the fact we regret a given moment (DCS, 441). Thought cannot rebuild a former state of things and confront it with the new ones, since the knowledge we got, the remembering of the first minutes, the things we have heard make it impossible for our consciousness to rebuild the past in such a way and directly act upon our past. We are no longer free to see our past (without taking such factors into account), except under the free form of our future (AOJ, I, p. 208–209). Remembering is sometimes going so far that we cannot rebuild memories, so that we can conclude that they are not really existant (CG, I, p. 100). A given remembering can also come back and always be attached to our consciousness (CG, I, p. 124). Everybody has remembering, at least the ability to rebuild memories (SG, II, p. 153). Through the use of our memory, we can choose different images of others we know in different moments (for instance: recent moments, so that people have not changed a lot). The difference between such images will show the movement of those people in comparison with our own personal development (SG, II, p. 194). Habits toward things and persons make it possible that when we are remembering a different meaning for them and even when they have lost any meaning, the events that are quite different from nowadays, the change in life that is implied in the diversity of actions, seem to be increased by the immutable permanency of the space, reinforced by the unity of the milieu (SG, II, p. 310). Images chosen by remembering are thus arbitrary, and cannot be grasped, as is the case with images created by imagination or destroyed by reality itself (SG, I, p. 232). Various people having lived the same experiences or events do not remember the same things. They allocate different attention to various aspects of such events or experiences (TR, p. 350). Within our memory, people (what they are for us) do not have the uniformity of a painting. They evolve. We can sometimes confuse them with others. Even in loving relationships, the remembering that we have of each other is not the same (TR, p. 353). When beings are dead, where nothing remains from the past, after immaterial things have been destroyed, we are still able to remember and to hope, although we could observe the ruins of what we have lost in our past, that our remembering can make such things reborn (DCS, 57). Dead persons no longer exist, so that if we are angry about them, we are then hurting ourselves only (SG, I, p. 240). Proust seems to be interested in reincarnation. According to him, some of our remembering comes from other lives than the


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present one. If I can have in me such remembering, forgetting can be linked to a former life. The being I shall become after my death has no reason to remember the being I am since my birthday. The being I am since my birthday has no reason to remember what he was before that life (SG, II, p. 154). The average life duration of remembering when applied to poetical sensations is much greater than when it is linked to sufferings of the heart (AOJ, I, p. 329). Omitting a remembering favours the uncertainty, and the evolution of a premature certainty (AOJ, II, 213). Rememberings are impressions for which our fragile self is a unique mode of realization (AOJ, II, p. 257). From our remembering relative to our self, the intelligence gets rid of everything that does not directly, immediately contribute to the immediate utility of our daily relations (AOJ, II, p. 350). There is much less egoism within pure imagination than in remembering (SG, I, p. 235). It is a basic weakness for a given being to consist in a collection of moments. It is also a basic power of being since it implies memory. Remembering a given moment is not influenced by what happened since that moment. The moment we have chosen to remember through our memory still exists and makes it possible for the being who is involved in that remembering to still exist for us (AD, p. 60). We “are”, through what we own. We own what is really present to us. We can lose some rememberings, so that we can no longer put them in our being. But they are secret paths to get in touch with our being. We can only regret what we can remember (AD, p. 70). However, a recent event can seem much more remote from us than an event that occured a few years ago (AD, p. 117). Some moments of the past still keep, in our memory, the “movement towards the future” (towards a future that became a past) such moments actually have when they were not already transformed in remembering (AD, p. 71). We can only be in accordance with what we remember, and we only remember what we have known (AD, p. 176). A remembering is powerless. It cannot wish something different than what it reveals. Reality cannot give it the state of things it would prefer to see (AD, p. 136). The renewal of things through remembering is delayed by the attention we give to what must change, at a given moment of our life (AD, p. 173–174). There are very few differences between remembering a dream and remembering a reality (AD, p. 231). Some people have a more intense pleasure to look at their remembering because of the tyranny of their sickness and their daily hope to be healed (LP, 20). We forget very quickly what we have not deeply thought about or what has not been dictated by a trend to imitate something or someone, or by surrounding passions that are changing and modifying our remembering (LP, p. 32). Memory is a nothingness from which an actual similarity can make it possible to give a new life to dead remembering (LP, p. 137).

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Remembering cannot be divided (TR, p. 211). A given remembering is extending itself only in a divergent direction from the impression with which it has firstly coincided and from which it takes a progressively growing distance (TR, p. 276). Sometimes, the being we can remember is no longer true so that the new being we are confronted with is a being we did not know (TR, p. 310–311). For people we do not deeply know (“unknown people”), we can remember something other than what we thought about them in the past, something that is suggested by people of their milieu, who know them very recently and in situations they (“unknown people”) were not confronted with in that past (TR, p. 354). Time changes beings. It does not modify the image we retain of them. There is a suffering opposition between the alteration of being and the static perspective of remembering. Something can be quite living and exciting in our memory, while in daily life it does not excite any desire or passion so that we can search for that exciting aspect (present in our memory) within other beings (TR, p. 368–369). Forgetting is a negative way to weaken the thought that is not able to recreate real moments of life and that must substitute conventional and indifferent images (SG, I, p. 241). Some people never forget, while others always forget everything (TR, p. 349). But we all forget half of the things we would like to say (LP, p. 393). Time progressively implies that we shall forget. Forgetting will deeply affect our notion of Time (AD, p. 174). Forgetting does not imply that it is sad to have lost any kind of information, since such information has been forgotten (AD, p. 222). Forgetting can sometimes affect the way beings seem to be, according to our own view (TR, p. TR, p. 343). Forgetting means we are destroying the potential survival of past events in our consciousness (AD, p. 138). C. Time and Past The duration of days is never equal but varies greatly one from the other (DCS, p. 404). And we are not always aware of what Time has accomplished through duration (AOJ, I, p. 144). The passions we feel widen the scope of our personal time, while what we inspire in others makes their personal time thinner (AOJ, I, p. 295). Our life is not purely chronological. We put many anachronisms into our life (AOJ, II, p. 7). The more time is objectively shortened from the action we would like to undertake, the more it is subjectively perceived as long, since we apply to it very brief measures or because we want to measure it (CG, II, p. 392). Depending on each individual, the measures of time can be increased or decreased (TR, p. 314). A change in time can recreate our self and our world (CG, II, p. 355). The person who is released from the order of Time is focusing on the essence of


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things. Such people try to grasp the permanent essence that is veiled or hidden within things and beings and in doing that, they release their true self (TR, p. 229–230). Time has a distorting perspective (TR, p. 294). Time has a destructive action, and creates a total, radical change or metamorphosis (TR, p. 300). Time has a power of original renewal. It is in accordance with the unity of being and laws of life while it is able to introduce contact between successive aspects of the same being. But Time (as an artist) works slowly (TR, p. 306). Time adds something new to every being (TR, p. 321). Time creates a mix of forgiveness, forgetting and indifference (TR, p. 353). Some people do not reflect their own desires. They rather refer (or draw from their past) to those habits and passions they consider as permanent characteristics of their being (DCS, p. 292). Our wise reflections on the past help us to preserve our future (AOJ, II, p. 201). The shadow of the past is what we call our “future” (AOJ, II, p. 201). We always tend to presuppose that we face an experience that has no precedent in the past (CG, II, p. 429). But distances are nothing but the relationships between space and time and vary in accordance with that kind of relationship (SG, II, p. 166). Future is within us. We can be aware of that or not (SG, I, p. 106). We sometimes believe that our future is the reflection of a present that is projected in a void space, while our future is the result of close causes that we cannot perceive or understand (LP, p. 308). Future is what only exists in our thought. It can be modified through the “in extremis” intervention of our will (AD, p. 4). What we feel exists only for us, and we project it in the past or in the future, without considering the barriers of death (AD, p. 110). The ability of Time to recreate our self and our world is described in a similar way as Proust understood the work of art. According to Stambolian (1972), Proust had a vision of the work of art that implies a recreation of the world by artists themselves. In other words, artists make the world their own world. Creating something new is the only means to make something “real”. In that sense, artists actually do not represent things or persons. Rather, they are giving expression to their impressions7 . II. VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882–1941) AND HER NOTIONS OF MOMENT AND DURATION

Virginia Woolf has been deeply influenced by Proust’s works, particularly about philosophical themes such as Time. In Mrs. Dalloway (1925) as well as in To the Lighthouse (1927), Woolf reveals three basic views or existential concerns: (1) a view of existence: the notion of life and human condition (suffering, death, anxiety); (2) a view of Time: the notion of the moment,

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of the duration (three basic types of duration: precise duration, imprecise duration, repeated actions). What remains crucial is the moment itself as the essence of Time; (3) a view of mystery: some terms like “suddenly”, “perfection”, “absurd” (meaninglessness) and “exquisite” tend to reveal the mystery of events. We will describe here only Woolf’s view on Time. A. Mrs. Dalloway (1925) This novel focuses on human consciousness. According to Harper (1982), the novel reveals the feeling that human consciousness transcends the limitations of individual spirit.8 Woolf describes forgetting as something we could be proud of (178). Woolf understands the structure of forgetting as including four basic elements: (a) this (the object); (b) here (the location); (c) now (the time); (d) in face of others (the situation).9 As Susan Dick (1989) said, the continuous movement of characters between the reconstitution of the past (memory as the reception of the past) and the perception of the here-andnow (memory as a present process) represents a basic structure of the novel Mrs. Dalloway. She focused, in her won narrative, on experiments with time, perceiving that new temporal perspectives might offer ways of making new structural contrasts in narrative and, by the time she wrote Mrs. Dalloway, feeling that the process of recollection was an important aspect of her attempt to forge a theory of a female aesthetic.10

Woolf is not really concerned with present or future. She defines the past as what we are thinking about many times (36, 42, 172, 181), what deeply troubles us (42), what has given birth to claims for having been subjected to specific events (49), what we dream about (58), what is enriching for us (163), what we talk about regularly (182) even if it does not reflect our present (188). Woolf considers Time as irrevocable (4), letting ruins we could observe (16) and being the object of our existential anxiety (30). According to Woolf, time is also that of happiness (36, 70, 72), what we tragically need and lack (95). 1. The moment The moment is the key concept for Woolf’s notion of time (32, 35, 39, 50, 59, 61, 66, 70, 122, 139). In Mrs. Dalloway, there are three specific uses of moment: (1) The moment within the event: the moment is considered as what constitutes an event (17). Some moments are decisive (20), so that other people can perceive it quite easily (38). The moment manifests the essence of life (29). A given moment is created by former moments (30). In


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some cases, the moment can increase the power of given realities (32). The moment can suddenly reveal something important (32, 70, 93, 174). The moment can describe an action to undertake (55) or the reference point to interpret reality as such (32, 104). The moment can also be the moment when a given event occurs (155). Sometimes, the moment precedes an action we are waiting for (119). The moment can follow a decisive past event (47) or represent the expectation or apprehension of an event that is closer to us (54). The moment sometimes refers to the here-and-now (79); (2) The relational moment: the moment can refer to the time to change (47), or can reflect actions of intimacy (50), of bravery (56), of depression (97), of calmness (103, 111, 165, 194). The moment is sometimes referring to a solemn event (127) or to the last stages of the dying process (149). Rarely, Woolf defines the moment with a basic social dimension: the moment when civilizations express their essence (55); (3) The spiritual moment: the moment is rarely defined as the opportunity to express one’s faith or unbelief (29). The moment can be the occasion of an extraordinary exaltation among atheist persons: a conviction of the necessity to be released from misery and ugliness (57). But Woolf seems fascinated by the depth of the moment, and sometimes refers to the absolute moment (151, 176) or to the moment that makes unity among things (152). 2. Precise and imprecise duration Precise duration refers to seconds: the moment that creates an event (17), or the duration we have directly access to (40). It can also be expressed in minutes: a moment of perfect happiness (62), or a moment of calmness (118). Using weeks, precise duration can refer to expectation (95). But in Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf generally describes precise duration as the duration of criticism and renewal of privileged relationships (76), the duration of experience (100), the recall of past events (100, 122–124). Woolf rarely makes a connection between a precise duration and the fact we have a given social status (103). Imprecise duration is everywhere in that novel. Woolf had different meanings for an indefinite period to time, using terms such as “for a long time” (170, 173), “all this time” (190, 192), “time after time” (134, 190). Generally speaking, she interprets temporal terms in an indefinite way. Imprecise duration can be applied to the evolution through ages (81), or can reflect a given type of poetry in a specific era (75). Rarely, Woolf refers to social habits in a given era (154, 167) or to a great era in which someone lived (117, 187).

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Woolf is mainly concerned with years, as the duration of reflection (75), a duration that creates a specific feeling or action (78, 186), the duration of friendships (153) or the duration of that “life in abnegation” (168). Woolf refers to a number of years that represent something important for a given character (171, 188), or gives predictions about an indefinite future, in a number of years that is more or less precisely defined (85). Woolf sometimes uses “sector-based” periods of time as reflecting a given culture: ’80s (106), ’70s (178), ’60s (178). In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf does not use very often the season as a period of time, except summer (154, 161–162). Occasionally, she defined season as the period in which we are happy (155). In the same way, Woolf used the week to represent the period in which we are unhappy (83). The month represents an indefinite moment (4), or the essence of a precise moment in one’s life (37), or the period of time in which we are lost (153). Woolf likes to use the day to represent an imprecise duration within an indefinite period of time (91, 112, 143, 152), or within a precise duration like a specific month (102, 111). The day can refer to loving relationships full of misery, torture and extraordinary passion (79), or to the moment of imagination (161). Parts of day (morning, afternoon, evening, night) are used to express the duration of this or that day. Woolf particularly appreciates the evening (87, 100, 135, 144, 169, 174, 178, 189, 191). She defines the evening as the period that changes the whole day (161), or the time where unhappy events occur (101). In a different way, Woolf insists on the night (129, 157, 165, 191) and is considering the night as being extraordinary (186–187). The hour (49–50, 102, 124) is used to manifest a duration within an indefinite period of time (79), or within a given part of the day, whether it is the morning (91, 175), the evening (98) or the night (165). It can also refer to the present moment (5). The hour is the indefinite duration of expectation (94), the time for praying (117), the time when events occur (118). The hour (like Time itself) is irrevocable (117). Minutes are rather the required duration to answer questions (95), the time of calmness (120), the solemn time (128). They can also express the importance of past events (151). 3. The repeated actions Woolf often used the imprecise duration to express some repeated actions that are accomplished in her characters’ life. Repeated actions are manifesting that a given perception is repeating itself (45, 126): hour after hour (190), every day (136), every night (166), week after week (44), every summer (35, 166), season after season (35, 138). When Woolf talks about day, it becomes a reference point for routine (7–8). Months become


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the expression of the time that is passing through our existence, the time that is spent (36). Repeated actions, as applied to years, reveal customs and habits or the same modes of thought (12, 30), a behaviour whose consequences are larger now than in the past and that will be much more important in the future than they are now (169, 193). A given behaviour could be repeated during a fixed number of years (187). Finally, repeated actions could be manifested in using the following terms: continually (44, 151, 169), now and yet (163). The sequence of repeated actions is sometimes precisely identified: a second time, a third time (142), a fiftieth time (84), twenty millions of time (163). B. To the Lighthouse (1927) In this novel, Woolf is dealing with time itself, trying to elaborate a feminist aesthetics, as said Roe (1990): A female aesthetic, then, would be linked to time, as it is in To the Lighthouse ( ) the writing process brought her own past, or unconscious time ( )11

According to Harper (1982), Woolf refers to two basic notions of time developed by Henri Bergson, that is, time as duration leading to freedom, and time as immutable and leading to necessity. In different parts of the novel, one or the other notion of time is dominating over the other.12 As Bowlby said (1988), Woolf first insists on the present moment, particularly on the day itself. The three sections of To the Lighthouse are distinguished by different forms of temporality. The first and third focus, as often in Woolf’s novels, on a single day and the associative links which connect it, in the consciousness of the characters and along the narrative line to other times and places. The “present moment” is divided and encompasses more than one time and this effect is multiplied by the number of characters in such a way that their coming together as a group ( ) constitutes only a tenuous and ephemeral connection of many heterogeneous parts.13

Bowlby (1988) suggests that Woolf used a notion of temporality expressing repeated movements that seems to create a more chaotic experience or reality. Other temporal terms used by Woolf (night, seasons, years) do not imply any temporal progression, but rather express the natural character of temporal cycles, their recurrence, alternation and invariability.14 1. The moment In To the Lighthouse, Woolf emphasizes (much more than in Mrs. Dalloway) the nature of the moment (32, 57, 65, 77, 96, 99, 103, 111, 151, 159, 161–162, 169–170, 195, 207, 221, 223, 22, 235, 240, 260, 264, 282, 285). She deals with the precise moment (100, 108, 136, 147, 160, 168,

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278–279, 301). Woolf likes to use terms reflecting the instantaneous character of phenomena: immediately (31, 60), instantaneously (58, 107, 145, 148, 226, 228, 244, 248, 262). She rarely refer to the temporary (15), the momentary (146) or the simultaneous (39) character of things. Three notions of moment appears in that novel: (1) The moment within the event: It is the moment when an event occurs (9), or when an action is undertaken during a public crisis (10), or the moment preceding a violent event (144), or more generally a moment preceding an action (48, 94, 277). Rarely, a moment becomes what follows a given action (33, 274), or something we could permanently transform (241); (2) The relational moment: It is the moment involving relationships with others, whether it is in loving relationships (21), friendships (240), or simply the moment of an encounter (24) or the moment of intimacy (46, 256), and even moment of discussion (131, 139, 157). Woolf uses the moment to express the context in which we see the other (247), or we let ourselves being what we are (25). Woolf also refers to moments of pain, whether it is the moment where the presence of someone does not mean anything for us (134), to that moment where it is suffering to recall the inadequate character of human relations (62); (3) The moment of personal interpretation of reality: this moment is expressed in different manners: a moment of extreme tension (28), the moment in front of the inevitable (41), the moment of discovering something (41), the moment of calmness (53, 108), the moment of doubt (62), the moment of exaltation (63), the moment of decision-making (66). It could also be the moment where the leader can express himself (herself) (142), the moment where we have nothing in mind (161), the moment of expectation (167), the moment of hesitation (208), the moment of revelation (220), the moment of silence (23, 25), the moment of impatience (242). Rarely, the moment is reflecting a social concern: the moment we think about rich and poor (17). Finally, Woolf is interested by the perfection of the moment (256), or the urgency of the moment (265), or the moment of our deep anxiety (273), a critical moment (287), a moment where we cannot feel or think about anything (288), or the moment when we feel something (268). 2. Precise and imprecise duration Precise duration is particularly used in terms of seconds: this second (42), for one second (60–61, 179, 219, 252, 294, 299, 310), in a second (145, 163, 271). It sometimes refers to minutes:


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two minutes (55), one minute (117). Woolf particularly insisted on summer (200, 202, 209, 259, 261) and winter (22, 43, 202, 244). She frequently refers to years: one year (212), two years (21), three years (23), ten years (220–221, 286), twenty years (132, 140, 196), forty years (288), seventy years (197). The longest periods of time are rarely used: two thousand years as the duration of renown (56), the 19th century (17), a century (35), one million years (34). Imprecise duration rarely refers to seconds: seconds as the time to regret our decisions, to evade ourselves or to avoid our duties (14). Imprecise duration is manifesting, above all, an emphasis on the hours, particularly the hours of evening and night: at this hour (97, 138, 298); after seven (103, 222), almost eleven (171), after midnight (211), about three o’clock in the morning (257), early in the morning (266). The imprecise duration is linked to parts of the day, mainly the night (44, 90, 121, 140, 148, 193–195, 198–200, 203, 208, 213, 217, 220–221, 232, 245, 253, 266, 276), the evening (33, 64, 68, 103, 106, 111, 121, 127, 132, 148, 158, 165–166, 168, 179, 185, 195, 212–213, 221, 270, 276–277) and the morning (117, 194, 217–219, 234, 238, 241, 246, 257, 271, 274, 285, 287–288, 291, 296, 309). The day is a reference point for the imprecise duration. It is defined in comparison with another day (43, 132, 159), or the whole day (90, 105, 119, 145, 266), or a future day (50, 113, 138, 173, 232). The day could be used to refer to one of its parts: the middle of the day (200, 210). The day can also be defined within an indefinite whole of days: for many days (80), those days (211), working days (212), many days after (270), long summer days (200). Woolf rarely refer to weeks as an imprecise duration: every week (17), or to months (next month, (67)). Seasons are also rarely used to describe an imprecise duration: in that season (201). Years are more frequently used to express an imprecise duration: some years ago (35), few years ago (105), all those years (132, 203, 205, 220–221, 240, 250, 254), these same years (133); one of those years (205), with years (240). Years are often linked to health and the body (38, 109). 3. The repeated actions Imprecise duration could give birth to repeated actions. Only the night has a crucial importance in that novel: every night (122, 124, 198), night after night (200, 202, 232). Woolf sometimes refers to evening (33, 38, 121) or the day itself (17, 91, 194). Weeks have poetic contents, whether it consists in the observation of the movement of waves (12), or the duration of silence (195). Years can also have a poetical meaning, whether a given year is a way to avoid something (63, 67), or years as opportunities to have a different view on given events (9). Seasons rarely appear in the context of repeated actions: summer after summer (44, 263, 293).

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In Proust’s works, we could observe that memory is a means to establish self-identity within an experience that overcomes temporal existence, said Duchêne (1994).15 Time has no other contents than what is interpreted through our memory. The function of memory is nothing but giving meaning to a circular time, to that type of time that explains why the past is as much present in our life than future expectations. In other words, Proust cannot conceive that we could isolate time from memory. One is required to define the other. There is an interdependence between a circular time and the various phenomena of memory we could observe in our existence. Woolf tries to reconstitute the influence of the unconscious and the hidden history of events, behind our conceptions of life and time, so that without such a reconstituting process, we would lose access to a basic dimension of events we actually live. That’s why the moment becomes so important. Any kind of duration has no other meaning than that meaning we could grasp in being in touch with the depth and intensity of the moment. The moment itself is the key concept to understanding any notion of duration (past, present, future). And we cannot reveal the substantiality of the moment without giving to the duration its basic orientation towards human relationships, believed Woolf. a process of tapping the unconscious mind for memories of events which the conscious mind has screened. For Woolf, though, the process is conceived as some more magical and more haphazard process of tapping a hidden history for events which have somehow remained suspended in an isolated historical moment, through not having been absorbed into the present narrative – that is, the mainstream of her life-story.16

University of Sherbrooke NOTES 1

Bergson Henri (1969) L’évolution créatrice. Paris: Bibliothèque de philosophie contemporaine”, PUF, p. 4–5. 2 Kristeva Julia (1994) Le temps sensible. Proust et l’expérience littéraire. Paris: NRF Essais, Gallimard, p. 209–210, 377–385. 3 Laïla Laïla El Hajji-Lahrimi (1999). Sémiotique de la perception dans ‘À la recherche temps perdu’ de Marcel Proust. Paris/Montréal: L’Harmattan, p. 69–70. 4 Rodier Carole (2001). L’univers imaginaire de Virginia Woolf. Paris: Éditions du temps, p. 49. 5 R. Epstein (2004) “Consciousness, Art, and the Brain: Lessons from Marcel Proust”. Consciousness and Cognition, 13: 213–243; BAL, Mieke (1997). Images littéraires, ou comment lire visuellement Proust. Montréal/Toulouse: XYZ éditeur/PUM; El Hajji-Lahrimi, Laïla (1999), op. cit.


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In this paper, we use abbreviations in referring to Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu: Du côté de chez Swann (DCS), À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (AOJ), Le côté de Guermantes (CG), Sodome et Gomorrhe (SG), La Prisonnière (LP), Albertine disparue (AD), Le temps retrouvé (TR). 7 G. Stambolian (1972). Marcel Proust and the Creative Encounter, Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 212–213; Fiser, E. (1933) L’esthétique de Marcel Proust, Paris: Alexis Redier éditeur: 154–156. 8 H. Harper (1982). Between Language and Silence. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press: 117. 9 S. Dick (1989). Virginia Woolf, London: Edward Arnold: 35. 10 S. Roe (1990). Writing and Gender. Virginia Woolf’s Writing Practice. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf/St.-Martin’s Press: 20–21. 11 S. Roe (1990). Writing and Gender. New York. Harvester Wheatsheaf/St-Martin’s Press: 21. 12 H. Harper (1982). op. cit. 139. 13 R. Bowlby (1988). New York: Basic Blackwell. p. 75–76. 14 Idem., p. 76. 15 Duchêne Roger (1994). L’impossible Marcel Proust. Paris, Coll. “Biographies sans masque”, Robert Laffont: p. 150–151. 16 R. Bowlby (1988). Virginia Woolf. New York: Basic Blackwell: 45. Feminist Destinations: p. 45.


S E C T I O N III

REBECCA M. PAINTER

TEMPORAL REARRANGEMENT OF THE MORAL COSMOS: ALICE MUNRO’S FICTION

Alice Munro is considered perhaps the finest living master of the short story. Within a genre known for its one-two punch, her fiction resonates with depth and mystery. Among major contemporary writers in English, she has frequently been compared to Chekhov, for her “eerie ability to capture character in a single brush stroke,”1 but more so for her ineffable portrayal of female frustrations of the heart and the lengths to which we must go to transcend them, though transcendence may not always be possible. One of those lengths we must go to, or through, is a fully lived experience of time. Munro’s stories are replete with unthinking silences and reconsidered memories, very similar to what Henri Bergson elaborated in his concept of duration. My focus here is to offer an appreciation of Munro’s signature freewheeling switches of narrative time, in particular what she contributes to the sense of duration or lived time by means of a narrative emphasis on the vital role of inconclusive silence – and of strategic silences – that lay an unspoken but indispensable groundwork for moral insight. This paper focuses on Munro’s longest story so far, “The Love of a Good Woman,” with briefer reference to other stories, to illustrate these reflections. As in many Munro stories, the narrative flow of “The Love of a Good Woman” seems factually and morally nebulous because of changes in temporal perspective. Even so, the silent passage of time and the “emptiness” of its duration yield to readers something fundamental to moral understanding. At the very least, we acquire from Munro a humbling compassion for the human predicament in the face of moral judgment. Her mysterious moral sensibility seems to confute the time-space continuum that readers and characters must accept in the so-called real world. It also colors the notion of duration with the wordless factors of silence and mental emptiness – though often of intense emotional fullness – that allow for reconfiguration of memory and moral significance. Munro’s artistry portrays a lived experience of human consciousness as it earns a more realistically modest measure of moral understanding within the confines of time, memory, and circumstance. 173 A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana LXXXVI, 173–186. © 2007 Springer.

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In many ways Munro’s fiction bears out Bergson’s most essential formulations on the subject of lived time or duration, as opposed to clock time. In Time and Free Will, Bergson maintained that human freedom “consists in a dynamic progress in which the self and its motives, like real living beings, are in a constant state of becoming”.2 And because of this constant becoming, we do not necessarily behave the same when faced with the same external conditions.3 Therefore, while freedom of the self is very real, it remains indefinable because of the reality of the flux of changing perspective.4 Any time people let themselves be caught up in a confusion between time as calendar or clock time, he warned, they become susceptible to “conscious automatism”5 and can free themselves only by being willing to re-engage with the reality of the evolving self. By means of temporal shifting in narrative time, as well as the characterization of evolving consciousness, Munro captures the sensation of this Bergsonian dynamic. Yet I believe her artistry takes the moral dimensions of evolving consciousness through time a step further in subtlety and mystery. In particular, Munro opens up readers to the experience of lived time as containing silences that, if heeded, yield moral insights that can only be appreciated by those who share a similar quality of silence. In The Creative Mind, Bergson suggested that artists are able to show us “shades of emotion and thought which might long since have been brought out in us but which remained invisible ”.6 I suggest that Munro goes beyond making the invisible visible, and makes us view reality, especially moral reality, in deeper layers of indefinable truth. In this way her work seems to embody the kind of heroism that Bergson alluded to in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, when he stated that “heroism may be the only way to love [it] cannot be preached [it] is a return to movement, and emanates from an emotion – infectious like all emotions – akin to the creative act”.7 “The Love of a Good Woman” begins on a summer Saturday in 1951, near a small Canadian town, when a group of boys discover the apparently drowned body of the town’s optometrist, Mr. Willens. After seeing the optometrist’s submerged car and his arm floating up out of the open window on the passenger side of the front seat, the boys go back to their respective homes and let an entire afternoon, night, and half of another day go by before one of them manages to tell his mother what they saw. Even then this boy does so after finding his three siblings absent and his mother alone in the house. He then spends an hour alone in his room reading comic books, and assumes that when he does tell her she will not take action until his father comes home from work. He is surprised when she calls the police right away. The other two boys come from families that cling even more intently to silence. One is the only child of an abusive alcoholic father and a sick, demoralized mother, whom he

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helps cook simple meals when she is too enervated to function. The other boy comes from a home stuffed to the rafters with extended family members, an invalid father and a working mother who live in the maternal grandmother’s house along with other needy relatives, cheerfully avoiding the semblance of a complaint despite the stringencies of frugality and crowded quarters. The three boys’ silence is summed up in terms of a din of unspoken familial truths: “It was just that their houses seemed too full. Too much was going on already”.8 One critic has observed that, in presenting the various reasons for the three boys’ delay in reporting their discovery, “Munro manages to articulate the entire social structure and moral history of the town in which they live”.9 This is characterized by such observations as the boys each thereafter being called “dead man” for as long as they lived in that town, a name carried over even to the son of the one who did not move away. The narrative abruptly shifts to the next section, oddly titled “Heart Failure” because it is more obviously about the kidney failure of the main character’s dying patient, Mrs. Quinn. The patient’s nurse, Enid, did not have to work. Her father had made a comfortable living and provided well for his widowed wife and only child. Enid had promised her father that she would not work in a hospital, but that did not prevent her from taking on the strenuous and frequently thankless work of nursing terminal patients too poor to be hospitalized. She had always been able to supply comfort, giving back what little the families had been able to pay her in the form of household supplies, laundry service, toys for the children, and so on. But in Mrs. Quinn’s case Enid “could not conquer her dislike of this doomed, miserable young woman.” She looked upon her patient’s sick and discolored body as “the sign of willed corruption” (38). What is worse, Mrs. Quinn knew that Enid was repulsed, and “made knowing it her triumph” (39). Without explaining the oddness of Enid’s reaction, however, the narrative switches to her memories of attending school, where she was a popular girl with a circle of friends who used to torment a quiet farm boy named Rupert. Rupert and Enid had a silent bond, however, and all through high school he sat behind her, unable to look at her directly but responding readily when she asked to borrow his eraser or where was the Tyrrhenian Sea. The boy grew up to be Mrs. Quinn’s taciturn husband, who greets Enid at the door without indicating that they had been longtime schoolmates. Enid instantly responds as if she were just making his acquaintance – an interaction of effortless silent cooperation and tact, founded upon unspoken trust and just a hint of unresolved attraction on both their parts. Thinking of their high school years, Enid feels “a tenderness and wonder.” The narrator adds, “You couldn’t say that they had chosen the wrong lives or chosen against their will

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or not understood their choices. Just that they had not understood how time would pass and leave them not more but maybe a little less than what they used to be” (48). Time had passed, attraction had not been expressed, and now Enid finds herself, as she sleeps near her patient, having lust-filled, ugly dreams, so depraved that she felt God would be insulted if she were to confess or pray about them. “She was insulted, by her own mind.” Nevertheless, “there was no point in dramatizing it and making it seem important. It was nothing, just the mind’s garbage” (51). Enid contemplates the lovely lives of cows, munching gently at night, until they ended in the slaughterhouse. The narrative observes: Evil grabs us when we are sleeping; pain and disintegration lie in wait. Animal horrors, all worse than you can imagine beforehand. And here was Enid, working her life away pretending it wasn’t so. Trying to ease people. Trying to be good. An angel of mercy, as her mother had said, with less and less irony as time went on. Patients and doctors, too, had said it. (52)

But the circumstances of a ministering angel can be distressing. Enid couldn’t sleep, so she began systematically cleaning Rupert’s house, to restore herself, as a penitent, “washing the cloudy glasses and sticky plates that were in the cupboards and establishing order where there had been none before” (52). But she could not figure what to do with a large patch of ugly brown paint that had been sloppily and recently applied to the front-room floor. Enid was soon to have this explained to her, in a suspiciously venomous manner, by the dying Mrs. Quinn. Taking a long while to die, Mrs. Quinn had lately been “watching Enid with a speculative or inquiring look in her eyes” (54), and Enid sensed she was building up to some kind of display. One night she overheard a weak and mocking laugh coming from within the bedroom where Mrs. Quinn was talking to her husband. Enid heard something in it that she had not heard before in her life: “something deliberately vile.” When Rupert emerged, he “looked as if he had caught hold of an electric wire and begged pardon that his body was given over to this stupid catastrophe” (56). Nevertheless, what Rupert expresses, whether consciously addressed to Enid or not, is done silently. We have only the narrator’s observation to guide us, but our awareness of the unexpressed is not hindered by the narrative’s view. The next day, in a section of the story entitled “Mistake,” Mrs. Quinn tells Enid that the brown paint was put down to hide the blood stains from when Rupert had knocked the head of the optometrist Mr. Willens on the floor, after surprising him in the act of what he thought was sexually accosting his wife. Rupert hadn’t meant to kill him, but had mistakenly underestimated his own strength. It was his wife’s idea to put the optometrist’s body in the front


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seat of his own car and have Rupert drive it down to the riverbank area where the boys eventually found it, and push the car into the water so it would look like the optometrist had just driven off the road and lost his way. The stretch of road getting there was uninhabited so no one saw them. At the beginning of Mrs. Quinn’s horrendous tale, she told Enid that Mr. Willens was simply examining her eyes and “grabbed her leg just to keep his balance that was all there was to it,” and all she could do was “concentrate on keeping still” (57). As she got further along, though, she described the optometrist as a “dirty old brute.” Reversing her premise of innocent victimhood, she said that they had played “the same game every time,” she pretending to have an eye exam while he groped her. She was then supposed to ask how much she owed him, his cue to have rough sex with her on the bare floor. Mrs. Quinn mockingly asks the modest if not prudish Enid, “How’d you’ve like that?” Enid does not reply. But in her silence linger our doubts as well as hers as to whether this evolving tale came from a truthful witness. It was the stain and its horrible smell lingering on the living room floor that led Mrs. Quinn to paint over it with some equally foul-smelling paint “left over from when Rupert painted the steps” (62). That was the beginning of her rare and terminal form of kidney disease. The whole grisly story had such a graphic brutality – down to the sickening pink froth that oozed out of Mr. Willens’ mouth after his head had been repeatedly banged against the floor – that it almost had to be believable. If so, Rupert would be guilty of manslaughter, if not murder. Since Mrs. Quinn died the next day, that left Enid the only person other than Rupert who knew. But here is exactly where the writer stops narrative time and allows both Enid and the reader to re-evaluate what has been heard. In part four of the story, “Lies,” time for Enid seems “so long and then too short,” because she cannot make out what had actually happened vs. what she’d been told had happened, and what to do about it. Not only time but her own sense of movement within time is depicted as out of joint. “She had not undressed, or unrolled her hair, and when she brushed her teeth she seemed to be doing something laborious and unfamiliar” (63). She spends the night busying herself with preparations to provide the Quinns’ two poorly-attended daughters with treats of Jell-O mixed with fruit and fresh-baked cookies, and rigs up two laundry tubs as makeshift swimming pools for the girls in the summer heat. While they are enjoying this experience, she asks if they thought a person should be punished if they did something very bad, even if no one sees them and nobody ever knew. The girls offer no wisdom in the matter, so Enid answers for them: “If you do something very bad and you are not punished you feel worse, far worse, than if you are” (66). In a way,

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it is this filling in of something that should be left silent that constitutes what Enid will come to reject in her own moral understanding. Enid fantasized about confronting Rupert in the rowboat he kept by the pond on his farm, giving him a choice between pushing her overboard and drowning her – she would tell him truthfully that she couldn’t swim – or confessing and going to prison, where she would visit him faithfully. As we read of her plan to wear a fine silk dress and matching suede shoes when she visits Rupert after the funeral, we see time noted abruptly: “She had been awake now three nights in a row, awake every minute, and she had not been able to eat, even to fool her mother” (70). The weight, the duration, of this time hits us quickly but resoundingly – three days of being awake every minute. And yet, would we trust our own judgment in Enid’s state of mind, in that suspended abnormality of wakefulness? When Rupert graciously invites her into his recently transformed living room, a particular memory and thought enters Enid’s mind: “Lies. I bet it’s all lies.” Of all the words that Mrs. Quinn said in that room, “lies” is the one that sticks. Enid looks back on her overall experience with dying patients, how their minds could “fill up with all kinds of trash and organize that trash in a most convincing way.” Her own mind, when she slept in this room to keep near her patient, “had filled up with the most disgusting inventions, with filth. You can never say, Nobody could make that up” (74). Enid also recalls a vision she’d had when she was a child of four or five. She had gone into her father’s office and seen him with a woman on his lap and one of her breasts bare. Not knowing the word for breast, she told her mother it looked like an ice cream cone, “the wrong end sticking into her father’s mouth.” In a year or so Enid saw the rightness of her mother’s verdict that it must have been a silly dream, too silly to tell her daddy. Enid’s recollection ends with one word: “Lies” (75). The subtlety of this perhaps mistaken verdict speaks volumes untouched by the author. The reader might wonder, Was this why Enid remained an only child? Had her mother actually believed her daughter’s story, or convinced herself it was the stuff of bad dreams? What we do know is that the memory has returned to Enid in a way that enables her to remain silent. Standing with Rupert in the living room, Enid then realizes that she can choose to live in a time and state of not knowing anything more than what everyone else believes about Mr. Willens, that he had driven himself off the road and into the river, “on purpose or by accident.” And if she did not choose to confront Rupert about the incident, this house and her life held an entirely different possibility from the one she had been living with (or glorifying in ) for the last few days. That possibility was coming closer to her, and


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all she needed to was keep quiet and let it come. Through her silence, her collaboration in a silence, what benefits could bloom: For others, and for herself. This was what most people knew. A simple thing that it had taken her so long to understand. This was how to keep the world habitable. [Emphasis added.]

As readers, we can surmise that Enid and Rupert must have gotten married, because the story began with a description of an optometrist’s kit that had been donated to the town museum – most probably the result of Enid’s careful cleaning and reorganizing of the farmhouse she was to occupy. The written story ends, however, as Enid waits for Rupert to find the oars he has hidden in the bushes to row her out onto the pond, her stated purpose now merely to take a photograph of the scenic shoreline. As if to savor this fresh new direction of time whose path she has helped to clear, she concentrates on the gentle motion of the boat, “a slight and secretive motion,” so that “she could feel as if everything for a long way around had gone quiet” (76). Not only do we appreciate the deep layering of experience that has gone behind this duration of silence, but we can also reflect on the mysterious moral dimensions that exude from it. Factored in are her school years with Rupert, his quiet devotion to Enid as he sat behind her in high school, even though she had been part of the group of girls who teased him in grade school; the unlikelihood of his ever staying in touch with her after high school, given their different occupations and social status; and Enid’s instinctive understanding of Rupert’s essential goodness and dignity – after all, he never reacted to their teasing other than to blush, nor did he ever return his wife’s caustic assaults. Otherwise we would not imagine that this story might have a reasonably positive ending. By this we mean that the ending looks toward a duration of time that might contain the flowering of the love of this good woman and its doubtlessly grateful reciprocation by the man she chose not to ask about Mr. Willens. Indeed, Enid’s decision to remain silent is a moral one, a judgment of sorts, one that went against the received ethical and juridical tenets of civil society. If Enid’s silence seems the crowning achievement of her loving nature, we are led to this conviction by Munro’s ingenious temporal rearrangement of the moral cosmos. As the critic Ailsa Cox notes, Munro’s fiction is noteworthy for its dialogue between past and present, in which her stories move back and forth in time but also compact time in layers.10 Enid, Cox asserts, “harnesses the capacity for silence induced by marginality to win self-empowerment. She resorts to the classically female tactics of manipulation, to get her man.”11 We might share Cox’s perspective that Enid’s role as a nurse marginalizes her socially in relation to Rupert and his children, whom she has provided the maternal attention they lacked from their own mother. But we can also see that

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Enid’s privileged upbringing and decision to sacrifice her upper-middle-class comforts to become a practical nurse for homebound dying patients gives her a different kind of marginalization, that rare species distinguished by a near saintly choice of life work. The fact that Enid chooses not to take on another difficult assignment after Mrs. Quinn’s death silently alerts us to her heart’s refocusing, rather than what Cox terms a female tactic of manipulation. “Getting her man” comes across more as Enid’s quiet dedication to care for Rupert and his children, this mysterious possibility that promises to benefit others as well as herself. If her tactics of silence and non-confrontation are compatible and effective within the society’s male-oriented power structure, we also see that there is another power base at work: the slowly acquired wisdom and forgiveness of a loving heart. The duration of Enid’s life of tending the sick, preceded by her school experience and the wordless bond she shared with Rupert, prepare her for what can be construed as an act of heroism. As mentioned at the beginning of this paper, Bergson has stated that “heroism may be the only way to love [it] cannot be preached [it] is a return to movement, and emanates from an emotion akin to the creative act”.12 Enid’s openness to a new life with Rupert suggests a morally creative act, based on an time-earned intuition that is built upon her reconstructed memory and her desire to act for the greater good of all concerned. As Gilles DeLeuze writes in Bergsonism, “Bergson saw intuition not as an appeal to the ineffable, but as a true method. This method sets out, firstly, to determine the conditions of problems, to expose false problems or wrongly posed questions, and to discover the variables under which a given problem must be stated as such.” Here we might think of the question Enid first thought of asking Rupert, giving him the choice of either drowning her or turning himself in to the police. “The means used by intuition are, on the one hand, a cutting up or division of reality in a given domain,” [the domain of Munro’s rural Canadian society, for example] “according to lines of different natures” [such as the natures of Rupert and Mrs. Quinn] “and, on the other hand, an intersection of lines which are taken from various domains and which converge.” Here we might see the domains of Enid’s and Rupert’s lives converging. DeLeuze continues: “It is this complex linear operation, consisting in a cutting up according to articulations and an intersecting according to convergences, which leads to the proper posing of a problem, in such a way that the solution itself depends on it.”13 In Munro’s fiction we observe the creative embodiment of this “complex linear operation” as something both linear, as in the narrative text, and as something cut up and rearranged according to the mysterious operations of feeling, memory,


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and desire for moral resolution. “The Love of a Good Woman” demonstrates that Munro’s fiction at its best explores not only the lived experience of duration, but also elucidates how intuition as it is fully earned can rearrange the moral cosmos. Another indelible story in the Munro canon is “The Children Stay,” also in the collection The Love of a Good Woman. The main character, Pauline, finds herself married to a man, Brian, who cannot bear to take a vacation without his parents, whose conversational skills – except for late at night in bed – consist in turning everything into vaguely mocking jokes or put-downs, and whose father-in-law has a subtle but insidious animosity toward her. Before the story’s turning point, the narrator observes, “[Brian] and Pauline never have much to say to each other (though sometimes there’s an affinity they feel ; there’s an awareness of not looking at each other, lest their look should reveal a bleakness that would discredit others)” (183). Then a young amateur theater director offers Pauline the title role of Euridice in Jean Anouilh’s version of the Orpheus myth. He, Jeffrey, is 25, a year younger than Pauline, strongwilled and resentful of “academic snots” and “social twits” who did not support his theater project (187). In comparison to the intensity of their Sunday afternoon play rehearsals, where she felt “detached and solitary,” “urban,” and “in the glare of an important dream,” Pauline’s home life seemed “ragged and tedious” (188). Soon she and Jeffrey enter into a passionate affair, and Jeffrey insists that they run away together. So powerful is their attraction that Pauline agrees tragically leaving behind the two young daughters she loves. At the time she was not thinking about them. The narrator comments that she had been living in “married complicity” and feels able to achieve the fully alive feeling that one “doesn’t have to strive for but only to give in to like breathing or dying” when she is making love with Jeffrey, when “the weight that bears down on her has Jeffrey’s heart in it, also his habits, thoughts, peculiarities, his ambition and loneliness (that for all she knows may have mostly to do with his youth)” (210). Only after her first full night with Jeffrey, when the die is cast, does she perceive “a large bleak fact coming at her it’s been waiting, cruelly nudging at her ever since she woke up, or even all night. Caitlin and Mara” (211). When she calls Brian to tell him that she has left him for Jeffrey, his bitter nonnegotiable reply is “The children stay.” At this stage, she realizes, going back to him would be like pulling a sack over her head. He might forgive her but would never get over it. Neither would she, though “they’d go on as people did” (212). What follows is an enormous time shift. Pauline is much older, her children grown. The narrative observes tersely that the acute pain Pauline felt at losing her daughters “will become chronic.” Chronic is then defined as permanent

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but perhaps not constant, something you won’t die of but will never be free of. Jeffrey did not stay with Pauline for long, we learn, but the narrative voice, perhaps Pauline’s, explains, “It isn’t his fault. He’s still an innocent or a savage, who doesn’t know there’s a pain so durable in the world.” The devastating resolution continues: Say to yourself, You lose them anyway. They grow up. For a mother there’s always waiting this private slightly ridiculous desolation. They’ll forget this time, in one way or another they’ll disown you. Or hang around till you don’t know what to do about them, the way Brian has. And still, what pain. To carry along and get used to until it’s only the past she’s grieving for and not any possible present.

Small consolation comes from reading that Pauline’s children don’t hate her, but neither do they forgive her. “Perhaps they wouldn’t have forgiven her anyway, but it would have been for something different” (213). The pain Pauline is experiencing, of course, is terribly silent. It was felt almost immediately when she made her getaway from Brian, but perhaps not immediately enough. The one factor in her story that is never discussed is how she might have planned things better, how she might have taken her little girls with her. But with a moment’s reflection we can see that the nature of her escape, its duration as it were, could have happened only in a flash of blindness and silence about the kind of love that a mother feels, the source of chronic pain that Jeffrey, savage innocent that he was, could not imagine. Another huge area of silence, narrative-wise, is what happened to Pauline during all those years after she broke off with Jeffrey, when she lived without being able to nurture and be nurtured by mothering her children. There is no indication of other lovers, career moves, any sense of personal achievement, just the nondescript carrying on until the past is what she grieves for without hope for any possible present. However, it is this vast empty tract of personal duration that stretches the moral parameters for Munro’s readers. Reflecting about her situation, we wonder how Pauline could have done otherwise and remained within her integrity, however benighted. Stay with Brian? He is ultimately aptly described as a child that hung around till his parents didn’t know what to do about him. The dissonance of her complicitous marriage could easily have resulted in children who would find something else not to forgive in their parents – especially in their mother, where daughters tend to affix blame. What about the moral priority of mother love? Readers know that Pauline wanted to talk to Brain about the children, but by then he had the upper hand and was vindictive enough to insist on custody, derisively telling the girls their mother had run off with “Orphee” (213). Yes, a mother’s love remains supreme as a moral value, but it is revealed as such in this narrative by the fact that Pauline’s grown daughters do not forgive her for


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leaving, and by the worse fact that the duration of her life without fulfilling her role as their mother is one of chronic, acute pain. Unlike “The Love of a Good Woman,” this story conjures up the silence of pain that cannot be avoided if one acts upon the limited self-knowledge and desires of the moment. Pauline’s life-changing moment was youthful, impassioned, unaware of enduring consequences, but true to her needs and desires. Only the arrogant would claim to have acted more wisely in her circumstances. We can only empathize with the blind irreversibility of youthful choices – which cannot be ignored if one wants to live as truthfully as possible. In matters like this, the urge to pass moral judgments is best deferred to silence. Here again, Munro’s fiction illustrates how Bergson’s view of intuition as a method of determining the conditions of problems, identifying wrongly posed questions and discovering the variables under which given problems can be stated. She does this by creating a resonant, questioning silence around too easily framed moral issues. What this narrative leaves unsaid encourages readers to employ intuition that acknowledges the difficulty of applying preconceived moral judgments to the painful but perhaps inevitable choices of women in stifling circumstances. To close on a more positive note, I should mention the liberating experience Munro portrays when her characters finally decipher a bewildering silence, as the narrator daughter does in “Before the Change,14 ” and when the seemingly irrational destruction of property performed by another character, Liza in “Vandals,”15 brings retribution and protection to two victims of a man’s cruelty. In “Before the Change,” the daughter of a small town physician comes home from college to help out her ailing father, and cannot understand why he so limits what he says in front of the mean-spirited older woman who serves as his assistant and seems to supervise nearly everything about his professional practice. His determined silence and self-censorship has damaged their father– daughter relationship and left her uncertain about her own identity. Only after his death, when the estate attorney is shocked that there is no appropriate inheritance left for her, does she realize that her father’s prune-faced assistant had been blackmailing him for nearly all of his income in return for her silence. It was before the days of legalized abortion, and her father had taken in “special cases” of desperate young women whose lives would otherwise be ruined by out-of-wedlock pregnancies. The one time the daughter had to substitute for her father’s assistant, she could see his great care and kindness toward these terrified, determined young women. She finally reasons that he might have defiantly endured his victimization – it was only money he lost, not his integrity or his ability to help those in need – out of compassion. “For love, then. Never rule that out” (292). The understanding of her father’s

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honorable silence frees her from doubts about his love for her, and brings closure to her painful memories of a fiancé who had asked her to abort his child because his career as a Christian clergyman or theologian in those days would have been destroyed if she were to give birth a few months too soon after the wedding. She had given her baby up for adoption and ended the engagement. The unmailed letters to this man, which constitute the story’s narrative, end by wishing him – sincerely, not angrily – good luck. “I send you my love Take care of yourself.” For a final flourish, she closes with an example she first got from him of “a statement that makes no sense because the subject doesn’t exist” (262): “Remember – the present King of France is bald” (292). She whimsically, perhaps significantly, changes “former” King to “present.” The humor clinches her liberation. A long duration of perplexity regarding her father’s silence, once understood, has confirmed the integrity she shares with her father – he by performing abortions, she by refusing to abort. Once again our moral cosmos is rearranged by Munro’s fiction, through the duration of silence that yields new dimensions of intuition. Liza, in “Vandals,” has been asked by an old friend and former neighbor, the wealthy heiress Bea Doud, to go with Warren, Liza’s husband of one year, to check on the house she had lived in with Ladner, her lover of many years, after a severe snowstorm. Ladner, a fiercely antisocial taxidermist who seemed incapable of loving anyone and clearly did not love Bea, is hospitalized and near death. Liza and her brother Kenny had been young kids who lived across the road from Ladner’s densely forested property in a rented farmhouse. Liza had observed with disgust and compassion for Bea how Ladner would mock and insult her behind her back. At one point, to console Bea for a humiliation she had not seen but on some level surely must have felt, she had given Bea the gift of her most precious keepsake. It was a rhinestone earring she’d found on the road, but she allowed Bea to believe it had belonged to her late mother. Later, when the childless Bea offered to pay for Liza’s college, Liza accepted, thinking “Okay, she’s got lots” (275). Eventually we discover that Liza does not only have Bea’s insulted dignity in mind as she quietly, exuberantly trashes Ladner’s place, destroying his carefully stuffed animals and birds, overturning bookcases, pouring whiskey, maple syrup, flour and ashes on his floors, and writing in Magic Marker on his wall “The Wages of Sin is Death” (283). Since she was a young girl she has held the mute memory of Ladner’s sexual molestation of herself and her brother under the dark cover of his tall trees. Her silence about this, however, is maintained; its horror revealed in tactful brevity by the narrator. We are also informed of Liza’s personal discovery that she, not Bea, is the only one she knows who will stand up to Ladner’s evil. As a girl she had thought,


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“Bea could spread safety, if she wanted to. All that is needed is for her to turn herself into a different sort of woman, a hard-and-fast, draw-the-line sort, clean-sweeping, energetic, and intolerant. None of that. Not allowed. Be good. The woman who could rescue them – who could make them all, keep them all, good.” But in time Liza realizes, “What Bea has been sent to do, she doesn’t see. Only Liza sees” (293). The narrative silence in this wickedly delightful, morally satisfying story seems to center upon how on earth Liza managed to grow up so emotionally healthy, how she impressed her young husband who trusts and admires her so much that he ends up helping out with her calm, uncrazed vandalism. As they leave he thoughtfully boards up the back door window he has just broken, telling Liza deadpan: “Otherwise animals could get in” (294). He was, of course, curious about why she was so angry at these people, Bea and Ladner, but accepts her insouciant reply, “Who’s mad?” They both laugh when she says, “I already told you what she did to me. She sent me to college!” (283) College wasn’t her cup of tea, but that’s beside the point. She loved Bea. What we do know and appreciate is her defiantly nonchalant sense of humor, and respect for her own powers of moral observation. She chose to join a Christian fellowship, where she met Warren, and that must have offered her some sense of community, but even there her uninhibited love of music and dancing set her apart from the others. Fortunately Warren was proud of her for it, and no doubt for her other qualities. We are, too, but are clueless how she made it out of Ladner’s dark forest intact. How did she keep to herself his offense to her and her brother, and to Bea, until she could enact fitting retribution – one that would keep the unseeing Bea safe from the temptation to return to Ladner’s toxic domain after his death? Liza could see what Bea couldn’t: how to insist upon the moral universe that was right for her and for those she cared for, and how to rearrange it when necessary. That is the genius of Alice Munro’s fiction, partly achieved through the duration of silence. Bergson would be proud. Marymount Manhattan College NOTES 1

O’Rourke, Meghan (2004). “The Highbrow Tricked Up: Alice Munro Rebels against Realism,” posted Dec. 1, in Slate, http://slate.msn.com/id/2111297/. 2 Bergson, Henri (2001 [1913]). Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F.L. Pogson. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc. p. 183. 3 Op. cit., 209. 4 Op. cit., 219.

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Op. cit., 240. Bergson, Henri (2002 [1974, 1946]). The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Mabelle L. Andison. New York: Kensington Publishing Corp., p. 135. 7 Bergson, Henri (2002) Key Writings, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson and John Mullarkey. New York: Continuum, p. 321. 8 Munro, Alice (1999). The Love of a Good Woman: Stories. New York: Vintage Books, 22. Henceforth page citations will be given in text and refer to this edition. 9 Gorra, Michael (1998). “Crossing the Threshold: In Alice Munro’s Stories, Characters Are Poised on the Brink of Changing World,” New York Times, Nov. 1. 10 Cox, Ailsa (2004) Alice Munro. In Writers and Their Work, ed. Isobel Armstrong. Horndon, Tavistock, Devon, UK: Northcote House Publishers Ltd, pp. 43, 41. 11 Ibid., p. 53. 12 Ibid., p. 321. 13 DeLeuze, Gilles (2002 [1996]) Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberiam. New York: Zone Books, pp. 115–116. 14 Also in The Love of a Good Woman, cited above. 15 In Munro’s collection Open Secrets (New York: Vintage Books, 1994). 6

VICTOR GERALD RIVAS

ON THE DISTINCTION OF TRAGEDY AND PATHOS THROUGH THE PERUSAL OF HENRY JAMES’S THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

“Let your life speak.” Old Quaker saying

Modern average individual is an heteroclite being: on the one hand, he maintains that he is utterly original and self-sufficient and that there is no law or orderliness above him, whereby he and only he knows how to rule his life; on the other hand, he bows to platitudes and beliefs that he himself assesses aberrant or preposterous, just in order to gain the acceptance and company of others, which, however, he just tolerates as a want imposed by the physical conditions of existence. Thus, halfway between autonomy and alienation, average individual time and time again faces the series of personal upheavals and tears that have given rise to the odd idea that modern life is tragic by itself to a lot greater extent than the woefulness that an ancient individual should stand, according to the Hellenic rises of tragedy, for there is not even a pitiful deity that saves modern man from doom, which entails a metaphysical bereavement that would be enough to destroy him without further ado if he had not both reason and imagination to overcome it while he performs his social duties. Of course, this solution is not utterly sound because it does not span the difference of inward and outward determinations, whereby the individual is compelled to choose between normality and originality, as it were: either he is efficient but dull or he is free but outlandish. Now, whatever his decision is, he must make it in a certain moment of his life, unless he opts for going on in the split, which would be tantamount to relinquishing his own being and resigning himself to be something worse than a vegetable, which is unacceptable in principle. Thus, whether he chooses or not, he is in anycase always in the middle of such a stress and uprooting that he can claim that he, and not the ancient hero, is the real tragic individual, which is precisely what we intend to criticize. Indeed, the main thesis of these lines will be that although modern individual faces mental derangement 187 A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana LXXXVI, 187–207. © 2007 Springer.

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and can be crushed by woefulness, just as the ancient one, his existence has nothing to do with the tragic ideal of transcendence that is fulfilled through wretchedness and death because the ontological framework that the modern conception of life implies is utterly different: firstly, it is based on the idea that the elemental strengths of life are psychological or rather emotional, and even when one states that they are irreducible to a rational scheme, everyone is anyhow supposed to master them by willpower; instead, tragedy assumes that those strengths are physical or rather metaphysical, inherent to reality in all its manifestations, whereby man cannot subject them to his purposes. Secondly, modern life denies that there is transcendence whatever beyond the imaginative projection of each one, whereas tragedy postulates that the psychological aspect of the issue is dispensable and that what must be taken into account is the substantial transfiguration of the individual. Thirdly, modern life reduces any vital conflict to the operative opposition of the inward and the outward determinations, natural or socio-cultural functions that everyone must perform efficiently and indifferently, which is inconceivable for the tragic awareness that the only aim of existence is the fulfilment of fate. Fourthly, modern life implies that vital success or failure is tantamount to sliding as comfortably as possible through the double dimension (individual and socio-historical) thereof, whereas the tragic vision embraces both the worldly function and the transcendent aim by the action of fate, whereby the pain and the suffering that the individual must bear are irrelevant. Fifthly, modern life implies that the individual is always ontologically alone, for he has no way to share with anyone else the conflict that defines his being; instead, the tragic hero is always accompanied by others (even by the dead and the absent ones) and is determined by reality as a whole. Sixthly, modern life demands that everyone stands for others and simultaneously that his identity is not considered exceptional (for it would contradict the evenness of the process), whereas the tragic hero is unique in principle. Seventhly and lastly, although modern life links imagination and outward performance (whereby it always implicates an endless competitiveness), it evolves through the same ontological plane, which accounts for why it is doomed to boredom and unsettledness; instead, tragedy avoids this insofar as it aims at a superior way of being that is not abstractly ruled by emotional strengths or by economic standards. Now, this series of differences, although illustrative and useful, is still negative and does not provide us with an adequate understanding of the matter, for what is at stake here is not the rejection of modern life on behalf of the greatness of tragedy but the explanation of why the modern dictum that life as such is tragic is completely absurd; taking into account, furthermore, that when

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someone upholds that, he does not mean the awful socio-historical phenomena that have smashed the ideality of mankind from the onset of history (war, poverty and so forth) but the would-be horrors of individual existence, which, as we have evinced, are reducible to the opposition of the imaginative selfprojections that cram the individual mind and, on the other hand, the causality determining objective reality. Then, in order to peruse the issue thoroughly, it is necessary to unfold in detail the double determination (imaginative and socio-individual) of modern existence, which will allow us to explore why it is outright opposed to tragedy. Still more, inasmuch as modern life is average in principle (remember that the very ground of modern philosophy is that there is no essential difference among the individuals’ understanding and that the diversity and even opposition that is observed among men is due to the way each one orders his thought in accordance with his particular experience,1 which goes hand in hand with the idea that the temporal and immanent framework of life is the same for everyone), it will be preferable to refer to it hereafter by the term “average”, which is better withal because it emphasises the normalization and lack of metaphysical transcendence that modernity has always upheld on postulating consciousness as the touchstone of reality and life, whether it is properly intellectual or not, as it happens in the axial trend of modern thought that has criticised the predominance of the Cartesian cogito but has anyhow upheld that consciousness is the ground of whatever individual reality,2 which is another way of stating that life cannot be ruled by individual will and simultaneously by fate, for the latter belies both consciousness and self-determination, which are precisely the two props of average life. Stricto sensu, the tragic hero does not act because he is carried away by fate (whereby he is finally innocent), whereas the average individual acts, at least formally, because he means to.3 At any rate, inasmuch as tragedy is utterly opposed to individual determination,4 I think that it is not hard to conceive fate not as the unfathomable potency of reality but as an aberrant mental strength aimed against the consciousness of the individual, who feels that something ominous threatens him all the time, an absurd idea that is nevertheless corroborated by a phenomenon axial in the unfolding of consciousness: we mean the contradiction that everyone experiences between the planning of his existence and his innermost drives, a contradiction that at worst seems to be sparked off by an evil entity that expresses itself through the mental upheaval, which, of course, requires that the individual does not take it as a daydream, let alone that he feigns it as a self-deceit to justify his stints or his impotency to overcome a particular problem; he must perceive the existence of a drive alien to his will so that the conflict carries him away to the point that he feels on the verge of madness. Thus, to identify fate and

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self-determination or, in other words, tragedy and average life, the existence of an evil drive that acts, as it were, by itself, should be accepted. Although the drive at issue could seem aberrant at first sight, its existence has been widely acknowledged from the onset of history by the most diverse ways of thinking such as myth, religion and philosophy, which, despite their differences, have coincided on considering it an elemental potency, both of man and of the rest of reality. Let us recall, for instance, the essential proclivity of soul that in accordance with the metaphysical and religious traditions alike compels everyone to fight against himself all the time or to shirk his duty, which is the origin of distress and bane for most people, who get carried away by the innermost drives that, despite reason, stand for wickedness as such, whereof the best testimony is doubtless (withal the biblical passage of the temptation in Eden that is narrated in Genesis III) the myth that Plato unfolds in the Phaedrus, 247b ff., where the philosopher says that the soul (figured as a chariot with two horses, one whereof is evil), lurches along the sky and finally falls to the earth, carried away by carelessness and opinion (248b-d). In sooth, the history of metaphysics could be seen as the failed endeavour to overcome the irrational opposition of self-consciousness and untameable vital drives. Now, what defines the modern approach to this phenomenon is that it is psychological throughout and explains its object as the outcome of a mental unsettledness: in the very core of consciousness, a strength that resists the rational determination is perceived as a sullen agent that plays havoc with everyone’s will when least expected and appears either in a gruesome or a meaningless aspect, which is the true rise of the horror that it brings about, for it acts either violently or as quietly as a predator that were about to rush at its prey and whose motionlessness went hand in hand with its hidden wildness. That is to say, the horror does not lie perforce in facing the drive but it also is perceptible in the wait thereof.5 Therefore, expectation and splitting tally with what has been meaningfully considered from time immemorial as the embodiment of wickedness itself, whose name cannot be other than “the beast”, a term that stands for the irrationality and ferociousness wherewith the strength smashes the identity and normality whereon average life is based. In the light of tradition, the real arms of this drive are the self-confidence that so easily turns into pride or the bewilderment that prevents everyone from assuming the risks of life, and the fact that either of them deranges the individual suggests that he falls into the clutches of the beast because of the prejudice that he is the only master of his life, which prevents him from fleeing evil. For beyond the metaphor, the beast is nothing but the consciousness of one’s own blindness with regard to a doom that one cannot ken as one should because of self-confidence, which contradicts, on the other


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hand, the unconsciousness of the tragic hero with regard to fate, whereby he acts as freely as if he were not doomed to bane (which is so terribly embodied by Oedipus).6 On the contrary, insofar as modern reason has flatly denied the existence of whatever vital determination that works independently from or against man (for it is stated that life is essentially positive and always acts in favour of the individual),7 it is impossible to uphold the existence of fate; thereat, either the individual apparently dismisses his fear to the unforeseeable or is carried away by it (that is to say, either he is an operative sceptic or a conflictive dogmatic), which is what happens in one of the most fascinating stories ever written, The Beast in the Jungle, a masterwork by Henry James,8 the plot of which can briefly be told: an average man misses his only opportunity to love and enjoy a full life because of the insurmountable awareness that he is doomed to be the prey of some evil, unknown entity: Something or other lay in wait for him, amid the twists and the turns of the months and the years, like a crouching beast in the jungle. It signified little whether the crouching beast were destined to slay him or to be slain. The definite point was the inevitable spring of the creature; and the definite lesson from that was that a man of feeling didn’t caused himself to be accompanied by a lady on a tiger-hunt. Such was the image under which he had ended by figuring his life.9

It must be emphasised that the odd, almost preposterous consciousness whereof we speak is not for the character a subterfuge to avoid duty or love but, quite the contrary, it crushes him inwardly while he tries to resist it and performs efficiently his social role of a middle-aged bureaucrat who shares his spare time with an only friend, a woman who spontaneously promises to help him to face fate, which he accepts with a certain reluctance, for he thinks that although her solidarity and bounty are sublime, they are at any rate useless because his doom is only his, and there is no way for her to alleviate his distress. This element traces for him the grey horizon wherein his existence unfolds, propped by relations, functions and events that, he maintains, carries out or experiences mostly nonchalantly, as if they were not much for him,a feature that is expressed by the name of the character, the most common and meaningless that could have been expected: John Marcher, someone who marches on, hardly perceiving anything or being perceived by anyone, for he is utterly immersed in the foreboding of his doom: “ It was his theory, as always, that he was lost in the crowd”,10 which is not due to his coyness but to his perfunctoriness with regard to whatever was alien to his obsession that, on the contrary, compels him to be deeply heedful of the slightest sound, which evinces that unique mixture of absorption and shortsightedness typical of average man, who, precisely when he must rise to the occasion, discovers

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that it is all the same for him provided that he will go on at his ease, which does not imply either that he is not sociable or mindful of others but that all this is for him merely incidental and does not stand for his real existence, which lies in expecting the fulfilment of his doom with a concentration that could be easily mistaken for the zest wherewith others devote themselves to praiseworthy ideals, such as humanitarian ones. Thereat, the more the individual deals with others and becomes engrossed in a social life (whether this is apparently intimate or not), the more he is lost in a helter-skelter routine where everyone else is an alien, which is what happens with May Bartram, Marcher’s friend, who, despite her having shared all her life with him, is almost as unknown for him after her death as she had been when they met for the first time, which is brutally evidenced by the fact that at her burial, none of the mourners recognizes Marcher as an acquaintance of hers, let alone as the hub of her life: A woman might have been, as it were, everything to him, and it might yet present him in no connexion that any one seemed held to recognise The concourse at her grave was not numerous, but he saw himself treated as scarce more nearly concerned with it than if there had been a thousand others. He was in short from this moment face to face with the fact that he was to profit extraordinarily little by the interest May Bartram had taken in him. He couldn’t quite have said what he expected, but he hadn’t surely expected this approach to a double privation.11

This privation stands for the total meaninglessness that coexistence has for average individual because what he most eagerly strives for is the utter control of whichever drive or feeling, not precisely in order to quench them but to defend his privacy: furthermore, this inward isolation is not for the consolidation of a personal independence, much less for the formation of moral character, but for a regulated mindfulness that allows everyone to perform what he considers important so as to go on engrossed and be able to set aside anything else, which entails that average life is outwardly a series of incidental fields and relations linked by willpower, by a mental endeavour or at worst by simple convenience. This changes existence throughout into an inward drama, the end of which will be tantamount to an apotheosis. Thus, the individual’s identity and all the meaning of his life hinge upon the fulfilment of the mental doom, which, nevertheless, has an odd consequence: future is bereft of its vital meaning, for this lies in the possibility of facing and above all of overcoming the unforeseeable and in the wish that this will be blessed and not woeful; in sooth, future is the ground of the vital temporality, for past means a dimension already overcome and present has consistency only as an anticipation; neither of them are able to enliven when there is no future at hand and one remembers the wan image of something that never will be again or perceives an instant that sinks into the nothingness


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of immediacy. Now, when the potency of future is reduced to the foreboding of a preposterous confrontation, life perforce loses its transcendent unity, because this, as has just been said, accrues from the wish that the conundrum of future will be solved blessedly, which is unthinkable when doom is anticipated and the individual must, as it were, be inwardly on a war footing. Thus, the consciousness of doom is not a condition among others for the pathos of average life; on the contrary, it is the reason why unsettledness and fulfilment are considered the same and also why the specific outcome thereof is finally unimportant: “When the possibilities themselves had accordingly turned stale, when the secret of the gods had grown faint, had perhaps even quite evaporated, that, and that only, was failure. It wouldn’t have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything”.12 This meaninglessness of the concrete outcome of doom (and, above all, of life as such) must not be mistaken for a conception of life “beyond good and evil” as Nietzsche’s (that is to say, alien to the moral inherent to western metaphysics and, concretely, to the modern interpretation thereof that goes hand in hand with the trends of Christianity developed from Luther onwards), for it does not entail that haplessness or glee must be accepted with the same gallantry because they are alike vital phenomena, but something very different: that life is endowed with a metaphysical profundity that prevails over the clumsiness of the individual because he has been appointed or rather anointed to face doom, which implies, on the other hand, that the rest of life is dispensable because it does not matter compared with the supreme feat, which, despite horror, calls for eagerness and excitation. Thereat, the innermost want of the individual is not to overcome doom but to fulfil it at once, to solve the wait to which his life has been reduced so as to evince that it is not useless, for after all his life is just that very wait and nothing more, and if there were not haplessness to face at the end, he would irremediably have lost his only possibility to be he himself, the exceptional prey of violence, and would be a shrub. Now, oddly enough, the individual would lose his life at any rate if his doom were fulfilled at once, for then he should only face the monotonous consistency of time. Indeed, what should he live for if he had overcome the only instant that he was to face, the one that was going to make him an anointed being? Thus, he must simultaneously be ready to meet doom and to shirk it at all costs so as to make the wait more thrilling (that is to say, the life). For its part, doom must somehow be perceptible in the trifles of everyday tasks (for the individual could otherwise lose hope) but must be absent from the transcendental choices so as to tally with the emotional stream that leads the individual to his inwardness,13 which confirms

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the odd meaninglessness of both life and doom and accounts for why Marcher wonders whether “ the great thing he had so long felt as in the lap of the gods was no more than this circumstance, which touched him so nearly, of [May Bartram] acquiring a house in London”.14 If the condition sine qua non for the fulfilment of doom is that it is never fulfilled (for life would immediately be subdued to a useless continuity that would be tantamount to death), then everything can equally betoken it, whether it is something as dispensable as a move that does not stand finally for a real closeness; Marcher remains the same throughout the story, and that is why after so many years of waiting, he is still as blind as he was at the onset and cannot answer if his doom has been fulfilled or not: The change from his old sense to his new was absolute and final: what was to happen had so absolutely and finally happened that he was as little able to know a fear for his future as to know a hope; so absent in short was any question of anything still to come. He was to live entirely with the other question, that of his unidentified past, that of his having to see his fortune impenetrably muffled and masked.15

Thus, it is the belief in one’s own doom that prevents the individual from becoming and enjoying, which shows why average life, instead of aiming to the future, is wasted in the opposition of inward and outward determinations that do not yield wisdom at all. Whereas May appears when she is about to die as “ the picture of a serene and exquisite sphinx, whose head, or indeed all whose person, might have been powdered with silver”,16 Marcher has not advanced an inch to the solution of his original foreboding and ignores if he has still to face something or if he has done it inadvertently, reason why he acts after May’s death as he had always acted, as someone with no link whatever with reality bar his obsession: he goes on a long trip and visits some places in Asia that have been considered the summit of spirituality, and in all of them he meets an identical emptiness, because he feels that his woe is superior to everything: “ For a man who had known what he had known the world was vulgar and vain”.17 The case is that the immediate outcome of May’s death is to evince again that others are not worthy to know his secret and that he must go on as always, sliding through life without revealing his innermost being, which changes both his past and his present into “a long act of dissimulation”.18 This leads us to the very ground of our identification of James’s character with the average individual: the final insensitiveness that agrees with the meaninglessness of vital experience. As a matter of fact, it could be expected that an existence unceasingly shaken, such as Marcher’s, would be, if not more absorbing, at least more thrilling, insofar as the passage of time leads


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to the fulfilment of doom; however, the cleavage of inward and outward planes (which, as we have seen, prevails over the individual choices) and the reiteration of the same psychological framework (wait, uncertainty and disappointment) ends up quenching the original stir, which, on the other hand, was not as intense as it was supposed to be either: through the story, one makes out that Marcher oscillates from absentmindedness to pathos and obsession; for instance, when he re-encounters May after so many years of having accidentally met her, he can hardly remember when or where he met her for the first time, and it is she who reminds him of all the circumstances of their meeting, especially the reason why she kept him in mind for years and years: the spontaneous confession of his doom. When she asks him if his foreboding has been fulfilled and he says that it has not and underlines how overwhelming the wait has been for him, she asks him again: “Isn’t what you describe perhaps but the expectation – or at any rate the sense of danger, familiar to so many people – of falling in love?”19 And when he replies that he has been in love but it has not been overwhelming at all, she replies: “It hasn’t been love”. Thus, she distinguishes from the first moment between his obsession and the experience of having been carried away by a feeling, and grasps that notwithstanding the strength of his stir, he has never known the shades of an inward life, let alone of a shared one. Anyhow, she commits herself to wait with him the attack of the beast, a decision that seems bewildering considering that she has at once gained a whole vision of the issue and that she is aware of his shortsightedness. Why, then, does she promise to devote her entire life to him? Why not leave him aside and go on, if she feels, withal, how he has “put marrying out of the question” and is not willing to make up for her staunchness and bounty? The answer is not that she is as foolish as him despite her keenness of sight, but that she enjoys a consciousness of life deeply enough to know that the strength of an emotion does not hinge upon the subject but upon the agent; in other words, she devotes herself to him simply because her sense tells her that he faces the possibility of a full existence precisely because of his foreboding. As Marcher feels straightaway, she has “a larger conception of singularity for him than he had for himself”, which is at bottom the knowledge of the real singularity of a human being, which lies simply in his way of facing time. This is why May Bartram’s attitude must not be mistaken for the dullness of a spinster who has missed the boat and clutches at a straw. If her choice is hard to understand it is precisely because it belies both common sense and the cunning that most people consider a requisite for landing a husband, and arises from an intuition as original as Marcher’s foreboding, which, nevertheless, has meaning utterly different since what she strives for is the fulfilment of

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an individual whereas he sighs for the reification of an obsession. At any rate, their approach to the matter is not contradictory in principle, inasmuch as the singularity of a human being perforce entails an ontological exception, which too is that whereof Marcher has all the time been conscious; the problem here is that he focuses his own doom from the standpoint of the average man, who bows to the prejudices and slants of his contemporaries without blenching, however much he complains of their shallowness, as if his foreboding betokened a mental unsettledness and not a possibility of leading a really original life, which would call for breaking with those platitudes that he instead takes for granted in spite of all that he feels. In a word, he is not up to his doom and consequently neither to May’s love, which he should requite according to the depth of a relationship based on the most original of all the vital drives: the amazement with regard to life, the sigh to figure it out and get its very rises beyond the limits of the own person, which is, nevertheless, something unattainable for him since, despite his having been endowed with an exceptional intuition, he always falls short of the target and does not understand either the innermost meaning of his foreboding, which is for enlivening both May and him, as she says when he wonders why she wastes her time with him: “If I’ve been ‘watching’ with you, as we long ago agreed I was to do, watching’s always in itself an absorption”.20 There is no room for boredom, spleen or disappointment when one is devoted to a cause that implies both love and everyday coexistence, which in this case lies in helping an “average man” to become “a man like another”.21 The similarity of these two expressions is hardly verbal for, in fact, they have nothing to do with each other: the former means the determination of life according to the basic opposition of inward and outward planes that has been perused so far, whereas the latter means the identity of universal integration and singular sensitiveness that characterizes the individual that has got his prime. Thus, at best the average individual partakes of general goals that allow him to go on unmolested; at worst, he flees a reality that is not up to him and becomes someone utterly unsettled, for there is no transcendence for a life that is subjective throughout, and despite someone is “neat”, “transgressor” or “outlandish”, he is anyhow reduced to an only emotional register that he cannot vary for he must keep an “image” that ends up being as overwhelming as doom, whereby the drives of the individual are so easily comparable with the rave that spins time and time again around the same. Instead, “a man like another” means someone who lacks in principle an only vital centre, bar the interest that he projects in all his activities, and carries everything out with the awareness that however relevant it is, it is anyhow as relative


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as life itself; thus, although he always develops one of his features over the others, he never neglects the whole of his interests and possibilities; quite the contrary, the predominance of one feature furthers his personal diversity and is simultaneously for the unity of his character; withal, since he always is immersed in the instant, he does not have to rely on an absolute certainty and accepts the stints of his understanding, which allows him to make the most of the one of others. He is also wont to go unnoticed not because of mediocrity but of the awareness that his personal importance stems from ideals that are not self-projections, which, oddly enough, is why he is more sensitive to everything than what the average individual (who brags of the strength of his drives) could ever be. In a word, this man cannot have an average existence because he makes out life as a possibility and not as an image that one must defend from unforeseeable or as a doom that one must suffer through the pettiness of everyday tasks. Thus, what May Bartram means when telling Marcher that she wants him to be “a man like another” is simply that he must take advantage of his foreboding and experience all the possibilities, both imaginative and real, that it entails (for instance, being a lover and not merely a companion), instead of reducing it to anguish and procrastination. At bottom, she perceives that he has not truly understood that the doom whereof he is so afraid subdues his life insofar as it deepens and enriches it: he “suffers”, yes, but only because he has (or rather should have) a reason to: pride. Now, the fact that she possesses the clue of his life whereas he ignores it, changes her into a figure more complex than one could have expected: she is not only a woman in love, she is also and to the same extent an oracle that, like the one of ancient tragedy, betokens fate through conundrums that can be solved just by the querient, for none deserves life if he has to hinge upon someone else’s wisdom to know what it brings him. That is why May keeps still throughout the story and acts as if she were the attendant of the drama when the fact is that she is the touchstone thereof, since Marcher’s uneasiness would be utterly preposterous if he did not have the company of hers. Alone, he would be a madman, whereas, with her, he is a hero who has resisted the utmost evil. Nevertheless, his acknowledgement of the part that she plays in his life takes place only at the end of a conversation, when, after having discussed if his attitude should be assessed as heroic or not, he perceives that she knows whereto his doom is aimed and that she tries to hide it from him so as to save him from horror: “You know, and you are afraid to tell me. It’s so bad that you are afraid that I’ll find out”,22 whereat she replies that he will never find it out. From that moment onwards, he starts to discover that their relationship has all the time been changing before his eyes although his own obsession

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has prevented him from realizing it. Then, he wonders what would happen if she died, a catastrophe that, of course, would not be “the catastrophe” but that would anyhow be just as crushing, or perhaps worse, considering that he should stand it alone and when the “real” bane finally came, it would be as meaningless as if it had never taken place because she, who is the only person up to it, would not attend it, an inkling reinforced by his discovery that she is very ill, which makes him think that if she died, she would have lost the main reason of her life, the revelation of his doom. Furthermore, the news of her illness comes together with the awareness of her age: all of a sudden he sees that she is no longer young and, consequently, that he is not either, which induces him to wonder if, after all, his would-be doom lies simply in losing her: “It would represent, as connected with his past attitude, a drop of dignity under the shadow of which his existence could only become the most grotesque of failures”,23 taking into account that if that were the case, he would be subject to the common fate of experiencing the loss of a beloved one and the subsequent loneliness, which would belie the direness wherein he has wholeheartedly believed. If she died, he would be a shrub and not the anointed one. All this evinces that Marcher never gets by himself the certainty of his own uniqueness and always relies on May’s keenness to understand the “metaphysical” (not to say “pathetic”) profundity of his life. Because of his shallow perception of everything, he demurs and becomes desperate time and time again, and if it were not for May, he would disparage himself, above all because he has been convinced from the onset that he is somehow a weak lunatic, almost a zany incapable of accomplishing his own existence, which is evident by the image wherewith he projects it: the beast, an evil potency that always is after him. This contrasts with May, who behaves all the time as if she were attending something wonderful. That is why, when he, already aware that she is ill and that her death is very close, asks again if he has not been a foolish, she replies enigmatically: “Whatever the reality, it is a reality. The door isn’t shut. The door’s open”.24 For although she does not clarify what the door is or whereto it is open, the case is that there is at least a possibility that Marcher is right and that he is really doomed to meet the beast or something as portentous as it. At bottom, the problem is that he has always considered that his foreboding is a shameful rave, whereby he does not understand why she says: “it’s never too late” and why she asks him if he does not know yet that what was going to happen has already happened, i.e., that he has met the beast and he has not realized it, a revelation that makes him think that, after all, his foreboding has brought him to the “stamp of the common doom”. Anyhow, his blindness remains total until the


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last conversation with her, when he asks for the umpteenth time if he has been wrong and why he has never felt what he was supposed to, whereat she replies: “You take your ‘feelings’ for granted. You were to suffer your fate. That was not necessarily to know it”.25 That is to say, the question of the would-be doom should have been answered not by the resistance against some dire threat or by the certainty of his being, but by the unfolding of his own sensibility, which is at the same time a lot more elemental and a lot more complex for him than the former option could have been. The alternative, then, is not set out between knowledge and feeling (as a romantic mind would put the matter) but between fear and sensibility. Whether Marcher is right or wrong in thinking that he always is about to fall into the beast’s clutches, there is no reason why he should have permanently lived aghast at it; the way he yields to the omnipresence of fear has nothing to do with the mere foreboding of evil, considering that this is the essential condition of life, for beyond hope or precaution, the fact is that man is utterly at the mercy of all those unforeseeable forms of evil that could change future into a permanent horror and prevent everyone from acting. For his part, Marcher could have made out his doom as the anticipation of an exploit or an accomplishment, which is, oddly enough, what he passes over systematically and why he is both guilty and despicable although he is not precisely wicked: thus, he never gets to think that he could defeat the beast and that his foreboding is in itself the first step to his triumph, since it allows him to be prepared to fight or, from another standpoint, to share a life that would have otherwise been wasted in loneliness. In other words, he should have been conscious that whatever the beast could stand for, it could not have bereft him of what he has enjoyed with May: years and years of company and understanding. At worst, even if his life ended in the direst wretchedness, he would have lived it fully, which is why May is right when she says that the door is always open for him and for anyone else. However, Marcher is incapable of seeing this. Shameful as this could seem, the outcome of all the years spent with May is not wisdom but bewilderment: with no transition, Marcher passes from fear and a childish expectation to sullen hopelessness. Contrary to the foreboding, his life has not led him to wretchedness but neither has it given him that sui generis lucidity that in the eyes of average man makes up for whatever mishap: May’s death is not heartrending, it is rather disappointing because it takes place without providing Marcher with the clue to solve his doom’s conundrum, and the same happens with his obsession, which is not potent enough to shake his dullness: although he is anxious, depressed or lost throughout, he never escapes the same emotional atony. What is worse, if

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May was right, the fulfilment of his doom went unnoticed for him, which would only confirm his inkling that he is an idiot, and that is why after May’s death he feels that he is “ powerless to turn away and yet powerless to penetrate the darkness of death.”26 This does not vary during his journey to Egypt and India, and when he is back he goes straightaway to the cemetery where May’s grave is; however, when he is there, he discovers that what he calls his life lies only in “ the sense that he once had lived”27 : all his life is a wizened remembrance that does not even inspire the yearning to recover it, which is not as upsetting as it should be, for, if one goes to the pith of the matter, it was only by May’s devotion that he succeeded in overcoming shame to discover an intimate world that, contrary to his inward drama, was not chaotic but full of possibilities. Thus, without her devotion, he had perforce to crumple up. It is necessary to underline this in order to understand why Marcher feels so empty when he should be plethoric by the mere awareness of having known an accomplished life with a woman who stood over all the others: instead, he fidgets about, fusses and at the end evinces that his past is a figure of pathos. Now, how is it possible that someone gets to the last stage of his vital development without his having made out the meaning thereof, which is, as May rightly felt, the possibility of becoming together with others, in this case, with her? The answer is that Marcher, the perfect embodiment of average man, was from the onset alien to the sensitive nature of existence, which, for him, was tantamount to the fulfilment of something that he changed into the absolute without his having really fathomed it: it was a lot easier to think that he was the anointed one (however much he should pay for it with distress and permanent uncertainty) than to relinquish his would-be uniqueness and start to live as “a man like another”. Thus, what Marcher passed over was that “since it was in Time that he was to meet his fate, so it was in Time that his fate was to have acted”,28 that is to say, that he should meet his doom instead of trying to avoid it by all the expedients within his reach, including the most important: May herself, who never was for him but a kind of attendant and passed away practically unnoticed. All this is blatant in the last scene of the story, wherein Marcher, who is paying one of his recurrent, useless, visits to May’s grave, notices a man that is standing a few steps from him, who is mourning for a beloved one while Marcher immerses himself in his accustomed perplexity. All of a sudden, when he advances towards the graveyard’s gate, he passes the stranger and kens by his face that he is crushed by a grief compared to which whatever Marcher had experienced is hardly a shiver. That man suffers as Marcher has never suffered and he shows it with such strength that his person as


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a whole is a symbol thereof, which awakens in Marcher a deep envy that changes straightaway into the consciousness that he is incapable of figuring out what human link could have sparked off a sorrow like that, for, despite the haplessness that has always hovered over him, he is utterly alien to emotion and cannot follow its traces over life. Thus, facing his impotence once more, he feels that “no passion had ever touched him, for this was what passion meant; he had survived and maundered and pined, but where had been his deep ravage?”29 There, at the sight of a stabbing pain, he feels unsettled and anxious because he lacks the certainty that the stranger expresses so strongly, to wit, that he shared his life with someone who was flesh and blood, as it were, whereas Marcher wasted his with a riddle that he had not been able to solve: May was as enigmatic as his doom and, since the threat of future was not fulfilled, the only thing that he should have saved from that failure should be the satisfaction of having been accompanied by her until her death, which is not the case, for, notwithstanding the years that he relied on her devotion, he feels as empty as if he had always been alone. Thus, he realizes in the dizziness of the revelation that all his life went unnoticed to him and he missed the only flair wherewith time made up for its ravage, which was no other than the certainty of having been loved, which should not be just a mental image but the very kernel of a vital satisfaction, which is precisely what he lacks. In other words, one can fully understand one’s own life not when one is able to recall whichever happening or instant and to stem from it the perfect unity of memory, want and desire,30 but when one gets a level-headedness that goes hand in hand with the balanced development of the bodily drives, which entails that wisdom is not tantamount to sublimation as to consciousness of how complex and full coexistence is, for the only advantage of finitude and of the individual stints is the possibility of discovering the uniqueness not of a would-be doom but of every human being, which is what Marcher kens in the instant of the revelation: “He had seen outside of his life, not learned it within, the way a woman was mourned when she had been loved for herself ”.31 At first sight, it would seem that what Marcher missed was a wonderful woman who was waiting until her last moment for him to seize and requite the greatness of her love; this, which could be considered the romantic approach to the matter, is not, however, what the scene at issue shows, for although it is true that Marcher was blind enough to let May pass away without his having loved her, it is also true that his real catastrophe was not that but his having lost the opportunity of experiencing a love as passionate as May’s. On the other hand, he sees that she did not suffer by his insensitiveness because she was from the first moment aware thereof and did not rely on it

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to get her own prime; quite the contrary, his faults did not prevent her from devoting the best of her to him, for she knew how to make the most of his only virtue, which was no other than the possibility of being up to his doom or, rather, to his life. Even without his being aware thereof, Marcher was by his obsession in a realm superior to his reach, and May tried to lead him thereto. Anyhow, he did not understand her and wasted his chance waiting instead of transcending towards a deeper identification with her and, above all, with himself, wherewith he proved that “he had been the man of his time, the man, to whom nothing on earth was to have happened”.32 Thus, on acting as he did, Marcher was not only an individual among others; he was the embodiment of a way of being that stands for the incapability of becoming; at bottom, this insensitiveness of his implies that the whole of his existence was changed into the everlasting anticipation of something that he never got: “It was the truth, vivid and monstrous, that all the while he had waited, the wait was itself his portion”.33 Thereat, Marcher’s loss was a lot more terrible than having missed a woman, even if she was going to be “the love of his life”; what he lost was life as such, i.e., the opening of future and the concomitant excitation that carries man away even in the final instants, provided that he is willing to follow the drive (which is doubtless the ground of the lucidity whereof so many moribund people show signs). Marcher, nevertheless, was alien to this, and it is understandable that in spite of his stirs and dullness, he had experienced the fulfilment of his doom as the utter annihilation of emotionality whereas May experienced hers as the revelation of an infinite interest: “This the companion of his vigil had at a given moment made out, and she had offered him the chance to baffle his doom. One’s doom, however, was never baffled, and on the day she told him his own had come down she had seen him but stupidly stare at the escape she offered him”.34 Because of this, Marcher is despicable not only as character but also and above all as human type although it could be argued in his defence that he was blinded by his own fear of doom and that he did not act wrongly on purpose; still more, it was his possibility to overcome fear why May loved him and why she did not consider it a waste to spend her life with him, even after her having realized that he was not going to go further, as Marcher notes together with his own meanness: “The escape would have been to love her; then, then, he would have lived. She had lived – who could say now with what passion? – since she had loved him for himself; whereas he had never thought of her (ah how it hugely glared at him!) but in the chill of his egotism and the light of her use”.35 In a brutal contrast with his narrow-mindedness, May guessed from the onset that he had at hand a sui generis vitality by the


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simple fact of his foreboding and that he just needed to free himself from fear so as to get it: the beast could have been lying in wait for ever, but that was a reason in favour of Marcher, not against him, because it would have made meaningful every deed of his. Still more, inasmuch as he had been promised a doom, he should have been more thoughtful and heed how extraordinary her abnegation was. Nevertheless, he surrendered to a shadow instead of soaring to a nobler, more potent realm, and lost her and his life at once, for he was neither up to her, nor to any other woman, considering that his problem was not at bottom the lack of love for May but for himself and for life in general: oddly enough, a man with such a doom had neither kin nor friends to share it; completely alone despite May, how could he have been up to the man that he should have been so as to requite her? Average existence cannot overcome pathos. Quite the contrary: it fits it. Why? Because a stir with no vital issue strengthens its drive just insofar as it makes it paradoxically meaningless; whatever or whoever the average individual finds is a kind of mirror where he stares his own image, which would otherwise be invisible: however, the image cannot go through the mirror and into reality for then the individual would run the risk of being caught by anyone else. Therefore, the unsettlement of a life like Marcher’s stands merely for an aberrant motionlessness, almost for a variety of quietism thought groundless because in this case there is no deity or truth to be adored or revealed and the circularity of the process makes it literally pathetic as a whole, which is something that Marcher never succeeds in understanding; when he realizes that his only possibility of feeling alive lies in accepting his lowness, he rejects it once more and tries to shelter under the dim consciousness of being a prey; now, however, for the first time in his life, he is not wrong, and while he is carried away by the shame of having marred all he could be, the Beast finally turns up and claws him: when he, aghast, flinches, he falls on a tomb and dies. The sudden end of Marcher’s drama calls for a final reflection, for it would seem that the protagonist thereof was after all right in considering himself the victim of an adamant doom, which would undoubtedly save him from all his meanness: indeed, how could he have acted otherwise (i.e., with love and bounty) if bane was always on his heels and he should devote all his strength to escape it? It is very easy to speak of balance and wisdom when one is free from danger, but the matter is altogether different when one has to endure haplessness. Thus, Marcher should not be blamed for his selfishness and he should be rather praised for his endurance against doom and above all by his having endowed May with an emotional kernel that she could hardly have got without him. Nevertheless, notwithstanding the apparent justification of Marcher, there is a feature of his drama that does not match

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the personal greatness that we admire in all the tragic heroes, that is to say, the psychological condition of the fulfilment thereof and the personal weakness wherewith Marcher faces it: he lives all the time expecting instead of acting, and the Beast whose attack he intends to prevent by all manner of means, ends up being nothing but a rave, not the revelation of a relentless evil, whereby, although Marcher acknowledges his meanness, he is not able to overcome it and chooses instead to die (insofar as death can be chosen when one has no other choice), which corroborates that he is the same pathetic individual that he has always been. Still more, what is bewildering in Marcher’s case is not the selfishness but the consciousness of having somehow a mission to fulfil, which has nothing to do in principle with the diffidence and sloppiness that he shows all the time. Of course, if his obsession is the only reason why he is not totally barren of interest as individual and as a type, it is also the cause of his being endlessly swallowed up by doubt. Pathos and not tragedy, then, is the final frame of Marcher’s existence, whereby what he endeavoured to throughout was to be the lead on the stage of his mind instead of facing life as such and joining others, above all May. With this, nevertheless, it seems that we should again consider average existence as a conception despicable for itself inasmuch as it wipes out the possibility of an ontological transcendence for the individual, which agrees, on the other hand, with the usual deprecatory sense of the word “pathetic”, which is a lot more shameful than “wicked”, for the latter at least implies some kind of greatness, whereas the former does not. Now, there is no doubt that, before the tragic hero and the way he overcomes wretchedness or, on the contrary, yields to it (for there is heroism too when a man reveals his stints after having fought, as it happens, for instance, with Oedipus), neither Marcher nor the average type he embodies can be vindicated: a life that merely slides through time is hardly human, considering that man is compelled by his own unsettledness to face fate: for man, indeed, life cannot be either the fulfilment of an obsession or the redemption thereof but the comprehension of how chance shapes finitude: whether it is evinced by derangement or by a real catastrophe, the problematic framework of existence demands that man enters the lists, which is paradoxically what the average character that has been figured out through these lines does not in spite of the oddness of his obsession, which does not contradict the insurmountable condition of his because it is not a flair but a resource to keep the process within a certain plane and to give the impression of a permanent vivacity, wherewith we make out that if this average type is the ground of the socio-cultural determination of modern life it is because it allows everyone to be the centre of the world while existing on the periphery thereof. Vale.


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After having showed that Marcher’s pathos stands for a cultural and historical type whose understanding is axial for philosophy, we have still to dwell upon May’s behaviour, which at first sight seems so enigmatic, not to say bewildering. There should doubtless be a link between Marcher and her that allowed her to be so deeply touched by him, and that link lies, according to what has been perused so far, in the possibility that he faces life with the awareness of its risks but without his being crushed by them. For what Marcher passes over is that no life is free from dangers and even haplessness and that what he forebodes is merely a metaphor thereof: in fact, the image of the beast would not be enough to mar a destiny if it were not a more powerful reason for it, which is nothing else than the lack of vitality that makes it impossible for him to ken what May stands for in his existence. This lack, on the other hand, is not just an individual feature, inasmuch as the story underlines the symbolic character of Marcher: he is the man of the present, who is willing to set aside whatever hinders normality, whether it is a passionate relationship or an exertion such as the one required to get rid of a preposterous fear. At bottom, the only thing that Marcher needed was, oddly enough, to laugh at himself a little, but he could not do it because of his selfishness and also of his narrow-mindedness: obsession was the only ground of existence for himself. Thus, the love that he inspires hinges entirely upon May or, to say it in terms more properly philosophical, in her capacity to fulfil humanity and freedom in him: she wants him to prove a real strength, not an illusory quality, whereas he moves in a mental realm and spoils his chance: she is not a daydreamer, quite the contrary, she is ready to throw the dice for what she wants, which is, nevertheless, the cause of her own bane: although she does not lose her life, as Marcher does, she anyhow wastes the ideality thereof, as she realizes in the supreme instant, when he shows her again that he has not understood a jot of it at all: “Don’t you know – now?”36 “Now”, that is to say, after their having shared a life and their having left behind the question of an upheaval halfway between sloppiness and madness. Thereat, this question of hers parallels Marcher’s in the graveyard and simultaneously opposes it because it shows a way of making the decision that average existence calls for everyone to make, i.e., how to get ideality from a temporality lacking transcendence. The fact that May (when she cannot go on pretending that Marcher is as she had formerly thought him to be), decides anyhow that she must support him to the end, is the best proof that average life is not tantamount perforce to meanness and although it always unfolds through the same plane, there is a fullness of meaning to be found therein, which is the acceptance of its insurmountable finitude and, above all,

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of the stints of everyone. Contrary to the despair wherewith an existentialist character would face this, May upholds her devotion because she knows that it stands for her life no matter how absurd the goals thereof may seem in the eyes of someone else, which reminds neither the ancient ideal of piety nor the Christian commandment of compassion but the modern glimpse that life is nothing but an unfolding of finitude and of the irreducible complexity of every human being. Iterum vale. Meritorious University of Puebla, Mexico

NOTES 1

Vide the First Section of the Discourse on Method as well as the First Book of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, the two works that have more powerfully influenced the further development of the subject through modernity, whose abyssal differences make more evident their agreement on the universality of the subjective faculties. 2 It would be practically impossible to review the complex trend whereof we speak, but we shall at least mention what could be considered its two main subdivisions: on the one hand, there has been from Descartes onwards a consistent criticism of the reduction supposedly made by him of all the functions of consciousness to mere reason; as a matter of fact, this criticism began with the authors that objected the Metaphysical Meditations (of whom the most famous were Hobbes, Arnauld and Gassendi), proceeded with Locke and Hume and got a first conclusion with Kant [among the immense bibliography on this subject, vide, for instance: André Robinet, La Pensée à 1’Âge Classique (Paris: PUF, 1981)]. On the other hand, there has also been a criticism not only against the identification of consciousness with reason but against the primacy of whatever conscious function over the metaphysical framework of reality, which coincides point by point with the vindication of some kind of irrationalism and of pre-modern thought, as it has happened with philosophers such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Heidegger, together with some other thinkers such as Freud or Bataille. 3 Which is the Kernel of Kant’s Ethics and of every conception of morals that is based on reason, as Kant states flatly: “ The ground of [moral] obligation here must not be sought in the nature of the human being or in the circumstances of the world in which he is placed but a priori simply in concepts of pure reason; and any other precept, which is based on principles of mere experience – even if it is universal in a certain respect – insofar as it rests in the least part on empirical grounds, perhaps only in terms of a motive, can indeed by called a practical rule but never a moral law” [Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. and trans. by Mary Gregor (Cambridge: CUP, 1997), Ak, IV, p. 439]. 4 Of course, this by no means denies that everyone acts led by his conscious intentions, which is why he is responsible for what he had done; rather, what I mean is that, in accordance with tragedy, the final ground of existence does not lie in the individual will but in fate. 5 Which reminds us, by the by, of the uncertainty experienced by the Cartesian narrator at the end of the First Meditation before the possibility of the existence of a deceiver whose cunning were paralleled by his power and who only intended to prevent man from getting a sound knowledge of the rational ground of Creation. Vide Oeuvres, XI vv., eds. Adam and Tannery, (Paris: Vrin/CNRS, 1964–1974), v. VII, pp. 26–27.


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As a matter of fact, the original intention of these lines was to compare James’s work with Sophocles’s Oedipus the King; nevertheless, the extension of the perusal compelled me to limit myself to the present subject. 7 It is necessary to heed that this last statement does not deny the complexity of vital drives that has been underlined both by Nietzsche and Freud and, above all, the violent action of Dionysus and of the Id over the individual consciousness. Now, leaving aside Freud’s indubitable pessimism with regard to the scant possibilities of man for resisting the destructive power of the Id and the devastating consequences that that has for all the orders or existence, the case is that Nietzsche’s aesthetic starting point, which agrees with the dialogical unfolding of tragedy, allows us to uphold that life is not essentially negative for the individual but rather pushes him to get his utmost potency (whether it implies or not his final sacrifice). Of course, to this intellectual foundation of the matter, must be added the vulgar optimism that has been distributed and repeated ad nauseam by all the mass media with the subsequent devastation of average resoluteness. 8 The edition of the work that we use is “The Beast in the Jungle” and Other Stories, ed. Shane Weller (New York: Dover, 1993), pp. 33–71. With no exception, the italics of the quotations are James’s. 9 Ibid., pp. 43–44. 10 Ibid., p. 33. 11 Ibid., p. 64. 12 Ibid., p. 54. 13 Of course, this does not entail that the average individual is meditative or is wont to be immersed in himself; far from that, he very easily gets carried away by twaddle of every kind and does not heed his own life, which is what James emphasises through the story. 14 Op. cit., p. 44. 15 Ibid., p. 65. 16 Ibid., p. 54. 17 Ibid., p. 66. 18 Ibid., p. 45. 19 Ibid., p. 39. 20 Ibid., p. 47. 21 Ibid., p. 51. 22 Ibid., p. 49. 23 Ibid., p. 53. 24 Ibid., p. 58. 25 Ibid., p. 63. 26 Ibid., p. 66. 27 Ibid., p. 68. 28 Ibid., p. 53. 29 Ibid., pp. 69–70. 30 On this meaninglessness of a “photographic” memory, vide Borges’ wonderful tale entitled “Funes el Memorioso”, which was originally published in Artificios (1944) and is included in the Obras Completas, 4 vv. (Barcelona: Emecé, 1996), v. I, pp. 485–490. 31 Op. cit., idem. 32 Idem. 33 Idem. 34 Idem. 35 Idem. 36 Ibid., p. 59.

WENDY O’BRIEN

TELLING TIME: LITERATURE, TEMPORALITY AND TRAUMA

“The time is out of joint: O cursed spite, that I was born to set it right.” Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1.5

INTRODUCTION

“In the beginning was the word.” The writer of The Gospel According to John knew it. So did Shakespeare. And Marcel Proust devoted seven volumes to exploring it. They knew what we seem to have forgotten or to have come to take for granted. Far from time telling us the hour of the day, the time of the year, we tell time. That is, there is a necessary and complex relationship between time and language. The two give birth to each other. This paper explores the relationship between time and literature in relation to trauma. One of the most common qualities evidenced in trauma narratives is reference to the distortion of time. Time comes undone when experience makes clear, makes somehow more than clear, perhaps inevitable, one’s own death. There is no where to run and no where to hide. There is nothing one can do. One is nothing. There is a collapse of all those psychological principles of organization that we rely on in order to structure experience. The world becomes at once more real than it ever has been before – one loses the defences and mechanisms we use to filter experience – and more strange. Regaining one’s footing after such an experience involves re-learning or perhaps better yet, re-orienting oneself to these basic building blocks of perception. Amongst the tools used in this process is reading. The term trauma has been used to describe a wide variety of experiences all of which share in common the individual’s recognition of her/his own vulnerability resulting in what Chris Brewin identifies as “some kind of internal breach or damage to existing mental structures” (2003, 5). More specifically, a traumatic event is defined by DSM-IV as an occurrence in 209 A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana LXXXVI, 209–221. © 2007 Springer.

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which the person “experienced, witnessed or was confronted with an event or events that involved actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of self or others” and in which “the person’s response involved intense fear, helplessness, or horror” (Brewin, 2003, 7). Thus experiences of war, of natural disasters, of civilian disasters, of rape and of child abuse are all deemed “traumatic.” Clearly there are distinguishing features to each kind of trauma. Herein I focus on trauma which arises from the experience of human cruelty. Bearing witness to such events exacts a price. How does one re-establish a sense of time after experiencing the unimaginable, the incomprehensible acts of horror that human beings commit against each other? I find it surprising that more work has not been done in the area of phenomenology of trauma. Research in trauma and its aftermath offers a unique opportunity to investigate how lived experience is constructed. The person who lives through a traumatic experience is plunged into the natural attitude. How he or she is able to re-organize his or her experiences, how they are able to re-build the world, is a telling perspective from which to explore the cornerstones of lived experience: perception, the body, memory, birth and death, culture (Husserl, 1960, 97). Trauma undermines social conventions and existing structures and in so doing, provides a vantage point from which to observe how perception is constructed – perception of such basic phenomena as space (distance), identity and time. More specifically, I think there is much to be investigated at the point of intersection between time, trauma and fiction. Fiction has in recent years become a venue for the exploration of trauma. That many of key theorists began their careers in literary studies is perhaps unsurprising. Modern and contemporary fiction has shown a certain fascination with trauma. Perhaps Gregg Horowitz is on to something in this regard. He argues that modern visual art shows a sort of fascination with trauma and its aftermath because former explanations of human suffering and of death have fallen by the wayside. When transcendent justifications of death and pain were upended, the search was on to find new means to solve the problem(s) of theodicy. Fiction provided that space for such investigations. And society has become increasingly willing to listen to such stories. Indeed, it could be argued that we became fascinated or entranced with the subject. Modern and contemporary writers struggle with the task of writing an experience that was beyond words which took place in a time outside of time. The novels of writers such as Pat Barker, John Banville, and Anne Michaels rely on ghost stories, doppelgangers and unreliable narrators in order to capture something of the time of trauma. Using these techniques, their

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works capture a past that won’t stay past and a future that won’t come into vision. They write in and of an altered sense of time. Or they try. For just how can trauma be written? In giving words to trauma and its after effects, aren’t all those aspects of such overwhelming encounters with unmediated life lost? The very act of writing requires one to structure and temporalize events. How can this medium be used to explore that which lacks such organization and sequencing. How effective are ghost stories in capturing such experiences? Are doppelgangers adequate representations of the lives trauma survivors could have lived – the lives that were forfeited but which they can’t leave behind? We return to an old question that haunts literature, psychology and psychoanalysis: how can you say, or in this case write, the unsayable? How can you give words to experiences in which words fail you? While these are intriguing questions, questions that clearly deserve more investigation, I wish to put them aside for the purpose of this discussion. Rather than focusing on the representation of trauma, more specifically, of the time of trauma, in literature, this paper turns attention to the relationship between trauma and reading. While there have been examinations of the trauma and creativity (see Miller, 1990; Scarry, 1985), these have focused on the production of works of art. They have left unexplored the relationship between trauma and the reception of art. This is the case despite the fact that so many trauma survivors have recounted their turn towards art, in particular towards reading (Sacks, 2001 and Diski, 2002). Witnessing trauma is what Ross Chambers describes as the “art of untimely intervention” (2004, 191). It requires you to abandon time and be willing to live in the space of untimeliness. Reading bridges the two worlds. It is both untimely and the ultimate measure of time. As such, it holds open the possibility of teaching those who suffer trauma how to tell time when all other clocks have been broken. It is this restorative function of fiction I wish to explore herein.

LOSING TIME: TEMPORALITY AND TRAUMA

Surveying narratives offered by survivors, Chambers notes that “Because trauma repeats and returns even when it is supposedly over, aftermath writing as a hauntedness that haunts, has a double character of untimeliness. It is both an exploration of survival as the experience of untimeliness – that is, of a baffling experience of time as, conjointly, the separation of the past and present and their continuing correspondence (e.g., in the form of flashback)

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(Chambers, 2004, 191). What would mean to live untimeliness? Better yet, what would it be like to be stuck in a time without time? Imagine for a minute what life would be like if time stopped, if it just stopped existing. Don’t think about time just slowing down, but really see if you can imagine what it would be like to have time stop. Would you experience something like Alice’s adventures in Wonderland, if you could step outside of time, leave it behind? If time stopped, would time continue to exist? Could we speak of time at all? Time seems to have implicit within it some understanding of motion or movement. Moreover, could you have experiences if time didn’t move? Time is a key structure on which all our experiences seem built. If time stops, doesn’t our very notion of experience – let alone our ability to understand, organize, process experience – crumble? Trauma is as such “some kind of internal breach or damage to existing mental structures” (Brewin, 2003, 5). The overwhelming feelings used to define trauma (PTSD) shake our most elementary psychological mechanisms (Brison, 2002, 9). They shatter people’s most basic assumptions about human nature and about the world (Janoff-Bulman, 1992). There is a loss of a sense of reality, of place, of space and of time. Thus trauma is, as described by Ruth Levy, a “problem of imitation,” or of mimesis (2000, 9). We use ideas such as “time passing,” “next time,” “being on time” as the basic scaffolding upon which we build, organize and share our experience with others. Trauma destroys that infrastructure. These terms no longer have any point of reference. As Cathy Caruth notes that “the impact of the traumatic event lies precisely in its belatedness, in its refusal to be simply located” (1995, 9). Events become suspended in time or perhaps more accurately out of time. Suddenly, “Not only are one’s memories of an earlier life lost, along with the ability to envision a future, but one’s basic cognitive and emotional capacities are gone, or radically altered, as well. This epistemological crisis leaves the survivor with virtually no bearings to navigate” (Brison, 2002, 50). It leaves them recounting the following sorts of experiences: “I had moment of losing track of what was going on – I “blanked out” or “spaced out” or in some way felt that I was not a part of what was going on.” “My sense of time changed – things seemed to be happening in slow motion.” “I felt disoriented; that is, there were moment when I felt uncertain about where I was or what time it was” (Marmar et al., 1997 as cited in Brewin, 2002, 54).

Note that in all these cases the trauma doesn’t become part of the past nor does it simply disappear. Quite the opposite becomes true. Traumatic events


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haunt the individual: “The pathology consists solely in the structure of its experience or reception: the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it. To be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event” (Caruth, 1995, 4–5). One becomes lodged or stuck in the time of trauma. The moment(s) is repeated over and over again, like a record with a scratch or a CD that skips playing the same lyrics over and over again. How can such distortions in time be explained? The account of internal time consciousness as succession offered by Husserl is instructive. Time, he argues, is not an entity itself but rather is a relation. This is best captured in the analogy he draws between time and music. The musician plays the first note (T1). But as she moves to the next chord (T2), the first note has not disappeared. Rather the tone resonates (T2, r1). Time as such is not so much a series of moments (T1; T2; T3) as it is a series of relations between moments (T1; T2, rl; T3, r2, r1). Any one time, contains within it a new “now” but a “now” that is always already part of a history of “nows” which continue to reverberate, even if only as a production of imagination or phantasy, in the present. For those who suffer from trauma, the succession of moments is disrupted. There is a break, a rupture in the relation of moments one to the other. There is a time which cannot be connected with any other. Considering the pattern described above, if the trauma is experienced at time T12, that time cannot be placed in relation to any previous moments (T12, r10, r8, r6, r4). Susan Brison describes this experience in terms of the introduction of “a ‘surd’ – a nonsensical entry – into the series of events in one’s life, making it seem impossible to carry on with the series” (2002, 103). A surd is both inexpressible and voiceless. Yet, despite, maybe because it has these qualities, the surd disrupts the future as well as the past. The surd – this traumatic experience – cannot be incorporated into any other subsequent chains of experience. Indeed, it seems to preclude the formation of any new strings of experience, unless, perhaps the trauma is repressed. No longer is time a relation between moments, it is rather a list of nows. Instead of music, you would hear a series of random notes played staccato. There would be no reverberations, no links. Such is nature of the distortions in time perception that occur following trauma. Lenore Terr (1984) identifies a series of alterations that occur to normal time perception as a result of trauma. Survivors experience a wide range of alterations in their conception of time. For some, time slows down. Everything experienced during the trauma moves as if in slow motion. There is a remarkable attention to detail that this kind of time keeping permits.

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If everything is remembered, every clue is identified then it can never happen again. For others, time quickens. It is as if time has been switched onto fast forward. Again, such experiences of time no doubt provide the individual with some sort of protective shield as Freud used the term. Time speeds up. The events are over. You move on. Along with such altered perceptions of time duration, there is the loss of chronology – of history. Terr describes how “Following, psychic trauma, disorders of time sequencing may assume various guises: (1) condensations of contiguous events into simultaneity; (2) time-skew; (3) retrospective significances (including omens); and (4) the sense of prediction. These posttraumatic distortions of ordering require sizable suspensions of reality sense” (1984, 644). Events are misplaced, displaced in time. The past refuses to stay past, and the future, well the future can’t be envisioned, though it may be, it has to be, predictable. There has to be a reason why you suffer. The direction and aim of time is lost. Time loses its linearity. Rather than running from past to present through to future, time seems to randomly oscillate from past to future then back to the past, then to the present. Or perhaps, it is more accurate to note that time seems to run on two tracks simultaneously. At one and the same time one “sees” the past overlaid onto present events. Two images, two times, sometimes three, are superimposed one upon the other, making it hard to tell what belongs to what time. It becomes hard to tell what time it is. This is true not only of the past but of the future as well. It seems as if time cannot move forward, not too quickly and not too far. Trauma survivors often have a hard time imagining next month, let alone next year. There is a foreshortened sense of the future. Barker captures this experience in The Ghost Road when her main character, paralysed by shell shock, stuck not remembering but reliving his experiences, recalls how “Rivers would say, remember now – any suppressed memory stores up trouble for the future. Well, too bad. Refusing to think is the only way I can survive and anyway what future” (Barker, 1995, 193). The future can’t be that far off. It can’t. As Brison notes, when one loses one’s sense of “one’s temporal being one loses a plan of life” (2002, 52). If the present is just a repetition of the past, then the future? The future will just be more of the same. In such cases, “The past reaches into the present and throttles desire before it can be directed toward the future” (Brison, 2002, 96). You can’t imagine what life will be like a month from now, a year from now let alone ten years from now. No, time must be measured in smaller units. The future is tomorrow, maybe the day after that. No one can bear the thought of re-living their traumas for much longer than that. And that is what trauma does. You repeat day in and day out, a story that you can’t shake, can’t forget and can’t tell.


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Hence the difference between re-living and remembering experiences. When events are given words, they can be remembered. Language – such simple devices as past and present tense, word choice – creates time, it facilitates the survivor learning or re-learning how to tell time. When no words are available, when one loses as such a sense of chronology of things beginning and ending, of time passing, of change, one has no choice but to relive events. The overlapping of past with the present and the foreshortening of the future – these alterations in time perception – become inescapable. During trauma “temporality and chronology collapse” (Whitehead, 2004, 3). And time cannot be as easily recovered as is often believed. How do you regain a sense of past, present and future? How do you learn to remember rather than re-live? There is a saying that holds that “all great fiction proceeds making the familiar and ordinary strange again.” But perhaps fiction also has an important role to play, at least with regard to trauma survivors, in making the familiar and the ordinary familiar again. That is, perhaps literature has a restorative role to play. Perhaps it can teach you tell time.

TELLING TIME: RESTORATIVE FICTION

“We frequently say ‘time will tell’ when actually it is we who read the expression on the clock” (Gass, 2002, 104). There has been much time spent discussing the important role which narration – which the telling and re-telling – plays in the lives of those who survive trauma. Trauma undermines narrative in a variety of ways causing disruption in existing stories told about identity and belonging and/or offering models that constrain the telling of the survivor’s experiences (Neimeyer and Levitt, 2000). In giving words to traumatic events meaning is thus re-established – “the integration of threatening, harmful experience into one’s model of the self and the world by answering questions reconstructing the causal ‘why’ and the teleological ‘why’ ‘what for’ ” (Ferring and Filipp, 2000, 153). Narration is restorative in that it brings some sort of coherence and continuity to events that have made the individual feel helpless and hopeless – lost and at a loss. Imposing a story of these events does not give one a sense of control over the events themselves – no doubt it is the wish of every trauma survivor but one that must be left behind. Rather one must be satisfied with the ability to control the story of those events – to author the story instead of being a character manipulated at the will of another. Indeed, “losses cannot even be recognized as such except against the backdrop of

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a presumed narrative of continuity over time, a continuity imposed by the human need to organize experience along a temporal line” (Niemeyer, 2000, 411). Narrative is necessary to recognize/acknowledge a loss as well as to live beyond it. Stories “stake a claim, they position self and other in a particular (and frequently self-serving) moral discourse” (Neimeyer, 2000, 403). But words, let alone entire stories, are hard to come by. And in many cases, especially involving children, there are no words. The words are yet to be learned let alone spoken. Reading gives one the sense of possibility. The possibility that if the events, emotions, failings of the characters in the books one chooses can be narrated – that is, can be put into words and thus into time, so too can the readers own overwhelming, incomprehensible and formless experiences. During trauma words fail you. There are no words. When you try to make a sound, nothing comes out, sometimes. Silent screams. Sometimes before you can narrate your own stories, you need to find words again. You need to learn to trust in words. For that faith has been shaken by the meaninglessness of the events that you have traversed. Sometimes reading thus becomes a necessary precursor to writing. It is a means for regaining belief in words and in thereby in time. As William Gass quite succinctly puts it “stories are restorative” (2002, 26). He describes this process as such: “To begin with, stories break up the natural continuum of life into events. Next, stories arrange these segments in a temporal sequence, in order to suggest that whatever happens earlier is responsible for what happens later” (2002, 5). It is because narratives function in this way that Gass is able to conclude that stories are consoling (Ibid.). They give structure and meaning to what appears random and meaningless, offering us a justification for why we suffer, shielding us from the truth. This view is supported by Joseph Carroll who argues in Literary Darwinism (2004) that, along with being a source of amusement and having didactic functions, literature has evolved because of its adaptive qualities. While agreeing with evolutionary psychologists that literature “gives us simulations that can act for models of behaviour, game plans,” that it lets you rehearse for the life events you may encounter, it also provides us with “important means by which we cultivate and regulate the complex cognitive machinery on which our more highly developed functions depend” (2004, 65). More specifically, Carroll argues, “The imaginative models that we construct about our experience in the world do not merely convey practical information. They direct our behaviour by entering into our motivational system at its very root – our feelings, our ideas, and our values. We use imaginative models to make sense of the world, not just to ‘understand’ it abstractly but to feel and perceived our own place


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in it – to see it from the inside out. Making sense of the world in this way, through narrative and through the other arts is both a primary psychological need and a necessary precondition for organizing our behaviour in ways that satisfy all our other adaptive needs” (Ibid., xxii).

Literature develops emotional depth, creates a sense of empathy, and most importantly, for our purpose it helps to structure our sense of time – it teaches us to tell time. Carroll makes reference to the relationship between time, trauma and literature, in passage that is particularly instructive. He notes how in David Copperfield Dickens’ main character derives from reading, “lively and powerful images of human life suffused with the feeling and understanding of the astonishingly capable and complete human beings who wrote them. It is through this kind of contact with a sense of human possibility that he is enabled to escape from the degrading limitations of his own local environment. He is not escaping from reality; he is escaping from an impoverished reality into the larger world of healthy human possibility. By nurturing and cultivating his own individual identity through his literary imagination, he enables himself to adapt successfully to this world” (Ibid., 68).

Literature keeps open the possibility of something more – a future and/or a better life – not merely by offering the reader, the survivor, in this case, an escape but by immersing him/her back into life. Literature offers to the trauma survivor a great escape. Already equipped with the skills of time travel or time denial, the stories on the page offer avenues into different, better lives. “We read to escape – if only briefly – the trap of real time, and then to return and recognize – if only briefly – the times we are trapped in. And for an instant, at least, time does not flow but is,” Robert Power writes (2004). This is true for us all but especially for those who have experienced trauma. For a few minutes, they escape – onto a page, into another life, somewhere else, as someone else. Outside of time, they are safe – away, out. But to focus on the escape value of reading for trauma survivors would be to overlook some of the more subtle and I would argue more important, indeed, critical reasons for turning the page. Gass notes, “Transcendence is not what masterworks teach me: they teach me immersion” (2003, 118). Literature serves a double purpose. It takes one outside of one’s self while it simultaneously embeds one firmly in life. It is both an escape and a return. Consider Husserl’s model of time in this regard. One cannot live in the perpetual present (T1, T2, T3) no matter how hard one tries. Reminiscences of times past provide one with the conditions for the possibility of engaging with/in the world. They give context to the present orienting one’s self to the environment, developing and evaluating expectations about the world, shaping a theory of human nature. The survivor cannot hold onto memories of his/her world so she/he begins again with

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memories of the words. Such memories provide a new history and thus hold open the possibility for a future. Time begins again. Survivors seek not to escape so much from the past as they hope to escape into a future. And it is for this reason that those who suffer trauma turn to literature. There is something both familiar and comforting in literature. Literature lives a time similar to trauma. It does not rely on, does not even require a sense of linearity. It allows for and is able, at its best, to capture something of what Alice Miller describes as the “episodic structure of memory” (2000, 17). which those who suffer trauma are left with. As such, literature is a point of contact, or a meeting place in which the traumatic and the commonplace can encounter each other without attempting to reduce the one to the other. The temptation in day to day experiences is to fit the traumatic event into the flow of everyday time. Too often the goal is simply to erase the other time, to disappear the events that won’t keep in/the time. On the page and in the words, there is no need for the privileging of one time over the other. In reviewing Ruth Kluger’s weiter leben Mark Rothberg (2002) notes how in recounting her life in a concentration camp “the extreme and the everyday are neither opposed, collapsed, nor transcended through a dialectic synthesis – instead, they are at once held together and kept forever a part in a mode of representation and historical cognition” (55). Thus, fiction operates in the time of the trauma survivor. As Brison notes, “Narrative facilitates the ability to go on by opening up possibilities for the future through retelling the stories of the past. It does this not by re-establishing the illusions of coherence of the past, control over the present, and predictability of the future, but by making it possible to carry on without these illusions” (Brison, 2002, 111).

Literature as such begins in the time outside of time where those who suffer trauma reside. And slowly, as the page turns, it brings other survivor back, reminds her of another time. As such, it restores a sense of time. Things happen in a story and then other things happen. And never without a cause or a purpose. Literature demonstrates a meaningful succession of events. Things happen for a reason. And then they are over. Time passes. Things change. There remains open a possibility for recovery/redemption. Reading and writing takes place within the bounds of this logic. The succession of letters and then of words pulls the survivor back into time. They remind her of “normal” or perhaps better yet the “conventions” of time, linking past with present and offering the opportunity of a future. Not yet ready or able to narrate, reading becomes a process through which time is recreated. In describing the process of creative writing, Freud recognized the link between writing and the construction of time. Freud begins by drawing


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parallels between writing and day dreams, characterizing the writer as the “dreamer in broad daylight.” He notes that when we phantasies the products of our imagination are “date-marked.” He notes that “The relations of a phantasy to time in general very important. We may say that it hovers, as it were, between three times – the three moments of time which our ideation involves. Mental work is linked to some current impression, some provoking occasion in the present which has been able to arouse one of the subject’s major wishes. From there it harks back to a memory of an earlier experience (usually an infantile one) in which this wish was fulfilled; and it now creates a situation relating to the future which represents a fulfilment of the wish. What it thus creates is a day-dream or phantasy, which carries about it traces of its origin from the occasion which provoked it and from the memory. Thus past, present and future are strung together, as it were, on the thread of the wish that runs through them” (Freud, 1907, 439).

What is true of day dreams is true of creative writing: “A strong experience in the present awakens in the creative writer a memory of an earlier experience (usually belonging to his childhood) from which there now proceeds a wish which finds its fulfilment in the creative work. The work itself exhibits elements of the recent provoking occasion as well as the old memory” (Ibid., 442).

As I have argued herein this is true for both the writer and reader. Note that there is as such something rather godlike in reading. Robert Calasso maintains “all the powers of the cult of the gods have migrated into a single, immobile and solitary act: that of reading” (cited by Powers, 2004). What are these powers to which he refers? Along with the writer, the reader creates the world, orders it, and controls it, through the words on the page. She decides what is plausible and what is not. She stands in judgment over the characters and re-creates events by skipping through some passages, reading and re-reading others. She invents, or perhaps, re-invents the time in/of the story. Recovering a sense of control, perhaps better yet, a sense of her ability to control even so little or so much as the words on the page is a beginning. “In the beginning was the word” CONCLUSION

As Chambers notes “an engaged reading that supplies the ‘measure’ capable of making the phenomena of unzeit recognizable within time – an experience of the ‘uncanny’ whose vehicle is the symbolic, that is the figural” (2004, 191). This paper has attempted to explore how this process occurs – how the reader learns, or re-learns to tell time through stories. In particular, it has sought to show the important role which literature and fiction offers to trauma survivors as they attempt to regain lost time, or to learn to live in an

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altered time. Not just escaping time, but becoming once again familiar with this convention, the survivor uses literature to adapt to her new history. They console and reorient the reader. If stories do no more than restore to us, this sense of lost time, of a time outside of time, have they not done enough? University of Guelph-Humber

REFERENCES John Banville (2000). Eclipse. London: Macmillan Books. Pat Barker (1995). The Ghost Road. Toronto: Penguin Books. Charis R. Brewin, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Malady or Myth, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2003. Susan J. Brison (2002). Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Joseph Carroll (2004). Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature and Literature. New York: Routledge. Cathy Caruth (1995). “Trauma and Experience.” In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Cathy Caruth, ed., 3–12. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ross Chambers (2004). Untimely Interventions: AIDS Writing, Testimonial, and the Rhetoric of Haunting. Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press. Jenny Diski (2002). Stranger On A Train: Daydreaming and Smoking Around America with Interruptions. London: Virgo Press. Dieter Ferring, and Sigrum-Heide, Filipp (2000). “Coping as A Reality Construction: On the Role of Attentive, Comparative, and Interpretive Processes in Coping with Cancer.” In Loss and Trauma: General and Close Relationship Perspectives, edited by, John H. Harvey and Eric D. Miller (2000), 146–162. Philadelphia: Brunner-Routledge. Sigmund Freud (1907). “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming.” In The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (1989), New York: W. W. Norton, 436–443. Paul Fussell (2000). The Great War and Modern Memory. London: Oxford University Press. William Gass (2002). Tests of Time. New York: Alfred Knopf. Geoffrey Hartman (1995). “On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies.” New Literary History 26(1995): 537–63. Gregg Horowitz (2001). Sustaining Loss: Art and The Mournful Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Edmund Husserl, ed. Dorian Cairns (1960). Cartesian Meditations. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff. Edmund Husserl, ed. Martin Heidegger (1966). Lectures on Internal Time-Consciousness. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. R. Janoff-Bulman (1992). Shattered Assumptions: Towards a New Psychology of Trauma. New York: Free Press. Adrienne Kertzer (2002). My Mother’s Voice: Children, Literature and The Holocaust. New York: Broadview Press. Ruth Leys (2000). Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Anne Michaels (1996). Fugitive Pieces. McClelland and Stewart Publishing Company. Alice Miller (1990). The Untouched Key: Tracing Childhood Trauma in Creativity and Destructiveness. Toronto: Doubleday Press.



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Nancy K. Miller, and Tougaw Jason eds. (2002). Extremities: Trauma, Testimony and Community. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Nancy K. Miller, and Tougaw Jason (2002). “Introduction: Extremities.” In Extremities: Trauma, Testimony and Community, 1–21. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Rober Neimeyer, and Levitt Heidi (2000). “What’s Narrative Got to Do With It? Construction and Coherence in Accounts of Loss.” In Loss and Trauma: General and Close Relationship Perspectives, John H. Harvey and Eric D. Miller eds., 2000, 401–412. Philadelphia: Brunner- Routledge. Richard Powers (2004). “Real Time Bandits.” The Guardian Saturday, August 14, 2001. Michael Rothberg (2002). “Between the Extreme and the Everyday.” In Extremities: Trauma, Testimony and Community, 55–70. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Oliver Sacks (2001). Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood. Toronto: Random House. Elaine Scarry (1985). The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press. Lenore Terr (1984). “Time and Trauma.” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 39: 633–665. Anne Whitehead (2004). Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

JONATHAN KIM-REUTER

TRANSCENDENCE UNBOUND: EXISTENCE AND TEMPORALITY IN MONTAIGNE’S ESSAYS

Nothing seems to have occupied Montaigne more than the experience of time. From his decision to write in the French of the people rather than the Latin of the scholars,1 to his incessant editing and re-editing of the Essays themselves, to his unwavering refusal to transcend the contingency of experience, Montaigne wholly gave himself over to the flux of temporal becoming. The advent of the essay makes possible a radical proximity to lived time inasmuch as the reflection carried out through the essay moves wholly within concrete subjectivity. This emphasis on the lived perspective is immediately apparent in the opening note to the reader of the Essays, in which we are told that what follows is a record of “habits and temperament.”2 “I am myself the matter of my book,”3 Montaigne writes. His are “essays in flesh and bone,”4 corporeal metaphors that signal the extent to which the Essays must be approached as a body of thought, that is, a description of a life in its concrete embodiment.5 They originate, as it were, within sensory, affective modes of existing. Whatever meaning one assumes Montaigne’s reflections or judgments to have, they are from the first weighted down with the terrestrial matter of their author. It is this radical privileging of the lived body and its temporal modes that caught the attention of the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Montaigne’s self-observation is anchored in the factical coordinates of subjectivity, and the cogito that he inhabits bears the worldly traces of his existence. There is, thus, a direct phenomenological interest in the Essays, inasmuch as for Merleau-Ponty the reduction performed on the natural attitude is a return to the existential foundations (spatial and temporal) of the being of the subject.6 These foundations make possible the perceptual comprehension of a meaningful and significant world. Yet, with respect to the temporal structure of our perceptual communication with objects, Merleau-Ponty reads Montaigne in a cautionary light. By exclusively privileging the sensible, he disrupts his perceptual comprehension of objects. In short, there is a failure to surmount or transcend the immediacy of sensory appearances for the public 223 A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana LXXXVI, 223–232. © 2007 Springer.

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world. Montaigne does not know that perceptual anchorage in the world that sustains the natural attitude and its faith in the perception of objects. Since the existential understanding of transcendence operates only on the presumption of the being-in-the-world of the individual (i.e., the individual as “bound” to the world through his or her situation), the experience of time in the Essays dramatically reflects the phenomenon of transcendence in an “unbound” state: unable to maintain a stable field of perception, the temporal subject is submitted to the movement of existence, a passive witness to the play of sensory fields. In describing Montaigne’s experience of time as “transcendence unbound,” I am thus referring to radical sensory mobility of the subject that occurs once the body-world relation no longer holds. To pick up the trail of the temporal effects that follow upon Montaigne’s retreat from the objective world to the subjective body we can turn to the Phenomenology of Perception, and in particular the chapter “Space.” This perhaps seems an odd place for an analysis of Montaigne’s experience of time. Wouldn’t the chapter on “Temporality” be the obvious starting point, especially since there, under the influence of Heidegger, the notion of transcendence assumes the full weight of the subject’s existence? This question is relevant only if we approach these two chapters as unrelated, as if having finished with the discussion of spatiality, we are then free to move on to the temporal modality of the perceiving subject. Such a serial ordering, however, ignores the basic grounding of spatial relations in the original temporal unfolding of the world relationship. If we look to the chapter on “Space” to decipher the analysis of Montaigne’s self-observation, this is because his experiences on the spatial level are comprehensible only through the temporal meaning of transcendence having become loosened from its terminus in the perceived world, the world towards which all our apprehensions gravitate and from which they take their bearings. We begin, then, with the question: What function does Montaigne serve in the phenomenological recovery of spatiality as a fundamental way of being toward the world? Merleau-Ponty locates the issue facing the Essays in the divorce of sensory appearances from perceptual reality. Unwavering fidelity to the sensory immediacy of empirical experience is the overriding principle of the type of reflection contained within the “essay.” In the following passage, Montaigne reveals the lived origins of his self-observation: I cannot keep my subject still. It goes along befuddled and staggering, with a natural drunkenness. I take it in this condition, just as it is at the moment I give my attention to it. I do not portray being: I portray passing. Not the passing from one age to another, or, as the people say, from seven years to seven years, but from day to day, from minute to minute. My history needs to be adapted to the moment. I may presently change, not only by chance, but also by intention.

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This is a record of various and changeable occurrences, and of irresolute and, when it so befalls, contradictory ideas: whether I am different myself, or whether I take hold of my subjects in different circumstances and aspects.7

In Montaigne’s hands, the body becomes the very medium for exploring the facticity of human existence. As a result of his great fascination with the workings of his natural faculties the encounter with the perceptual object became an occasion for indulging in the body’s primal modes of taking in its surroundings. By lodging the foundations for consciousness in the sensory body, however, he left consciousness without any means to structure the perceptual field. When in the passage just quoted Montaigne commits his reflection to the “passing” of perceptual appearances, he is revealing the phenomenological outcome of having taken up an absolute residence in the sensory thickness of our embodied existence. In effect, the body becomes a sensory carousel for all knowledge of reality.8 Unlike natural perception which is both intentional and worldly, sensory experience is highly unstable – it neither maintains the horizonal motivation of the perceptual object nor preserves the common background setting of the world that conditions the possibility of the former. Sensuous consciousness takes up the given appearance of the thing; but, contrary to the perceptual motivation that pushes the experience on toward the “fulfillment” of the object’s “self-givenness,” there is instead only the emerging presentation of ever new appearances.9 Assuming this position forces a relinquishment of perceptual objectivity – where there is no longer any coherent self-unity to serve as a correlate to the perceptual unity of objects, the basis for the synthesis of the phenomenal adumbrations is missing. To be lacking a stable self-unity is to have a greatly reduced perceptual contact with the world. Any disturbances to the conditions of integrity for the former are directly transmitted into the latter. Montaigne, it seems for Merleau-Ponty, presents us with the case of an individual in whom there has occurred a general collapse of the perceptual field and its promise of objectivity. This conclusion is consonant with the skepticism of the Essays, so long as we understand Montaigne’s doubt as originating in an exclusive and obsessive thinking that sides with the body against the reflective purity of consciousness. For reasons that fall outside the scope of this paper, Merleau-Ponty associates the retreat to the sensory consciousness in the Essays with the kind of pathological subjectivity encountered in schizophrenia.10 This comparison might seem to be a highly unusual and perhaps even forced interpretation of the Essays. The Essays are not, after all, the product of a mind given over to delusions or hallucinations, nor is there any general loss of the sense of the world that distinctly characterizes the inner life of the schizophrenic.11 However, from an existential standpoint we are able to surmount the obvious

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differences and find a powerful and single understanding that speaks to this privileging of the sensory over the perceptual. The common portrait that can be read in the Essays and that manifests itself in schizophrenia is of a subject who has divorced sensory appearances from their fulfillment in normal perception. As Merleau-Ponty notes in the chapter “Space,” Montaigne’s overt skepticism masks a more profound existential modification of the world wherein perceptual appearances and perceptual reality have parted ways.12 By giving the senses an exclusive purchase on the cognition of reality – his very self-observation is a study of the minute impressions that register themselves on the sensory body – Montaigne has given the experience of the lived body in its sensitivity an autonomy it does not normally possess within the natural attitude. Let us turn, now, and see just what it is that Montaigne sees when he turns to the body and gives his powers of self-observation over to the flux of sensory existence and the internal movement of the lived body. First off, we must be very clear as to the nature of the self-observation that is taking place for the essayist. To watch oneself in the way that Montaigne does is to look not merely with a vision that originates in the eyes. There is certainly an element of the visual in all of the self-descriptions that are paraded before the reader of the Essays. Montaigne at all events wanted to present himself naked and unadorned. But just as no portrait strives for a merely visual likeness, trying as it does to capture an inflection or style of the person, so too is Montaigne interested in revealing his very essence, as contradictory and variable as it may be. There is a willful aggravation and amplification of subtleties of attitude and mood that works against the belief in a stable self and, correlatively, a stable perception of experience. The notion that consciousness has a “stream-like” quality to it – this is the same phenomenon that is being described in the following observation, taken from the essay “Of the inconsistency of our actions”: “[C]We float between different states of mind; we wish nothing freely, nothing absolutely, nothing constantly.”13 This immersion in the pre-reflective realm of immediate consciousness testifies to the extent to which the very experiencing of subjectivity itself is made the object of an observation that has not removed itself from the body’s conditioning influence. Montaigne is not exploring a consciousness purified of all corporeality. He takes up residence within the body, familiarizing himself with its affective life, exploring its hidden polarities and drives. For Merleau-Ponty, this has the effect of drawing his “power of existing”14 out of its naturally tacit operation. Because this function is responsible for making objects “exist in a more intimate sense, for us,” before they are explicitly determined or thematized in an act of knowledge,15 it is hardly surprising that the objective world slips out of sight.16 Where the “power of existing” is kept from its


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natural insertion in the world through my situated being, my surroundings everywhere take on a subjective value that hides objectivity from me. Unlike the normal person, whom Merleau-Ponty describes as being content to avoid the direct experience with his own subjectivity,17 Montaigne revels in the body as directly experienced. It is the very phenomenon of “experiencing” itself that is the focal point for the self-observation in the Essays. We can better understand, now, the phenomenological reading of Montaigne: by making the sensory consciousness the object for reflection, the horizons of sensible experience are kept from their perceptual fulfillment. Montaigne has become a “spectator” of his sensory impressions. Where there is no longer any stable “self” that is anchored in the common, objective world, there is solely an “affectedness” of existence. In this state of heightened awareness, Montaigne writes of being able to notice within his experience the emergence of a “thousand unconsidered and accidental impulses”18 ; of acutely watching himself being overtaken at one time by a “melancholic humor” and at another moment by a “choleric”19 ; elsewhere he will make the observation, that “to a man vexed and afflicted,” and for Montaigne we are never for a moment free from the body’s afflictions, “the brightness of the day seems darkened and gloomy.” This last observation is an example of the kind of affective phenomenon that occurs when, in intimate proximity to the “passions of the soul,”20 the existential bases for experience are withdrawn from their natural functioning in normal perception. We find here the logic that guided Merleau-Ponty in his placement of Montaigne in the chapter “Space,” which is predominantly an attempt to recover the primary spatiality of existence, a spatiality that is lived rather than measured. In the radical reflection operating on the sensible body, Montaigne dramatically diminished the common space and distance that gives the object in an intersubjective manner. To perceive is to grasp an object at a distance, against a common background of intentional fields that transcend one’s private situation. To lose this perceptual structure or Gestalt is to relate to the world from a sensory perspective – it is to be unable to separate oneself from the sensible contact with one’s surroundings. For Merleau-Ponty, the very structure of space, and thus the very normalcy of perceptual reality, is dependent on the field of distance that radiates outward from the body. On this point he writes, “What protects the sane man against delirium or hallucination, is not his critical powers, but the structure of his space: objects remain before him, keeping their distance and, as Malebranche said speaking of Adam, touching him only with respect.”21 Without this sense of distance that sustains objects in their horizonal structure, there is a merging of the body-subject and the sensory world and a radical overturning of the stable field for perceptual experience.22

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Where life is given over to the primary springs of spatiality in the lived body, the subject confronts the contingent mutability of sensory existence. Fully immersed in the mobile cogito of the lived body, Montaigne gives himself over to the phenomenon of movement: The world always looks straight ahead; as for me, I turn my gaze inward, I fix it there and keep it busy. Everyone looks in front of him; as for me, I look inside of me; I have no business but with myself; I continually observe myself, I take stock of myself, I taste myself. No man tries to descend into himself [Persius]; as for me, I roll about in myself.23

This experience of “rolling about in oneself” is an accurate description of the merging with the sensory aspects of appearances which results from the loss of one’s perceptual field and the consequent shrinkage of the lived space that structures the common world. The “spatiality” of Montaigne’s self-observation amounts to a disclosure of that contact with the world that in normal perception gives objects at a familiar distance, but when under the exclusive rule of the sensory, affective power of the body, turns the given world into an empirical contingency incapable of sustaining any confidence or faith in the objects of perception. Lacking the stable perspective on the world constituted through the relation to the world of objects, Montaigne’s self-observation is turned into a mobile vision, ceaselessly buffeted by the passions of the body and the soul. It would be easy to say that this unrelenting proximity to the sensible body gives the subject over to the flux of appearances, and think thereby that we have implicitly found the temporal interpretation that we have been seeking. To equate the shifts in affectivity with a sense of time’s passing, however, is only a surface phenomenon. Yet it does point to a deeper relation between the disruption of existential spatiality and the potential temporal effects that can be found within this modality of subjective being. Spatiality, while it stands as one of the primary modes of subjective existing, is still only an expression of our being-in-the-world. What gives the world its original significance in the perceptual life of the individual – what makes it a lived world – is the idea that the world is in inseparable communication with the subject. “The subject,” Merleau-Ponty writes, “is a being-in-the-world and the world remains subjective.”24 This active and ongoing projection of the world by the subject defines the notion of transcendence.25 Whatever determinate significance the world possesses it has because the subject is able to transcend a given situation or perceptual presentation. There is thus a crucial futural aspect to transcendence: to exist is to be able to surmount the sensory immediacy of our embodied existence for the perceptual fullness of the intersubjective object.26 So long as I am able to live toward the future


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in such a way that the world remains an open projection of significance and certainty, my acts and their synthesis unfold in the mode of active or bound transcendence. What “binds” my acts of transcendence is precisely the perceptual distance that I create when I make a decision or establish a concept and thereby cease to passively submit to the momentum of existence.27 Active transcendence presumes one can step back from the initial sensory contact by means of one’s insertion in the world of perceptual experience. One escapes into the future horizons of the object in order to throw the present adumbration into perceptual determinacy. Without any perceptual world to respond in one’s dialogue with the object, the subject of sensation lives the present as a fleeting moment, without any sense of anticipation directed into the future or memory directed into the past. The protentional and retentional structures of time consciousness,28 which depend upon an organized perceptual field,29 and which in turn acquire their constitutive significance through the body as the situational pole for all my practical and reflective dealings with objects, cease to meet in a field of presence. For the subject anchored in perceptual experience, time is that “mobile setting which moves away from us”30 ; for the subject of sensory appearances, consciousness “moves” with the “mobile setting,” leaving behind it no traces of a governing style of being or a perceptual history. Carried off in ever new sensory appearances, the object (and the subject) under observation dissolves into a series of impressions lacking any temporal consistency or style. On a strictly textual level the different chronological levels of insertions and additions to the Essays are proof of the extreme variability through which Montaigne filters his self-understanding. Perceptual identity becomes an illusion that has no place in the realm of sensory appearances. Since there is no tending toward objectivity in the wake of the collapse of the subject’s “power of existing,” there is no stable field of perception. The retreat to the sensible body disperses the common world. Relying strictly on the body’s reception of the object, drawing out the various sensory textures and isolating them for study and “test” or “trial,”31 is a sure means to lose the ability to communicate with the object as a significant perceptual, expressive whole. Correlatively, if there is no longer any network of perceptual intentions sustaining me and drawing out my encounter with the object into ever fuller presentations, the chances of establishing my situation within the world are severely curtailed. I look on as a spectator, not from some place above the world, bur rather from the inner sensibility which I now live as my private perspective. The twin phenomena of lack of perceptual being or anticipatory fullness and sensory passing of time come together and are powerfully expressed in the description Montaigne gives of his subjective

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experiences of time. Given his personal and skeptical retreat from the objective world, he is left with only the temporal flux of sensory appearances. Perception is no longer able to function as an organizing principle for maintaining, in my experience, a “concrete hold on time in a living present.”32 Where the subject refuses to remain motionless, the portraitist has no choice but to adapt to the creative, existential needs of the moment. When in the concluding moments of the famous skeptical essay, the “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” Montaigne abandons all hope of communicating with the being of the world,33 he is drawing the phenomenological conclusion to an argument whose premises borrow their certainty from the status of the lived body. For Montaigne, “there is no existence that is constant, either of our being or of that of objects.”34 Without any self to direct the deployment of the temporal horizons of the experience through the meaningful, active encounter with the perceptual object, there is only a contact with sensory moments. As they pass into subsequent impressions, no longer bound together into a single presentation of the object but distributed into the various sensory registers, the observing self moves with them. For Merleau-Ponty, to live the sensible appearance as the only modality of subjectivity is to break the “perceptual chains” that link up one perception with the next.35 Being unable to move beyond the sensed immediacy of his contact, via the body, with the affective surface of the world, Montaigne is caught up in the movement of transcendence that propels the subject into perceptual contact with the world. Yet, in the absence of a field of perception to allow for the binding of transcendence to determinate perceptual acts, the subject of sensation experiences the phenomenon of transcendence with no perceptual background for support. It is in this sense that the movement of existence is inhibited and comes “unbound” from its world setting, leaving Montaigne without a temporal hold on the future, and, consequently, without any of the temporal fullness that characterizes the phenomenological experience of the world. If, for Merleau-Ponty, the perceptual act “is pinning one’s faith, at a stroke, in a whole future of experiences, and doing so in a present which never strictly guarantees the future,”36 and if this faith in the future is a function of the projection of a world through active, bound transcendence, then Montaigne, who knows no faith in a temporal future populated with stable perceptions of objects, represents a cautionary form of subjectivity whose phenomenological value is outweighed by a movement of transcendence that wells up in itself with nowhere to go, its perceptual dialogue with the world reduced to a sensory monologue. Georgian Court University


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NOTES 1

The decision to write in French rather than in the traditional Latin makes for a significant and ultimately telling reflection on the embrace of temporal change by Montaigne. From the essay “Of vanity,” Montaigne writes: “I write my book for few men and for few years. If it had been durable matter, it would have had to be committed to a more stable language. In view of the continual variation that has prevailed in ours up to now, who can hope that its present form will be in use fifty years from now?” For Montaigne, the choice of linguistic expression is determined by the perishable matter – his own existence and its essential becoming – of the object he is portraying. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958). For the reader’s convenience, page references will also be given for the two French editions of the Essays most commonly cited: the Pléiade version by Albert Thibaudet (Paris: Gallimard, 1950); and the Quadrige version prepared by Pierre Villey and V.-L. Saulnier, 3 vols., 3rd ed. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999). References to the Essays will start with the Frame translation, to be followed by the Thibaudet, and then the Villey-Saulnier editions. The Thibaudet edition will be abbreviated “T” and the Villey-Saulnier by “V-S.” Thus, in the citation for this passage, for example, III: 9, p. 751; T 1101; V-S 982, what is indicated is the Frame translation, third Book of the Essays, essay 9, page 751; the Thibaudet edition, page 1101; and the Villey-Saulnier edition, page 982. 2 Montaigne, “To the Reader,” p. 3; T 25; V-S 53. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., III: 5, p. 641; T 942; V-S 942. 5 Hugo Friedrich, Montaigne, ed. Philippe Desan, trans. Dawn Eng (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), p. 208: “In this way the Essais became the most personal book that had appeared to date in world literature, despite all its precursors in the various categories of autobiography, confessions, memoirs, and letters.” 6 In the “Preface” to the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty writes that the “phenomenological reduction belongs to existential philosophy.” (p. xiv; PP-F ix). Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New Jersey: The Humanities Press, 1962). References to the Smith translation will be accompanied by the citation from the French edition of the Phenomenologie de la Perception (Paris: Tel/Gallimard, 1945). Subsequent references to the French edition will be abbreviated PP-F. 7 Montaigne, III: 2, p. 611; T 899; V-S 805. 8 Ibid., II: 12, p. 424; T 634; V-S 564. “It is certain,” writes Montaigne, “that our apprehension, our judgment, and the faculties of our soul in general, suffer according to the movements and alterations of the body, which alterations are continual.” 9 Rudolf Bernet, Iso Kern, Eduard Marback, An Introduction to Husserlian Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), pp. 126–130. 10 Merleau-Ponty groups together Montaigne and the schizophrenic as displaying forms of subjectivity that belong to the “philosophy of transcendence or absurdity.” Both stand at the interior limits of this philosophical perspective: “I can remain in the realm of the absurd only if I suspend all affirmation, if, like Montaigne or the schizophrenic, I confine myself within an interrogation which I must not even formulate: for by formulating it I should ask a question which, like any determinate question, would entail a reply. If, in short, I face truth not with its negation, but with a state of non-truth or ambiguity, the actual opacity of my existence.” Phenomenology of Perception, p. 295; PP-F 341. 11 One of the most influential studies of this particular characteristic of schizophrenia can be found in the landmark work by Wolfgang Blankenburg, La Perte de l’évidence naturelle:

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Une contribution à la psychopathologie des schizophrénies pauci-symptomatiques (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1991). 12 Merleau-Ponty, p. 295; PP-F 341. 13 Montaigne, II: 1, p. 240; T 369; V-S 333. 14 Merleau-Ponty, p. 134; PP-F 156. 15 Ibid. 16 The self-observation in the Essays is radically exclusive. When Montaigne writes, “I who spy on myself more closely, who have my eyes unceasingly intent on myself, as one who has not much business elsewhere,” he is describing not merely a narrowing of perspective but a genuine encounter with existence in its subjective modality. Objects cease to function as perceptual supports for a world that transcends the individual. Montaigne, II: 12, p. 425; T 636; V-S 565. 17 Merleau-Ponty, p. 343; PP-F 395. 18 Montaigne, p. 425; T 636; V-S 566. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., p. 450; T 673; V-S 596. 21 Merleau-Ponty, p. 291; PP-F 337. 22 Of this merging of the subject and the world in the loss of a perceptual background to offset and structure the spatiality of objects, Merleau-Ponty writes: “What brings about both hallucinations and myths is a rooting of things in our body, the overwhelming proximity of the object, the oneness of man and the world, which is, not indeed abolished, but repressed by everyday perception or by objective thought ” Ibid., p. 291; PP-F 337. 23 Montaigne, II: 17, p. 499; T 743; V-S 658. 24 Merleau-Ponty, p. 430; PP-F 492. 25 Merleau-Ponty defines the theory of existence as having to do with “that fundamental activity whereby man projects himself towards a ‘world.’ ” Ibid., p. 191; PP-F 222. 26 Ibid., p. 239; PP-F 276: “I open my eyes on to my table, and my consciousness is flooded with colours and confused reflections; it is hardly distinguishable from what is offered to it; it spreads out, through its accompanying body, into the spectacle which so far is not a spectacle of anything. Suddenly, I start to focus my eyes on the table which is not there yet, I begin to look into the distance which is still only potential, and so disposes its sensitive surfaces as to make it a present reality. I can thus re-assign to its place in the world the something which was impinging itself upon me, because I can, by slipping into the future, thrown into the immediate past the world’s first attack on my senses, and direct myself towards the determinate object as towards a near future.” 27 Ibid., p. 427; PP-F 488. 28 Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, trans. James S. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964). 29 Merleau-Ponty, p. 416; PP-F 476. 30 Ibid., p. 419; PP-F 480. 31 Both “test” and “trial” are equivalent translations of the French “essai.” 32 Merleau-Ponty, p. 339; PP-F 391. 33 Montaigne, II: 12, p. 455; T 679; V-S 601. 34 Ibid., II: 12, p. 455; T 679; V-S 601. 35 Merleau-Ponty, p. 338; PP-F 390: “The experiences of other people or those which await me if I change my position merely develop what is suggested by the horizons of my present experience, and add nothing to it. My perception brings into co-existence an indefinite number of perceptual chains which, if followed up, would confirm it in all respects and accord with it.” 36 Ibid., p. 297; PP-F 343.

ANETA ZACHARZ

TRANSLATION LOST, TRANSLATION REGAINED – ON TEMPORALITY, OR ON BEING

Theo Hermans, one of the leading scholars in the field of translation studies, claims that “if is it is true that in the beginning was the word, then almost from the beginning there was a problem of translation.”1 From Genesis we learn that the word of God had the power of creation. However, the divine act of verbal creation provoked the emergence of duality. Since then, as Pavel Florensky notes, the duality of everything that was created has always been considered not only primary but also problematic.2 In his article, Art as Iconostasis, Władysław Panas argues that before the fall, in paradise, the provoked duality existed only potentially. Its manifestation and perception as “opposition” and “diversification” were unlawful. As a consequence, the perfect paradisaical communion of oppositions obliterated duality, united the internal with the external and echoed divine homeostasis. This homeostatic reality appeared to be the world of the bracketed semiotics. There, the differentiation into signifier and signified, form and content, foreground and background did not exist since God’s word was not a mere sign but reality. When God said let there be light, there was light and when He said let there be man, Adam came to existence. Hence, in the Garden of Eden, communication did not rely on codes, symbols, allegories or metaphors. There, everything had a meaning and everything communicated. The language of paradise was the expression of the absolute unison between God and His creation. As a result, there was no space for the non-communicative or non-meaningful. Therefore, following Panas’s argumentation, it is possible to say that in the situation when everything communicated holistic meaning, semioticity appeared to be invalid since a sign can become a sign only when it can be confronted with a non-sign; the language spoken in the Garden of Eden was all-sign; it was absolute and complete. Consequently, paradisaic language had a pre-semiotic character. However, together with the original sin, as Leo Shestov claims, when the Tree of Death threw a shadow upon the Tree of Life, man lost the opportunity of continual participation in the language of the divine absolute. 233 A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana LXXXVI, 233–255. © 2007 Springer.

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This eradication from the absolute left man not only with the original sin but also with language flawed with duality. As a result, personal communication became transformed into communication of signs, by means of which man has tried to seize post-Edenic reality. While the language before the fall was immediate, the language after the fall appeared to be indirect. Therefore, as Panas argues, the fall of our first parents was, first of all, a fall into semiotics. Hence, differentiation, which is a principle of all semioticity, has changed paradisal harmony into amartological disharmony.3 Yet, once polarized, the parts strive for the unison. The desire of the ultimate coming back to the state of direct communication appears to be primordial, yet impossible to be entirely realised. This impossibility introduces a demand for dialogical engagement because only in dialogue can binarities approximate and bridge a gap between one another; moreover, it is in dialogue that they mutually disclose their othernesses. Yet, reciprocal understanding of othernesses is possible only through and in the process of translation. In the world of post-paradisal relations, despite the cacophony of voices, the ultimate function of every act of communication remains the same: mutual agreement and consonance in understanding.4 But this mutual agreement and understanding can be reached, to quote Gadamer, only by “bridging the distance between minds and revealing the foreignness of the other mind.”5 The problem of making what is alien comprehensible, shares its structure with both hermeneutics and translation. Thus, to quote Gadamer, “as the art of conveying what is said in a foreign language to the understanding of another person, hermeneutics is not without reason named after Hermes, the interpreter of the divine message to mankind. [ ] We are dealing here with a language event, [ ] which presupposes understanding.”6 In that way, translation, as Theo Hermans maintains, very nearly becomes the human condition – every act of understanding involves an act of translation of one kind or another; every translation involves the transfer of meaning. There are two aspects that are of particular relevance to translation: the cultural and the interpretative. The first refers to the problem of translation in the context of transmission and mediation. The second refers to the problem of translation in the context of making things intelligible by means of verbal explanation and commentary to and of the target text. Transmission and mediation not only build bridges but also enable going beyond the domesticated into the sphere of the unknown. Intelligibility, to quote Hermans, is achieved here by “offering a mirror image of that which itself remains beyond reach, by presenting a reproduction, a replica, a representation.”7 Translation, thus, seems to belong to mimesis – the world of imitation, likeness and resemblance. However, the cultural and the interpretative aspects of translation

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converge and connect with each other because “the trust that we, on this side of the language barrier, place in the translator as mediator and enabler depends on the quality, or the presumed quality, of the translation as likeness, as resemblance, as a truthful portrait.”8 Nevertheless, there are scratches on this “mimetic” portrait. Though often ignored and overlooked, considered mechanical, secondary and derivative, translation has undeniably contributed much to the making of culture. As a cultural force it appears to be hybrid and plural since the voice of the other is always present in it. This voice echoes the voice of the original but never fuses with it. Accordingly, the image of translation as mimesis changes into the image of translation as the hybrid construction of mimesis and poiesis. Translation is not isomorphic. What happens in the process of translation is the osmotic exchange which leads to the image distortion of both the original and the derivative; it means that in the process of translation, because of the instability of meaning that results from the continuous exchange, the identity of the original and the derivative is established each time the “barter” takes place.9 In that sense, translation belongs first of all to creation, and not merely to recreation. Accordingly, translation is always unique since when the translation occurs it is always a particular type of translation burdened with a cultural context and the fleeting inter/trans-exchange. Thus, as Gadamer writes “the task of the translator must never be to copy what is said, but to place himself in the direction of what is said (i.e. in its meaning) in order to carry over [to render/u˝ bertragen] what is to be said into the direction of his own saying.”10 This mutual exchange without violation and domination of either of the sides inscribes itself in the Rosenzweigian idea of dialogue whose result cannot be anticipated. Translation that happens in this time-nourished dialogue has its telos not in the distant future (Aristotelian meaning of the concept of telos) but in the now of the very process of translation. The relation of the background and the foreground illustrates the relation between those who/which participate in translation. Their mutual referentiality and inseparability not only reflect the nature of the process of translation but also function as a warranty of the continuity of experiencing. However, it is difference that gives life both to the background and to the foreground, and makes them individual while still remaining in the dialogical symbiosis. Consequently, the experience of the background and the foreground is characterised by the duality of negation and affirmation: “negation means that an essence is lived in discontinuity whereas affirmation means that diversity is lived in continuity.”11 Discontinuity, ascribed to being, and also to the foreground, is a sudden rupture of a detail, which strikes with separateness; the essence manifests itself in the form of the self-imposing message. Continuity,

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referred to existence, and to the background, creates conditions for communication. In that way they create a two-dimensional system that can be read from the inside and from the outside, depending on whether we posit ourselves on the side of manifestation (foreground) or conversation (background). The “voice” of the background comes from the inside while the “voice” of the foreground comes from the outside. However, only when coupled, do the background and the foreground build a complete picture; only when coupled can they serve their mutual full understanding. CULTURE REVISED ACT OF TRANSLATION

In the opinion of Umberto Eco, translation is a process that happens between two texts “produced” at a given time and in a given cultural background. Accordingly, while translating it is not enough to only consider relations and affiliations between two linguistic systems but also between cultural milieus, or in other words, “two encyclopaedias.”12 In translation that is dialogically oriented the translated into and the translating are equally important. This equality has its roots in the Renaissance courtly love and the language of cortoise. It was the phenomenon of courtly love that extorted the need of translation between the sphere of femininity and the sphere of masculinity. The pre-Renaissance translatio or transferre relying on the hierarchical order of subject and object changed into a horizontal type of translation, in which subject and subject relation stood in the lead. The former, following a pattern of a master and slave and imposing the dominance of the emperor language on the conquered one, “effectively colonises the source text.”13 The latter strives for the harmony of coexistence and cultural co-exchange because, to mention an opinion of Susan Bassnett and Andre Lefevere, “translation is never innocent; it is always doubly contextualised [ ] since the text has a place in two cultures. There is always a context in which the translation takes place, always a history from which a text emerges and into which a text is transposed.”14 In the space of the horizontal the lover and the beloved, the same and the other, open a relation of a complex co-presence, the experience of which relies on a Daedalian interplay and exchange of attraction, repulsion and cross-fertilisation. Therefore, it is possible to compare translation, as Andre Lefevere does, to a channel through which, he writes, “foreign influences can penetrate the native culture, challenge it, and even contribute to subverting it.”15 In this way, every act of rendering creates an opportunity for the cultures of minority to demonstrate that their “languages” are able to express the same content, which is expressed by languages of the majority without any


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violation.16 The above directs our attention to the problem connected with the use or misuse of power in the process of rendering and with the question of faithfulness in the process of translation. It cannot be denied that translation may carry with itself the threat of suppression and dominance. Victor Hugo used to say that “when you offer a translation to a nation, that nation will almost always look at the translation as an act of violence against itself.”17 Then what happens is, as he continues, “an abuse of images, a profusion of metaphors, a violation of frontiers, a forced introduction of the cosmopolitan into local taste.”18 Consequently what takes place is repression and distortion because when translating, the power of those who wield in the target culture becomes legitimised while the source culture becomes disenfranchised. Certainly, things do not have to take such an unfortunate turn since power, along Foucault lines, “does not only weigh on us as a force that says no, but it traverses and produces things, it introduces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse.”19 Translation appears to be not only a rewriting, to believe Susan Bassnett, but also a creative manipulation undertaken “in the service of power.”20 In this service of power, translation is highly creative both in the conceptual and cultural field. Furthermore, it may provoke the opening move from text, as a translation unit made of words, to culture, as a translation “unit” made of discursive realities. Therefore, the creative power, here the discursive power of culture, should not be shared only by the dominant culture but also by the inferior one. In that way, power discourses open up to the less powerful milieus while “subjugated knowledges”21 give credit of trust to the “superior knowledges” and, by that, become accessible to those who use mainstream, or in other words, more powerful discourses. It is the translator who is made responsible for keeping a balance between the universe of discourse acceptable to the original and the universe of discourse acceptable both to the very translator and the audience of the translation. While striking a balance “the translator’s first duty is,” in Mathew Arnold’s words, “to be faithful, but the question at issue then is, in what faithfulness consists.”22 Given the complexity of the translation phenomenon, faithfulness cannot be considered either on purely linguistic grounds or as a system of rules to be followed. Faithfulness does not simply mean equivalence, literal reverberation or technical manoeuvre allowing a translator to express “somehow” the spirit of the translated text. Faithfulness in translation is intimately connected with ethics and (surprisingly) “economic exchange”; translation and translator are faithful when the right or wrong motivates the response to the call of the text, when the economy of the translation loss and retrieval is equilibrated.

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It is the mechanism of exogamy and endogamy, as Steiner claims, which allows that equilibration. In other words, it is possible to say that faithfulness refers rather to the process of ethical negotiation, as Eco writes, “between author and text, between author and readers, as well as between the structure of two languages and the encyclopaedias of two cultures,” negotiation that is “the only one that matches our experience.”23 The one who enters translation is responsible for diachronic and synchronic transpositions. He initiates the exchange backgrounded with the idea of compatibility. The aim is laudable – it is to make the source text “feel at home” in the culture of the target text. The expected result is to erase the difference between the modes of functioning of the source and target texts in the source and target cultures. However, the erasure is dependent on how and what type of functions the culture of the translated-into (the target culture) assigns to the very translations. Consequently, if the translation result rests on the status of the addressee24 and the status of the source text25 then the very translation appears to be highly influential and becomes a part of a production of culture, or in other words, culture appears as the operational unit of translation. Therefore, as Vladimir Macura notes, translation has a constitutive power – it can “legislate” cultures.26 Accordingly, on the general level it is possible to talk about intracultural and intercultural translations. The first is connected with a rewriting owing to which “certain texts originally translated from another culture can become naturalised to such an extent that they are given the same ‘intracultural’ treatment as texts which have originally been generated within the culture in question.”27 The second can be equalised with a notion of Eco’s adaptation, or in Jakobsonian terms, with a transmutation,28 which helps to “understand” the original usually by depriving it of its multidimensionality.29 Eco calls it “understanding through manipulation.”30 However, the above division inevitably simplifies the problem of the cultural liminality of the process of translation and boils it down to the either-or conflict. Yet the problem seems to be more profound. When the traditional Herderian concept of single cultures relying on the elements of social homogenisation, ethnic consolidation and intercultural delimitation,31 proved to be invalid, the concepts of interculturality and multiculturality came into discussion. Yet, as Wolfgang Welsch claims, neither of them could embrace the complexity of modern cultures and consequently, both approaches appeared inappropriate in their attempts to disentangle the intricate problem of cultural communication, or in fact, the lack of that communication. Having in mind limitations also brought about by interculturality and multiculturality, Wolfgang Welsch proposed a conception which gave up the


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idea of isolated cultures and aimed at the reconciliation of diversities. He named it transculturality. The concept of transculturality perfectly describes the condition of modern culturality, which by means of interpenetration, interconnection and entanglement, constructs cultural networks. This mesh structure of cultures mirrored in the transcultural approach transcends the monocultural vision of societies and expresses their hybrid nature. Moreover, hybridial are not only cultures and their societies but also subjects who/which constitute them.32 “The differences,” Welsch maintains, “no longer come about through a juxtaposition of clearly delineated cultures (like in mosaic), but result between transcultural networks, which have some things in common while differing in others, showing overlaps and distinctions at the same time.”33 The new type of differentiation is no longer territorially prone but primarily, culturally prone. Geographical or national matters are not of prime importance here. Moreover, it is extremely affiliative. Cultural networks composed of elements are highly exchangeable. As Welsch writes, they “include segments which also occur in other networks and thus represent points of affiliation between different transcultural forms.”34 In this cultural web of relations and correlations man functions and behaves like a nomad. He moves freely in the mesh of cultural realities, adds new segments to the existing ones or performs their cultural exchange. This trade-like attitude contributes to the rise of a new transcultural identity. What it promotes is the exchange and interaction between othernesses, which remaining distinguished, are at once exceedingly acclimative and accommodative. Therefore it is possible to risk a statement that the mechanism of transculturality reflects the mechanism of translation, the process of which is never completely dissociated from the context of culture, be it in practical or theoretical dimension. Accordingly, as Irene Oseki-Dépré writes, “every act of translation is already a conscious or unconscious ‘thought’ about translation, either corresponding to an existing option or creating the option that it is setting up.”35 The socio-cultural exchange is almost always detectable in the act of rendering. Cultural transposition, rearrangement of segment transformation in the process of rendering perfectly illustrates hermeneutic and phenomenological exploration owing to which human consciousness becomes engaged in the process of understanding. Consequently, as the authors of Redefining Translation allege, “hermeneutic translation or translation as hermeneutics is the experience of the contradiction between two cultural worlds, which at the same time causes the translator to question his own preconceptions and to assimilate those which he finds to be foreign to himself.”36 In the above

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configuration the role of the translator is not only to convert the place of the earlier mentioned segments, or reformulate the ever-changing conditions of meaning definition, but first of all to negotiate all types of changes. Accordingly, to believe George Steiner, “a culture is a sequence of translations and transformations of constants.”37 Consequently, we can talk about changes which result from the activity of the translator’s translation, and which, as Henry Meschonnic points out, are of three types: expansive, regressive and conservative. Regressive and conservative “changes” are the effect of translations relying on the classical and intercultural models of culture. The lack of dialogical communication, which relies on mutual exchange, results in the repression of the other and the loss of distinctive borders since, “cultures can only succeed in establishing contacts – be they of harmonious or of the destructive sort – through and because of their differences.”38 Expansive changes, however, do not lead to the intrusion on the borders of the other. They are the effect of crossfertilisation of othernesses that results from dialogical communication, in which the recognition of the difference that entails the recognition of the other is not an obstacle but an advantage and a privilege. Inevitably, the expansion of the change becomes initiated. It is owing to the other, Steiner argues, that “the role of the translation is determining in the process of cultural cross-determination; in translation the dialectic of unison and of plurality is dramatically at work.”39 Consequently, translation can be described as a hermeneutic process of the transcultural production.40

THE PROCESS OF TRANSLATION

The concept of transculturality as a dynamic exchange reflects the nature of translation as a dialogically oriented process. Dialogue entails an ethical dimension – responsibility for the other. Transculturality emphasises the need of continual change and exchange which give rise to the new but temporal identity that does not abandon the past; however, still residing in the present is all the time directed to future. It is in translation that the self can look back and forth at the same time and engage itself in a complex co-presence of cultural realities. Translation appears to be a space of atonement “animated with the rites of recognition.”41 Salutation, reticence and various types of exchange comprise the cortesia of understanding in which the exchange of elements, cultural intermixing leading to mutual fertilization and resulting temporal nomadic identity, or the essential role of communication between othernesses, delineate the infinity of relationship.


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Cortesia, relying on the idea of egalitarian plurality, refers to the essential negativity present in the meeting with the other. This negativity, enforced by the ceremonials of encounter, thwarts both domination and destructive identification that leads either to suppression or erosion of identity. Therefore, cortesia, to believe Steiner, “carrying a precise, probing wealth of associations”42 and having the power of welcoming or rejecting the guest (the other), helps to create a havening space for reconciliation. Within that space, “on a tree of meaning [ ] where branch and leaf are highest, cortesia qualifies the last ambush or the final tryst which is a possible venue – the coming, the coming to a place of God.”43 What is interwoven into and what makes this confrontation even more profound is the notion of death, or more exactly, the awareness of its inevitability, unpredictability and mercuriality. The concept of death marks creation with completion and finiteness but simultaneously it leads to a new way of being. As Franz Rosenzweig maintains, death effecting “the experience of factuality that precedes all facts of actual experience,”44 points to the occurrence of opening toward the other. Therefore, following Norbert Samuelson, it is possible to say that “death, being the capstone of creation whose recipient is marked by the past,”45 projects itself to the revelation of a lived life. Consequently, as we can read, “death removes creation imperceptibly into the past, and turns it into the tacit, permanent prediction of the miracle of its renewal.”46 The continuous recurrence of death causes the incessant occurrence of ever-new stages of existence. Death has a driving force that determines existence not only in a general sense but also in a particular one. The space of reconciliation provoked by the death – the space that resists cultural or political invasions – can be considered utopian, since it assumes the simultaneous being the same and the other. However, the idea of a deeper and deeper marriage between two othernesses is designed to annul the abyss of misunderstanding. The translator is to help in the renewal of the communication grounds, which now are to rely on the process of bridging and the exchange of segments, so as to make the alien sound of the other audible, “to build up, or invent, an otherness as an offer of a new identity.”47 It does not mean, however, synthesis; the openness of distances could not be infringed; all unused or lost possibilities of reinvigoration have to be put into use again, have to be cultivated in the same way one cultivates fallow ground.48 It is speech that makes it possible. In the courtly dance of translational welcomes and farewells, a new otherness as a new identity is built up. By this means, in the process of translation, the soil of living language is prepared to let the other immerse in it, accept it and finally to raise their

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common crops – to speak up. In that way, translation amalgamates re-creative and purely creative powers; in its cultivation mimesis and poiesis are equally at work. THE CONTEXT OF FRANZ ROSENZWEIG

Franz Rosenzweig’s philosophy of translation coined in the first half of the 20th century places itself in the canon in which translation is perceived as dialogue and transcultural project. Rosenzweig, differentiating between traditional western philosophy – characterized by the question of “what is?” which is concerned with essence, and the new philosophy – characterized by the question of “what happens?” which focuses on relationality and experience, directs our attention to the problematic areas which would impress his way of thinking. In his opinion, the is-philosophy referring to timelessness and timeless truths, worshipping the essence of elements but ignoring the “immanent reality”49 of the particularities of existence, appears to be, as Yudit Kornberg Greenberg writes, not only “one dimensional” and “dissolving multiplicity in its unity,”50 but also pushing to the margins of rational deliberations the significance of individual experience. On the contrary, the new thinking, or in other words the and-philosophy, originates out of its temporality. It is the method of speaking which “does not know in advance where it will arrive; it lets its cues be given by others.”51 It is time-bound and time-nourished because as Rosenzweig reports, “to need time means: being able to anticipate nothing, having to wait for everything, being dependent on the other for one’s own.”52 “Speech thinker” celebrates thinking, but one that is dialogically oriented. The other is needed since only in the dialogical conversation does something happen; only then does the solitude of timeless thinking become annihilated. The meeting with the other, be it a text, a work of art, another human being or God, manifests itself in the immediacy and spontaneity of the moment. It is the meeting that takes place at the intersection of philosophy and theology, science and faith, art and aesthetics where the latter need to be translated into the former, and the former want to be driven into the latter.53 Thus, Rosenzweig draws into his new thinking concepts of creation, revelation and redemption. Creation, which is oriented to the past and which (on the ground of theology) describes the relation between God and the world, functions as “a door of perception” through which, and owing to which, the entrance to the dynamic world of existence becomes possible. It can be called a threshold on which the old is abandoned and the new is about to come under the roof of dialogical relation. Revelation, foreseen by creation, which


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is oriented to the presence and which refers to the relation between God and man, is assigned to life itself – to the experience. It appears to be the source of the dynamic speech, openness to the other and resulting from that, dialogical encounter between I and Thou leading, further, to the cohortative we of redemption. Finally, redemption, in which man and the world find their solace, is oriented to the future. However, battling the old does not mean that objectivity and reason were replaced with the experience as the “key epistemological organon.”54 Instead, Rosenzweig proclaimed evolutionary dialogism, the objective foundation of which was reason and the subjective continuation was experience. In that way, the new thinking remained systematic but “deriving from and accounting for existential reality.”55 Moreover, dynamic “what happens?” created a chance to bridge the distance between two different spheres of philosophical reflection, theology and philosophy, because in Rosenzweig’s opinion, as Greenberg argues, it is “philosophy that anticipates theology and is its precondition.”56 By doing that he introduced a project of dialogical relation, which he exploited furtherly in his philosophy of translation. Übersetzung was not a word with which Rosenzweig felt fully comfortable.57 Though present in his writings and used interchangeably with Übertragung and another term Verdeutschung, Übersetzung is not as precisely interrelated with and allied to his “empirical,”58 performative thought as the already mentioned Übertragung (rendering). In German the two terms are more similar than their English equivalents “translation” and “rendering,” but in both languages they retain a difference: Übersetzung, conceptually connected with explanation means to “set the meaning over”; Übertragung, conceptually associated with restoration and reproduction stands for “carrying the meaning over.” In comparison to Übersetzung, Übertragung appears to have a dynamic character and context.59 Consequently, Rosenzweig differentiates between the two main types of translation. The first one is a type in which the purity of “one-ness” is saved, “the strange” does not disturb the same and no need of dialogical response resounds in and between the lines of the translation. It disregards the task of “reflecting the foreign tone in its foreignness”60 and delimits a “technical event.” Speech (that is transformative and multi-dimensional) and dialogic response (where the addressee and the addressor influence each other and where the translator “makes himself the mouthpiece of the foreign voice, which he makes audible over the gulf of space or time,”61 ) do not appear there. Therefore, translation of the first type has a constitutional and autocrative character and should be equalized with a semantic content of Übersetzung. It is a dictionary that is its chief authority, a reservoir from which a “technical

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translator” draws translation patterns and matrices.62 Constitutional translation does not translate words,63 their contours,64 which create a lived language. As it is “addressed to an immediate need and necessity”,65 it is lined with the language of vocabulary. The nature of the second type of translation may be called dialogical since it is addressed to the immediate desire of meeting a stranger. Reflection of the foreign tone in its foreignness and the very problem of foreignness are of prime importance here. The person, his tonality, his meaning and his heartbeat, as Rosenzweig writes, are to be expressed in their full strangeness that resounds in the ears of the addressee. It adverts to creativity, as “the creative achievement of translating can lie nowhere else than where the creative achievement of speaking itself lies.”66 Accordingly, translation and speech are integrated and cannot be separated. Allied with temporality, it refuses displacement into separatedness, which is always addressed to the immediate need of conquering the other. The difference between the need and the desire designates two paths of translation proceedings. The first one, semantically harmonizing with constitutional translation, refers to remaining within oneself, assimilating and making use of the other. The second one, corresponding with the dialogical translation, suggests taking the risk of going out of the self-constraining and opening onto the other – giving oneself to that other. However, so as to bring near the need-desire difference, first, we should reach for the Heideggerian concept of care (Sorge). The notion of care stands for “the unity of the transcendental structure of the deepest need of Dasein.”67 The most profound need of Dasein is the need of the understanding of being. This need is “the most profound finitude – the medium of being.”68 The need of understanding – anticipating the very understanding – appears to be care (Sorge), which cares only for the ability to be finite.69 The need of understanding overwhelms all dimensions of existence and limits the independence of freedom. The need is so deeply rooted in the structure of Dasein that, as Krzysztof Wieczorek notes, “it is not recognised as the limitation of freedom [ ], in advance, subordinated to the need of understanding.”70 The more we understand, the more possibilities we have. Such a project of understanding “moulds freedom as the autonomy of reason, the right of reason to go beyond being – whatever it may be, the triumph of (anonymous) truth over (personal) justice.”71 The path chosen by Martin Heidegger is a path of totality – thinking based on the principle of sameness and dependence in which “deduction replaced that which eyes see, ears hear and hearts feel.”72 As Józef Tischner notices, freedom that was born of need is not freedom at all. It is making native what is foreign and asking all the time “what is?” Need knows its destination – subjugation of the other to


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satisfy the hunger of the conqueror. As Emmanuel Levinas writes in Totality and Infinity, “in need I can sink my teeth in to the real and satisfy myself in assimilating the other.”73 Need seeks power and control, order and system. Need, imbibing dependence on (self-) constitution, appears to be the primary movement of the same towards the same. The need of understanding is contrasted by Levinasian desire, which reaches into the sphere “about which it is impossible to say that it is not, but in which, however, any of ‘basic’ principles of being discovered by ontology cannot rule.”74 New metaphysics, initiated by desire, focuses on experiencing the particular of meeting – the meeting with another human being, since, Levinas says, “the metaphysical desire tends toward something else entirely, toward the absolutely other.”75 This meeting with the other has both a nomadic nature and a transcendental character. Going beyond any system, it is characterised by the ceaseless readiness to meet and the willingness to succumb to the other. It refers not to ontology, which trusted the substance, but to Jewish metaphysics whose point of departure is just another man and whose sense discloses itself in constant “travelling” towards the unknown. This constant movement towards the unknown negotiates identities of those who participate in the translational meeting and steers I always towards you, or further, to we. In that way nomadism can be juxtaposed with monadism which does not need a dialogical encounter as it closes unaffected I in the self-sufficient ontological constructions. The figure of peregrination versus the figure of stagnation; the parable of Abraham – man of hope, and the myth of Odysseus – man of memories. The dialogue, similarly to desire, which transcends the self-centered categories and dares to face future, cannot be quenched since “it is desire, as Levinas writes, that measures the infinity of the infinite, for it is a measure through the very impossibility of measure.”76 Therefore, translation that is dialogically oriented is restless. It makes the foreign voice audible “over the gulf of space and time.”77 Owing to the process of defamiliarization and distanciation such audibility becomes possible. What happens is the enrichment of the language-spirit, that means, the enrichment of the old by means of the new. Consequently, one can translate because of the assumption that every language has an enriching potential, which enables coterminous co-ordinance of many languages in the process of translation. The can entails both the courage of the decision and foresightedness.78 Subsequently, one may translate to enable the cultivation of a linguistic wasteland of literalness and to make it finally blossom in words breeding their contours since the translator “may not suppress the innuendos of the language.”79 Finally, one shall translate so as to make the growth toward one language possible and so as to provoke

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the break of language and culture isolation – the break that backfills the ditch of alienation and causes the opening to the other and, moreover, bridges strangenesses in the process of translation. Can, may and shall delineate and necessitate the duties of a translator and a certain strategy of the very translation. As a result, the translator may be compared both to a scientist80 weighting his words and trying to find the golden mean, and to a poet making use of his talents. Consequently, mimesis and poiesis coexist, correlate and converge not only in the act of translation but also in the act of battling the place for the translation truth since, as Rosenzweig writes, “the lie has many possibilities, the truth only a few, at base always only one.”81 In that way, the translated-into language, as well as the original undergoes a change because translation opens the possibility of the novel and unique structural and semantic contribution to those involved in the process of rendering.82 Yet the dialogue is only the beginning of inter-human relations. It is community, seizing polyphony of voices, which constitutes a real speech translation. The time of the dialogical performance is the presence, which like love – always renewed but also always passing away – is fleeting. Rosenzweig compares language and by that speech with love and this comparison has a temporal dimension. He writes: “language is alive because it too can die.”83 It means that the nature of language is fragile: rooted in the temporal existence, language mirrors fragmentation of reality; it is ephemeral and, like a human mortal. Accordingly, as Leora Batnitzky remarks, language is, at the same time, immanent and transcendent. “Immanent – because by definition it claims to encompass all of being. To claim completeness is what it means to speak, to say what the case is. Transcendent – because every speaking excludes something, as in contrast to thought or to mathematics, language can never be all-encompassing.”84 Similarly to the Blanchotian understanding of language, the presence of language implies and necessitates its simultaneous absence. As Maurice Blanchot says, “word gives being but it gives being lacking being. A word is the absence of that being; it is its nothingness, it is what had been left when it lost being. It means a word is only a fact that a word is absent.”85 In the process of translation delineated by the polyphony of voices, both the translated into and the translating, in their temporality, simultaneously experiencing the past and the future, grow to the new. In this “community” which spans the past, the present and the future a dramatic performance of rereading that is umbilically connected with the ratification of the already received identity becomes initiated. The dramatic performance of reading incorporating the multitude of voices sets the overtime conversation in which


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identities are formed and transformed. In that way, we move from the wealth of experience towards the responsibility of translation, which materialises when all rules become disillusioned, when a life conversation enters the stage of unpredictability. Thus, translation requires time, and as Rosenzweig says, “to require time means that we cannot anticipate, that we must wait for everything, that what is ours depends on what is another’s.”86 To Rosenzweig, the process of trans lation leads to the unity of language, but the language that is the result of multi plicity and diversity but also uniqueness of those who/which meet in translation. The goal of the mind is to translate, which means to respond to the call of the other and give voice to his/its strangeness and difference. On the battlefield of translation where language forces clash, diversity and tension between present and past propel the constitution of meaning. For Rosenzweig, translation, which entails experience marked with changeability and temporality, is considered to be primary to understanding, which belongs to conscious predictability. Accordingly, only in translation can we encompass contradictions and diversities. The imperative of translation is a continuous effort to “decipher,” exchange and transform while growing to the new. Moreover, it is to explain and all the time remain in the openness to the dialogue. Consequently, the classical translation “doctrine” saying that it is signifie¯ not signifiant, it is thoughts not words that should be translated and that the role of a translator is purely imitative appears to Rosenzweig to be invalid. It occurs that signifie¯ and signifiant mutually enrich themselves in a timenourished rendering, or even more, in that rendering they cannot be detached. In its carrying the meaning over, translation is restless. Interested in the contours of words, it rejects a safe haven of referential synonyms. While translating both untranslatable and translatable, to use Cyprian Norwid’s words, “the proper word [is given] – to thing”87 since “what is pronounced strengthens itself, what is not pronounced tends to nonexistence.”88 This indefatigable endeavour of rendering tends toward the consciousness of now. This move enlivens the text being translated, as well as its past, by negotiating the meaning within the contours of words. It strives to find the truth; but the truth is not in the constitutive that have autocratic character but in the unremitting change, which in its temporality joins past with future. As a result, on the junction between the immanent and the transcendent, a model of agreement is delivered. However, the model results from criticism, which allows for opposing “opinions.” In that way, both the original and the derivative preserve in translation their foreignness. Therefore, it is possible to say that Übertragung dwells in the ever renewed and life giving difference. There is no logic of exclusion, inclusion or paradox but the logic of dialectic

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oppositions since difference leads to “the unity of the antagonistic contradictions.” Consequently, Übertragung is directed to the eternal presence of the tireless and continuous negotiation of meaning. However, we should be aware that while bridging foreign worlds in and by the active process of translation, there appears a shift in the accentuation of the language functions. Every language describes, communicates and expresses. However, they are differently emphasised by different philosophical “trends.” Though the phenomenological strategy of thinking and reasoning is the one that together with hermeneutical approach can help in the characterisation of the process and the notion of translation, its classical version does not seem to be an adequate tool for that characterisation. The reason is that translation understood as Übertragung – carrying the meaning over – refers to the Rosenzweigian empirical pattern of thinking. Thus, it is not the referential function of language but its expressive variation that should be strongly accentuated because it is the expression not the description that is coterminous with the experience. Yet the concept of phenomenology that appears here is not one of the description but one of the expression. For that reason, it is possible to say that to esteem expression means to allow what the in-translation text expresses, articulates and communicates to be blueprinted and mapped out in those who meet on the bridge of translation. In that way the borderline between reality and the word symbolising it becomes blurred. Word is used to throw the participants of the translation dialogue off the routine balance and conventional sensitivity, to make the meeting conversation audible and to awaken the truth of understanding. Therefore, the way of speaking determines the way in which reality can be narrated, which reality can be narrated and which type of relationality becomes possible. The perception of reality forms the basis of the possible types of relationality and is constitutive for its patterns. The cultural world is formed by the way in which it can be narrated by humanity. In and by the dynamic Übertragung, “the gate of the word”89 becomes broken and cannot be altogether closed again. The carrying-over, being always on the way, contrary to Übersetzung90 whose “thirst” can be quenched by the glossary of synonyms, cannot be satisfied. Levinasian desire and need, the parable of Abraham and the myth of Odysseus – in the process of translation – provoke a difference which battles a place for naming which, to paraphrase Heidegger, not only uses words but, first of all, calls to words since the very naming while calling approaches and approximates that which is called.91 As a result, identification of that which is called, its meaning and understanding, amounts to a philosophical problem. Therefore, there is no problem of translation connected with the decision of a choice, which for many translation


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theorists and philosophers appears to be a logical difficulty (aporia), but there is translation as a philosophical and cultural problem. The process of translation, the sense of which materializes itself in the very act of negotiation between othernesses, should be understood dialogically and transculturally. The process of translation is the process of experiencing and bringing speeches of strangers to its full audibility. It initiates unremitting transgression of limitations and biases; in translation the othernesses of cultures and traditions meet in the embrace of the wander; they exchange their goods so as to grow to the new. Translation that emerges from the point of junction between the transcendent and the immanent is the experience that allows going beyond the domesticated and the tamed but without a definite break with that which is domesticated and tamed. Owing to that, as Emmanuel Levinas points, by means of experience it is possible to transgress the objectifying thought, which takes its life-giving power from the experience itself. This suppression of objectivity by its enlivening element becomes a chance for surmountability of obviousness, as Franz Rosenzweig claims, bestowed upon philosophy from Iona to Jena. Experiencing is intertwined with time and space, which are not given in advance but emerge and open (themselves) gradually in the very process of experiencing and translating. When translation happens nothing is as we thought it was and nothing will be as we thought it would be. Translation, nourished by time, is a field of negotiation between what is known and what is unknown, on which problems of being, identity, otherness, repetition, difference and meaning battle the old and face towards the new. Accordingly, a time nourished process of translation functions as a mode of authentic communication between languages, cultures, or literatures. Composed of three stages: immersion (which leads from the secluded Dasein to the co-existence of beings that undergo transfigurations and the exchange of elements within the space of reciprocal recognition), opening (which is a stage at which othernesses enter into conversation. Here, the process of mutual acceptance and cognition begins) and agreement (which constitutes dialogical transmutations and transformations of othernesses in the process of rendering. Uniting the past, the present and directed towards future, acceptance is the possibility of the question, which brings and gives life to the authentic answer. This, as Blanchot claims, turns towards the infinity of confirmation and, by that, is the infinity of conversation), the process of translation appears to be the eternal opening to that which is impossible and unknown – the ineffable. Translation appears to be a field of transcommunication. University of Silesia, Poland

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1

Theo Hermans, “Translation’s Other,” an Inaugural Lecture delivered at University College London on 19 March 1996. (Available:http://eprints.ucl.ac.uk/archive/00000198/01/96_ Inaugural.pdf,Accessed: 05.05.2004). 2 “In the beginning of Genesis – ‘God created the heavens and the earth’ – we have always recognised as basic this division of all creation into two. Just so, when we pray the Apostles’ Creed, we name God as ‘Maker of all things visible and invisible.’ These two worlds – the visible and the invisible – are intimately connected but their reciprocal differences are so immense that the inescapable question arises: what is their boundary? Their boundary separates them; yet, simultaneously it joins them. How do we understand this boundary?” Pavel Florensky, Iconostasis, Donald Sheehan (trans.), St Vladimir Seminary Press, 1996, p. 33. 3 See Władysław Panas, “Sztuka jako ikonostas”, in Znak (12)337, p. 1525. 4 In light of the above, there emerge questions that delineate and span a front of ruminations associated with a problem of matching, joining, or at least, approximating binarities in the process of translation. The first aims at finding the answer to “where” of the common ground for the dialogical meeting of oppositions, or in other words, it asks “what” or “who” is or ought to be a mediator – an intermediate agent able to conjoin or even wed these oppositions. Another question refers to the problem of heterogeneous space taken by binarities, particularly to the problem of passing or moving between antonymic spaces. Thus, as a result, the third is associated with the notion of boundary and the problem of decoding that boundary. Hence, how we understand this boundary, and what that boundary is, demarcates a frame of the discussion upon the function and role of a borderline in communicating and approximating polarities. It should be noted, however, that the concept of boundary should be comprehended here in a dialectical mode, as something that at the same time separates and joins, relegating by those sharp contrasts. Finally, since every communication happens in time, the question about the role of time and its function in and meaning for the process of translation should be posed. 5 Hans Georg Gadamer, “Aesthetics and Hermeneutics,” in Philosophical Hermeneutics, Trans. David E. Linge. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1977, p. 100. 6 Hans Georg Gadamer, “Aesthetics and Hermeneutics,” in Philosophical Hermeneutics, pp. 98–99. 7 Theo Hermans, “Translation’s Other,” Part 1. 8 Theo Hermans, “Translation’s Other,” Part 2. 9 See Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting Translation. History, Post-structuralism and the Colonial Context, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. 10 Hans Georg Gadamer, “Man and Language,” in: Philosophical Hermeneutics, p. 68. 11 Stéphane Mosès, System and Revelation, Trans. Catherine Tihanyi. Detroit: Wayne University Press, 1992, p. 78. 12 Umberto Eco, Rat or Mouse. Translation as Negotiation, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003, p. 82. 13 Susan Bassnett and Andre Lefevere, Translation, History and Culture, London: Pinter Publishers, 1990, p. 11. 14 Susan Bassnett and Andre Lefevere, Translation, History and Culture, p. 11. 15 Translation / History/Culture. A Sourcebook. Andre Lefevere, ed., London and New York: Routledge, 1992, p. 2. 16 In Translation, History and Culture we find an example of such an approach. Susan Bassnett quotes the case of Julius Nyerere who translated Shakespeare into Swahili.

TRANSLATION LOST, TRANSLATION REGAINED 17

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Victor Hugo, in Translation / History/Culture. A Sourcebook, Andre Lefevere ed., p. 18. (Quotation is an extract from the preface Hugo wrote for the Shakespeare translations published by his son, Francois-Victor, in 1865). 18 Victor Hugo, in Translation / History/Culture. A Sourcebook, Andre Lefevere ed., p. 18. 19 Michael Foucault, Power / Knowledge: Selected Interviews 1972–1977, Colin Gordon, ed., New York: Pantheon, 1980, p. 119. 20 Susan Bassnett and Andre Lefevere, Translation, History and Culture, p. IX. 21 Michael Foucault, Power / Knowledge: Selected Interviews 1972–1977, p. 82. 22 Mathew Arnold, “On Translating Homer”, in: Translation / History/Culture. A Sourcebook, Andre Lefevere, ed., p. 68. 23 He continues: “[ ] when speaking of negotiation I do not mean to suggest a sort of deconstructionist idea according to which, since translation is a matter of negotiation, there are no lexical or textual rules that can be used as a parameter for telling an acceptable from a bad or incorrect translation.” Umberto Eco, Rat or Mouse? , p. 34. 24 Susan Bassnett quotes the example of Gulliver’s Travels translations. In a translated version for children, the main character never urinates on the palace of Lilliputians to save it from flames. Instead, he uses water to extinguish the fire. Umberto Eco in Rat or Mouse? refers to the story of Pinocchio, which was changed by Walt Disney’s translation. He directs our attention to two things: the absence of the narrator at the beginning of the Disney fairytale and a nice, vaudeville-like image of a severe pedagogue Cricket. 25 In the case of the texts that are considered to be central for a given culture, the translation is governed by ideology, which very often entails substantial adaptation. 26 See Vladimir Macura, “Culture as Translation” in Translation, History and , pp. 64–70. 27 Susan Bassnett and Andre Lefevere, Translation, History and , p. 9. 28 Roman Jakobson in Linguistic Aspects of Translation distinguishes three types of translation: intralinguistic, interlinguistic and intersemiotic. Intralinguistic translation is defined as “an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs of the same language.” Interlinguistic translation is when “we have an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of some other language.” This type of translation is called translation proper. Finally, intersemiotic translation is “when we have an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of non-verbal systems.” This type of translation is also called transmutation or adaptation. (See Roman Jakobson, “Linguistic aspects of translation”, in Rueben A. Brower, ed., On Translation, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959, pp. 232–239.). 29 Umberto Eco, while discussing the problem of intersemiotic translation, or in other words, transmutation, which relies on the interpretation of verbal signs by non-verbal signs, draws our attention to a wide variety of its forms. He quotes transmutations of a novel to a film or play, a poem into music, or a musical composition into a painting. In all these cases, as he asserts, we can talk about a certain change in the continuum of the original message. The change in matter that is caused by the passage from one continuum to another imposes, however, a certain formal realization, which may say too much or too little. In both cases the spectator, be it reader, listener or viewer, is compelled to accept a given interpretation of a verbal, sound or visual “reticence” of a work. Or, it may happen that “the change of continuum humiliates the vision [because] the verbal text suggests more than its visual transmutation.” (See Umberto Eco, Rat or Mouse?, p. 165 and pp. 158–171). 30 Umberto Eco, Rat or Mouse? , p. 158. 31 Johann Gottfried Herder’s book titled Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind was published in 1784. Exactly in the same year, 1784, Immanuel Kant issued his What is Enlightenment? Kant, perceiving culture in terms of civilization, accompanied the master-and-slave order

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of the cultural world. Therefore, the concept of culture that roots from the Enlightenment contends that only the reason-given autonomy and independence can bring real and authentic culture. In other words, culture equals civilisation. Unfortunately, such an approach results in imperial abuse. The aim of the civilising mission was to answer the presumed call of the uncivilised and refine their imperfect world so as to prepare them to the “conscious” self-governing. However, this patronizing “telling the facts of life” meant usurpation of the right to settle the matter about what is culturally right or wrong. It resulted in domination of the European cultural patterns over the native ones and entailed the destructive presence of the civilised in the world of the “uncivilised.” Herder, on the contrary, while considering culture in terms of difference and diversity, objected to the tendency of creating another in one’s own image. Though the Herderian attempt to liberate the concept of culture from the yoke of the patronizing vision was innovative, in the final analysis, it failed. In fact, the three elements of his cultural conception: social homogenisation, ethnic consolidation and intercultural delimitation are presently untenable. Social homogenisation assumed unification in the womb of a given culture. As Wolfgang Welsch asseverates, homogenisation meant that, “every culture was supposed to mould the whole life of the people concerned and its individuals, making every act and every object an unmistakable instance of precisely this culture.”(Wolfgang Welsch, “Transculturality – the Puzzling Form of Cultures Today,” Available: http://www2.uni-jena.de/welsch/, Accessed: 18.04.2004. Originally published in: Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World, Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash, eds., (London: Sage, 1999), pp. 194–213). Moreover, ethnic consolidation suggested the vision of cultures as autonomous islands or closed spheres. It entailed hermeticity of these cultures both on the level of language and territory, which resulted in the non-acceptance of the other and the intercultural delimitations. The intercultural delimitation brought with itself the exclusion of the foreign, and furthermore, led to a cultural racism – what does not belong to my culture does not deserve respect. Societies can no longer be perceived as homogenous, if ever they could be, since there are severe horizontal (e.g. gender, male and female cultural patterns) and vertical (e.g. residential vs. working-class cultural patterns) differences, as Welsch asserts, which disable coherent unification. Ethnic consolidation appears to be fundamentally erroneous as well. Yet it is impossible to think today about cultures in terms of “central” versus “peripheral.” 32 Welsch quotes the opinion of sociologists (Peter L. Berger, Brigitte Berger, Hansfried Kellner and Daniel Bell) who keep saying that modern lives “are to be understood as a migration through different social words and as the successive realisation of a number of possible identities” and that “we all possess multiple attachments and identities, cross-cutting identities.” (Wolfgang Welsch, p. 5.) He notes that formerly such characterization applied only to the outstanding personalities like Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Whitman, or Montaigne. Today almost everyone has a crosscutting identity. 33 Wolfgang Welsch, “Transculturality – the Puzzling Form of Cultures Today,” p. 8. 34 Wolfgang Welsch, “Transculturality – the Puzzling Form of Cultures Today,” p. 9. 35 I quote Oseki-Dépré (“Le Lettre de l’étrange. Remarques sur le concept de litteralité”, Actes des deuxième assises de la traduction littéraire, Arles: Actes du Sud, Hubert Nissen Editeur, 1985, p. 72) after Lance Hewson and Jacky Martin, Redefining Translation. The Variational Approach, London and New York:Routledge, 1991, p. 8. 36 Lance Hewson and Jacky Martin. Redefining translation. The Variational Approach, p. 9. 37 George Steiner, After Babel. Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 426. 38 Lance Hewson and Jacky Martin. Redefining translation. The Variational Approach, p. 38. 39 George Steiner, After Babel , p. 135.


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Wolfgang Welsch is against the application of the hermeneutic approach to a new model of cultural communication, the transcultural one, and opts for the Wittgensteinian pragmatically based the concept of culture since, as he writes, “it is free of ethnic consolidation and unreasonable demands for homogeneity.” Then he continues, “according to Wittgenstein, culture is at hand wherever practices in life are shared. The basic task is not to be conceived of as an understanding of foreign cultures, but as an interaction with foreignness. Understanding may be helpful, but it is never sufficient alone, it has to enhance progresses in interaction. We must change the pattern from hermeneutic conceptualisations with their beloved presumption of foreignness on the one hand and the unfortunate appropriating dialectics of understanding on the other hand to decidedly pragmatic efforts to interact. [ ] And there is always a good chance for such interactions, because there exist at least some entanglements, intersections and transitions between different ways of life. [ ] Culture, in Wittgenstein’s sense, is by its very structure, open to new connections and to further feats of interaction” (Wolfgang Welsch, “Transculturality ”). In my opinion, the hermeneutic approach together with its presumption of the presence of otherness, the need of understanding the other and the need of verbalisation of this understanding, does not exclude the pure interaction with foreignness nor halt the progress of that interaction. Hermeneutics not only allows for interaction but also enriches it by the attempt of understanding its mechanism. 41 George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 147. 42 George Steiner, Real Presences, p. 148. 43 George Steiner, Real Presences, p. 148. 44 Franz Rosenzweig, “The New Thinking” in: Philosophical and Theological Writings (Trans. Paul. W. Franks and Michael L. Morgan. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2000), p. 23. 45 Norbert M. Samuelson, A User’s Guide to Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption (Richmond: Curzon Press, 1999) p. 146. 46 Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, William W. Hallo trans. (London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), p. 155. 47 Gabriel Motzkin, “Memory and Cultural Translation,” in: ed., Sanford Budick, Wolfgang Iser, The Translatability of Cultures, pp. 265–281. 48 See Franz Rosenzweig, “Afterword”, Jehuda Halevi. Ninety-Two Hymns and Poems, in: Barbara Galli, Franz Rosenzweig and Jehuda Halevi. Translating, Translators, and Translators (London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995), p. 171. 49 Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, p. 108. 50 Yudit Kornberg Greenberg, Better than Wine. Love, Poetry, and Prayer in the Thought of Franz Rosenzweig. (Atlanta, Giorgia: Scholars Press: 1996), p. 19. 51 Franz Rosenzweig, “The New Thinking”, p. 126. 52 Franz Rosenzweig, “The New Thinking”, p. 126. 53 See also Franz Rosenzweig, “The New Thinking,” p. 129. 54 See Barbara Galli, Franz Rosenzweig and Jehuda Halevi , p. 316. 55 Yudit Kornberg Greenberg, Better than Wine , p. 20. 56 Yudit Kornberg Greenberg, Better than Wine , p. 20. 57 See Lawrence Rosenwald, “Preface” to Scripture and Translation, trans. Lawrence Rosenwald with Everett Fox (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. x–xi. 58 The Empiricism of Rosenzweig’s thought relies on grasping and contracting existence in its concreteness. Rosenzweigian experience is related to being and takes under consideration both the significance and value of things. 59 Accordingly, it brings to mind Karl Dedecius’ division of translation presented in the essay “Translation and Society.” He singles out three “types” of translation: Übersetzung, which

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is associated not with artistry but faithfulness, Übertragung, which refers both to creativity and fidelity, and finally, Imitation that relies on artistic abilities but rejects accuracy. This classification can be rendered into the language and practice of Rosenzweigian philosophy of translation, in which the first type would base on synonymity, the second, apart from the use of synonyms, would fight for retaining rhythm, melody, character and form of the original text, while the third would engage into the poetical game, ignoring by that the essence of the original. Dedecius’ taxonomy seems to be derivative in relation to Rosenzweig’s, be it for historical reasons (Rosenzweig died in 1929 while Karl Dedecius is still a prolific translator and critic) or for the conceptual background that in the case of Dedecius does not bear philosophical traits. (Karl Dedecius, Notatnik Tłumacza, (Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1988)). 60 Franz Rosenzweig, “Afterword” to Jehuda Halevi p. 170. 61 Franz Rosenzweig, “Afterword” to Jehuda Halevi p. 171. 62 Umberto Eco in Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation writes about translations that are influenced by dictionaries and those which are influenced by encyclopaedias. Whereas dictionaries do not supply their users with detailed contextual information about a given word, encyclopaedias are endowed with words that include contextual selections. He says, “a dictionary does not provide all the possible interpretants of a given linguistic term – this is the job of an ideal encyclopaedia.” (Umberto Eco, Mouse or Rat? p. 12). 63 Franz Rosenzweig, “Afterword” to Jehuda Halevi p. 172. 64 Franz Rosenzweig, “Afterword” to Jehuda Halevi p. 172. 65 Franz Rosenzweig, “Scripture and Word” in: Scripture and Translation, p. 42. 66 Franz Rosenzweig, “Afterword” to Jehuda Halevi p. 170. 67 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, (Blackwell, 1962), pp. 262–271. 68 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 262–263. 69 See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 241. 70 ´ ˛ski, 1992), Krzysztof Wieczorek, Levinas a problem metafizyki, (Katowice: Uniwersytet Sla p. 71. 71 Krzysztof Wieczorek, Levinas a problem metafizyki, p. 71. 72 Józef Tischner, My´slenie według warto´sci (Kraków: Znak, 1994), p. 181. 73 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1995), p. 116. 74 Józef Tischner, My´slenie według, warto´sci, p. 181. 75 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 33. 76 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 62. 77 Franz Rosenzweig, “Afterword” to Jehuda Halevi p. 172. 78 As an example, Rosenzweig quotes German–Hebrew liaison in the Lutheran Bible translation, where the Hebrew sentence construction was applied to the German version of the holy text and whose novelty and originality outlived the language consciousness of its time. 79 Franz Rosenzweig, “Afterword” to Jehuda Halevi p. 178. 80 As a scientist, the translator watches over the structure and form of the translation effect. He excavates roots and traces of the translated words, “whether they are at home in the core of the language or in its peripheral regions” (“Afterword,” p. 179). As a poet he faces the problem of word choice and reproduction since the sense of the poet’s existence is the contemplation of word. In both cases, however, the notion of time plays a crucial role since translation is time nourished – this time nourishment is caused by the sequence of Creation, Revelation and Redemption that come into dialogical relation with man, the world and God. Thus, while talking about the Rosenzweigian philosophy of translation, we cannot forget about its Star-of-Redemption roots and biblical context.



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Franz Rosenzweig, “Afterword” to Jehuda Halevi p. 183. For further reading see Barbara Ellen Galli Franz Rosenzweig and Jehuda Halevi. Translating, Translations, Translators. 83 Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, p. 301. 84 Leora Batnitzky, Idolatry and Representation, The Philosphy of Franz Rosenzweig Reconsidered. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000, p. 117. 85 Maurice Blanchot, in: Wokół Kafki (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo KR, 1996), p. 28. 86 Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Scripture and Translation, p. 151. 87 Cyprian Kamil Norwid, “Za wst¸ep (Ogólniki),” in Vade mecum, 1857–1865 (Warszawa: Ossolineum, 2003). English translation available at:http://www.gerardmanleyhopkins.org/ lectures_2003/norwid.html. Accessed: 15.03.2005. 88 Czesław Miłosz, “Reading the Japanese Poet: Issa (1762–1826)” in The Collected Poems (1931–1987) (New York: The Eco Press, 1988), pp. 331–333. 89 Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Scripture and Translation, p. 46. 90 It should be noted here that a conceptual and semantic difference between Übersetzung and Übertragung explained earlier does not remain indifferent and therefore, though using in the text the above terms exchangeably, semantically and conceptually they both refer only to Übertragung. 91 See Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper Collins Publishing, 2001), p. 198. 82

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NOTES ON A POETICS OF TIME

PREFATORY REMARK

The idea of a poetics of time, in contrast, say, to an aesthetics of time, is intended to focus on the creative possibilities of imagination in the configurations of time. An aesthetics of time, for example, would focus on the sensuous experience of time, and certainly such experience is a basic resource of creative imagination in literature. But the concept of a poetics is taken from the root meaning of poiesis in classical Greek thought which is to make, or to bring forth – and so in the present case a poetics of time is concerned with conceptions of human life and thought brought forth in various configurations of time in creative literature. It will be the effort of analysis in this essay to review some of the ways in which poetic conceptions open a time and space of creative imagination. Aristotle investigated three different kinds of human intelligence which he designated in terms of poiesis, productive intelligence concerned with the possibilities of imagination; praxis, practical intelligence concerned with predictive action; and theoria, theoretical intelligence concerned with exact explanation. It is useful at the outset to point out that each of these modalities of human intelligence makes a legitimate claim to a configuration of time: all are true in the context of their appeal to a different need of human life and culture. Our focus on a poetics of time, then, is an attempt to see the range of creative possibilities open to imagination in the configuration of time. I

Man, so far as we know, is the only creature that knows it is going to die. In that important sense, only human beings die; a corollary to this is that only human beings are creatures in the grip of time. Time is the fire in which we burn. This haunting imprint of consciousness is present in the human project of self-understanding long before philosophical arguments begin to debate the nature and character of reality within the appearance of time. The first movement of thought that identifies time in its relation to life and death 257 A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana LXXXVI, 257–269. © 2007 Springer.

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suggests also that the archaic mind is already deep in what will later become the metaphysics of time; more simply, it speaks to the fact that Man is in his nature a metaphysical animal. “What is time?” St. Augustine asks, and he answers for all of us: we know well enough what time is until we put the question, and then only confusion attends our thinking about it. Aristotle, sensibly of course, put it that time is the measure of motion. But which motions? The motions of the planets? The turning of seasons? Or, on another metaphor, should the metabolism of time and life be measured in the beating of the human heart? Or in the variable movements of mood or thought? Cultures continue to be defined in different and distinct patterns of thought and movement that correspond to no fixed measurement of time. The cultural anomalies of Native American tribal peoples are enough to show that time is not the singular and immutable constant that Newton supposed, nor the clock time which is the ordinary of Euroculture. E.T. Hall cites his experience working as a young man in a government program among the Hopi and Navajo: I soon learned that I was dealing with at least four different time systems: Hopi time, Navajo time, government bureaucratic time, and the time used by the other white men (Indian traders) living on the reservation. There was also Eastern tourist time, banker’s time when notes were due ” The Dance of Life (Garden City, Doubleday 1983, p. 29)

There is a rhythm in the metabolism of life in a given people and culture that is resonant with the environment that surrounds it. The Navajo, grounded in a continuing present and for whom the future is uncertain and in a certain sense unreal, finds neither interest nor motivation in promises of future reward which is the cultural ground of government programs. Similarly, the Hopi feel no compelling force of closure of projects, or in the point of scheduling anything in the ordinary course of life that would reduce it to routine. They reserve such important measures to the sacred, in the scheduling of religious ceremonies determined by lunar cycles, etc. Such anomalies argue against a general concept of time that is ubiquitous, and suggest that any particular system of measurement is stipulative, contextual and arbitrary, or at least relative to the needs, understanding, and consensus of a given culture. What we normally regard as the everyday understanding of time as a succession of moments leaves open the question of meaning. Do we mean discrete and iterated moments, as if stretched out in space, or is this just an optional if convenient idiom, a linguistic frame that fails to express the seamless flow of consciousness? Even within the dominant culture of the West, conceptual time is broadly depicted in conflicting ways: linear metaphors assimilate time into discrete space, as if past and future have independent


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existence, are names of places separate from the place of presence, while a contrasting discourse of / in / and about time is framed in metaphors of motion that depict time as a flowing river. The problematic of time in the history of philosophy is a labyrinth of tangled explanations and speculations, giving accounts of the nature of time in various frames of metaphysical and ontological reference, and in the conceptual idioms of psychology, biology, history, physics, etc. Henri Bergson’s dynamic concept of the reality of time is a singular and modern version that describes time as continuous moments of eternal presence in contrast with the more usual spatialized concept of time that segments moments along a line of past, present, or future. But if, in Bergson’s analysis, reality is time, the individual self, otherwise lost in the flux of time, is redeemable only through memory. The value of this conception of remembrance within authentic time – the durée réelle – is that it describes the conditions for an authentic self. Real duration, for Bergson, consists in an eternally flowing present that contains the whole of its own past; it is a conception that brings a depth to the human issue of time resonant with central themes in world literature. It is also a view of time that has influenced the work of important modern writers either directly, as in the case of Proust, or indirectly in the case of others that we will discuss. A deep and consistent concern with time has been a fixture of fictive literature from its inception; poets, dramatists, and novelists have been drawn to or driven by the intensity of the realization that human beings are caught in its web, are confined within it, isolated by it, condemned to it, measured against it. Literature as a comprehensive form of cultural expression is arguably a fundamental response to the human need of meaning in and against time. The creative activity of imagination is directed toward finding a sense of unity in the flux of time, some constant feature in the current of existence that threads through the random occurrences of thought and feeling of the “inner” world of consciousness consonant with the broken images that constitute an “external” world. Some way, in short, for a creature caught in time – not between past and future, but between dust and dust – to transcend time. Whether or not we can conceive of time in a way that avoids spatializing it, there is no question that our conception of ourselves in the world, with others, toward death – whether in the ordinary discourse of everyday life or in the languages of science, religion, and art – must acknowledge the invariable axes of space and time. If life itself is understood simply as motion, that is, as time, a concept of world requires space. The human mind is a concrete manifestation in the interstices of time and space, and human culture a manifestation of activity held in a tenuous relation between time and place.

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Consciousness of time, and so of life and death, has seemed to destroy any permanent sense of human meaning. The existentialists have made a virtue of such contingency, but a great deal of literature has responded in opposition to the dominion of time, seeking to achieve a sense of place, however fragile in passing. Literature has thus conceived of its possibilities as both transcending and transfiguring time in an effort to overcome its devouring maw. II

In what follows I will try to set out ways in which literature figures in and transforms human consciousness through transfigurations of time. Time as understood and used in this essay is figurative, an essential metaphor in its various configurations and conceptual expressions. The most commonly contrasting conceptions of time depict it as either linear, or as cyclical. Depending on cultural perspective or felt need, time is either, or both – or of course, neither. We take time, pass time, mark time, share time, lose time, and suffer time. Human time, in contrast to natural time, is the lifeblood of consciousness, a continuing and variable mode of understanding and experience so pervasive that there seems no rule that would limit the domain or extent of its expression. Human beings first framed and marked occurrences in terms of movement experienced in the natural environment. Cultural life in time so experienced is expressed as cyclical: movement and motions are measured in the rhythm of turning seasons, and as the moon traverses its cycles from full to dark and returning to cast pale shadows on the earth, measuring patterns both of transience and eternity. As culture became progressively literate and began to narrow its primary concerns to and through human life, a new configuration of time developed. As interest focused more and more on individuated lives independent of the natural metabolism of repetitive recurrence, the cultural paradigm of time shifted to metaphors of linear progression. Time becomes a line of advancement, from birth to death, from beginning to end, from conception to fruition. But this paradigm shift of metaphor does not annul the earlier metaphor of cyclical time: the sun also rises and the seasons move in their recurring glory and endurance, no less than Man is born to die. The truths of time, coordinate with the lives and needs of human beings, are several. So what is there to choose between such claims or perceptions of time? Does our conception and understanding of reality suffer from contending metaphors of time? Does it matter if we measure our lives in the recurring seasons or in the linear terminus of actions and events? Do we lose a secure sense of reality if we trade on the ambiguities between the current of consciousness


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and the delineation of Calendars, untroubled by differences of conceptions of time in the computations of physics and the fictions of imagination? What is the philosophical consequence of an acknowledgment that the reality that is time is both form and flow? These are only the most obvious expressions that characterize our collective concerns with consciousness and the phenomenon of passing life and in which cultures have defined themselves in the configuration of and comportment toward time. It is not difficult to defend the idea that the whole of human culture is in some or another way an attempt to deal with consciousness as, of and in time. Clearly the contingency of human life, the finality of individual consciousness in the terrible intimacy of the knowledge of our own death, is an existential framing of time. What can we do to shore up our lives against the relentless pull and fatal reach of time? The pyramids of ancient Egypt stand as weathered monuments to the desperation of would-be gods to escape time; even the magnificent sphinx, majestic and solemn, staring with stone dead eyes across a desert waste into eternity, is subject to the corroding elements in service to time. But for men below the horizons of the gods, there will be time, the weary voice of Koheleth assures us, for all the days and hands of men. For to every living thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

But even as the sun also rises and passes away, there is only vanity in the days of men. Wisdom is but recognition of the dominion of time – ‘Be not over much wicked, neither be thou foolish: why shouldest thou die before thy time?’ An ancient Asian tale on this theme counsels that there is but a single resolution for every season, good or ill: ‘This too shall pass.’ But if time heals all things, the poet Eliot will remind us that Time the healer is Time the destroyer. Whether the culture is classical or modern, ironic or tragic, the dominion of time frames its lament: “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow ” is the familiar paradigm of tragic self-realization at the convergence of overweening ambition and the retributions of destiny. This expression has become an indelible inscription of the paradox of time within human consciousness. The sequence of tomorrow’s

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creeps in petty pace for a despairing Macbeth; but in the consciousness of another, tomorrow may still be alive to possibility, the pace of its rhythm may race or skip to its last syllable. For some, tomorrows may weary and all recede into yesterdays, or they may actively match the energy of youth. Whether our projects bleed together into a continuing space of hope or into an intensity of despair in which neither yesterday or tomorrow exist, the insistence of tragic literature, voiced in another mood in the lamentations of Ecclesiastes, is that in time, consciousness falters finally into destruction. The time of our lives can be and is transfigured in the many ways in which we put events into stories, and in turn transform our lives. The self-lifewriting of autobiography, for example, can begin with a genealogy and birth, presenting a recorded sequence of accomplishments, or it can begin with a remembered event or situation that has become a touchstone for the ensuing re-construction of the continuing story of one’s life. That story remains an open one and without an ending: one can offer a summing up of her life that may or may not be accurate or believable, but the final ending can only be told by another. The individual’s story simply trails off; even if the last gesture is suicide, the detail of its telling requires a survivor, and the story then becomes the teller’s story in the time line that continues life. It is not only our individual lives which are transfigured in the telling and taleing; time – as a fictive reality – is transfigured as well. The narrative time of literature is normally sequential and may seem to mirror the irreversibility of linear time; but an event may be narrated and a story told through several voices attending the vagaries and regressions of character and memory. In Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury, time expands and contracts, ebbs and flows, stills and swirls in family voices and characters differently regressed, obsessed, and defeated, all drawn into recalling a distant erotic vision of the muddy underwear of a little girl in a tree, a lost sister, a dissembled family whose history and heritage is both sustained and shackled by the antebellum values of a lost time. Poets write within and against the measured passion of life and death in time. The two great themes of world literature, Love and Death, celebrate in their separate and synchronous ways the reality of consciousness. In each case, Life and Death, or rather Love and Death, are metaphors of transcendence in the transfiguration of time. The familiar line of Dylan Thomas discovers the point of convergence of these two great passions beneath the ease and bloom of youth: Time held me green and dying / though I sang in my chains like the Sea.’ The mythic impulse in both Hebraic and Hellenic literature records the founding relationship of time and life – time as life in the genesis of human


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consciousness. Deus Faber, the Creator God, requires six days to fashion a universe, and the Hebrew testament proceeds to record generations of men from the moment of creation. As the drama of human life unfolds, the promised greatness of a people is traced though their captivity and exodus, and in time forms the germ and genius of their continuance, always in the hope of future deliverance. The literature of this tradition thus comprehends both divinity and humanity in the meaning of time – there is a beginning of time, and a Being outside time: ‘In the beginning God created and it was Good.’ A portrait in a sentence of time in eternity. In the Psalms, however, we are presented with another sense of time, not of generation and promise, but of passing and loss: As for man, his days are as grass. As a flower of the field, so he flourishes. For the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and the place thereof shall know it no more. (O.T. Psalm 103)

Hellenic literature discovers no creative moment of world and life, but rather marks the generations of life forms that emerge out of the yawning abyss of Chaos. The mythic narrative of consciousness that forms Greek literature traces the becoming of desire and destiny though their manifestations, growth, and transformations of gods, until contending forces coalesce into a stable universe that provides the stage for the drama of human life. The timeless gods of Olympus whose dominion culminates the movement from chaos to cosmos represent a both a stage limit and interactive audience for a continuing human drama of desire and destiny, of life and time. In the archaic drama of the gods, Kronos, Time, becomes manifest and remains the eternal enemy of Man, who is a descendent and beneficiary of the Olympians, a lesser god caught in the maw of Time’s devouring hunger. The long drawing out of time in Greek myth and epic finally develops into a focused intensity in the high culture of Attic tragedy. These dramas were staged during the festival of Dionysos, in celebration of the dying god, not a god of time but the god in time. Dionysos, as the god of fertility, marks the regeneration of life from death in the recurring cycles of the seasons. Nietzsche persuasively argues that tragic drama developed out of the religious rituals of the worship of Dionysos, in which the singing and dancing revelers – later becoming the chorus at the center of tragic drama – call forth and live for those brief timeless moments in the presence of the god. The theatre then becomes a space in which the drama of the dying god is enacted, in which the audience is drawn into the time of the god; the tragic realization of human existence in time is suspended in the ecstasy of the god’s presence, which joins the whole of life in cycles of eternal recurrence.

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The whole of human culture is arguably a creative sometimes desperate response to Time’s dominion. All life is subject to its authority, but only the human being is acutely aware of its insistent finality and confronted with finding a resolution to its sentence through creative imagination. The easy lyricism of Dylan Thomas is a faint echo of the song of this ancient god: as we are young and easy beneath the apple bough, a moment’s thought brings the truth that time holds us green and dying. But consciousness of the dominion of time also generates the passion of poetic expression: though green and dying, we sing in our chains like the sea. The human life and death sentence of time arguably covers the whole range of symbolic systems of expression, but the arts in general and literature especially addresses the possibilities of variance within the bounds and bonds of time. Whether we celebrate the gift of time in life, or lament its passing in litanies of death, time is a crucible of poetic expression. It is less a theme of literature than its very structure. Philosophical literature records a complex, sometimes contradictory tradition setting out and arguing the meaning(s) of time. Modern discussions of time tend to take their cue from St. Augustine’s framing of time in which the present is inclusive of past as remembrance and future as anticipation, against the background of eternity. Contemporary discussions vary relying on the variations between the categorical distinction of Kant, who consider time the internal order of experience as space is the external order, and H. Bergson, who engages a more elemental metabolism of consciousness and dynamic of time through a foundational élan vital of creative evolution. What is invariable and evident in both, however, is the convergence of time and life, energy, motion and consciousness.

III

In the common discourse of philosophy space and time are compared within the differing categories of the organic, physical, conceptual, and cultural. Organic time is a variable measure in the life metabolism of an organism – metabolic rates vary as do the relational life spans of differing organisms. Time is thus variable in linear measurement as well as dynamic motion, measuring the beating intensity of the wings of a moth as it is drawn into the flame Physical time is a variable measure, e.g. in the contrasts between geological time of mountain and sea, and the astrological time of light and space.


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Conceptual time is variable configuration within the contexts of various theoretical practices and depends on contextual design and purpose (Physics, Biology, Geology, Economics, History ) Cultural time is broadly the configurations of Symbolic expression that give meaning to shared experience. This includes what we have above called “human” time, and the metaphors that find transformational expression in the creative imagination of the arts. The development of human culture arguably begins at the stage of animal laborans, a creature bound in necessity to the metabolism of life as such – that is, a creature bound within the frame of organic time – and develops through an awareness of physical space and time to a stage of homo symbolicus, in which space and time become open to the creative wealth of imagination. A poetics of time discovered in metaphor and symbol generates the means to alter consciousness and culture, creates fissures in the otherwise inexorable logic of time though which the mind can reach into and live within time past in memory and time future in hope and expectation. Every reader is familiar with the magic of suspension in which time slows, as in the time of the Magic Mountain in Thomas Mann’s novel, or in the vacant if frantic distractions of Becket’s fools, waiting for Godot. In contrast, reading the novels of Dostoevsky, one is cast headlong by the prose itself. As we are drawn into the consciousness of narrator and into the drama of the action and characters, a sense of urgency may well affect a residual urgency about the affairs of life as we are released once again from the time of the novel. In the litany of tragic drama, in which the flawed pride and best laid plans have gone awry, the hurried pace and raging ambition of the hero is reduced to the steady heartbeat of mundane life, in which tomorrows creep in petty pace day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time. In the metaphysical poetry of John Donne, time variously measures life awakened by bells tolling death, or again, time and life are arrested as the mind is so caught between death before and despair behind that all one’s pleasures are like yesterdays. As we have noted, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury transfigures Macbeth’s soliloquy of weary resignation into the mythic time of a dying Southern Aristocracy caught up in the frayed edges and death throes of a dissolving culture. Neither the anger of offense, nor the agony of the cry and the pitch of its anguish stills the inevitability of decay. Quentin pulls off the hands of his watch so that it no longer marks the measure of movement, but the internal spring keeps driving the mechanism, a reminder of the relentless force and fate of life, that like his idiot brother’s tale, beneath the sound and fury, signifies nothing.

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There is, of course in Faulkner as in Shakespeare, a disturbing and seductive fullness in that nothing. Think of the variations in directions, as well as intensity and tempo of time, of time lost and redeemed, of time within time and time out of time. Proust’s A la recherche is a recovery through remembrance du temps perdu: time lost and dead to the actual present, comes alive again in the imagination of memory and art. There is a paradox at the heart of Proust’s metaphor of time, what he regarded as the necessary connection that binds past and present together in a moment out of time. A newer translation corrects the standard earlier translation “Remembrance of things past” providing a title for Proust’s seemingly interminable search for a beginning as “In search of lost time.” The novel is in its reach consumed with a task that seems never to be made complete, one of discontinuous ruminations of constant becoming. The lesson of time in Proust’s novel(s) is a complex of remembrance in which life is formed and time redeemed through a plurality of ways and meanings. If there is a truth revealed in time, however, it is only to be found in the diversity and density of its expressions. There is a fullness to the re-emergent discontinuities of thoughts, feelings, moods, words in the process of remembrance that contrast with the modern temper as it emerges in other literatures of time. Camus, for example, may well quote an Ode of Pindar which instructs the soul not to aspire to immortal life, but rather to exhaust the limits of the possible. These limits, as we know however, from the mythic and senseless labors of Sisyphe and the vacant transactions of L’étranger prove to be spare indeed, and depressingly empty of consequence. Similarly in writers like Kafka and Beckett, time is drained of significance; in the former time proceeds apace but apart, for the latter time empties out not into eternity but to indeterminacy. For these writers, there is nothing compelling in either time or place to affirm or oppose. Time past, in Thomas Wolfe’s novels, presents a different aspect – a journey not triggered by an acute perception in present experience (la madeleine, par example) in which the past comes to life, but rather, the lost time of the past seems to have a persistent life and force of attraction; for all that, it remains unrecoverable in time present. Time’s child, in Wolf’s novels, is lost in the present among the alien dead of the city, but drawn equally backward into a space of unrecoverable distance, haunted by a longing and home-sickness for what is no longer. The mind in memory, reaching back through the flow of time and the river of life, to where the heart feels its home only in the certain knowledge it is lost. For Wolfe, the transience of life in time is reconciled only through a moment of intuition, a lyrical transfiguration of sense that connects to an immutable universe of time suspended from the chronology of past and present – that is, though an act of poetic imagination.


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IV

Whatever the creative resources of imagination in literature and art, there is a nagging realization that the order of time is inexorable and omnivorous, that no spirit of resistance in works of transcendence from Shakespeare to Joyce is sufficient to restore a secure vision of existence sub specie aeternitatis. The moving hand of time, having writ moves on, nor all thy charm or wit can call back a word of it. Whether modern consciousness betrays an obsession with time, a good deal of modern literature has taken its point of departure from the inferential patterns and paradigms that mark change as given, and rest as anomalous – whether reflected in the physics of motion or the biology of species evolution. The stream of consciousness in Joyce, as well as the intuitive dynamics of Bergson’s durée réelle attest to a common sensibility that man and god, and all things in between are subject to time, that the universe and its inhabitants exist, in reality, sub specie temporis. There remains in cultural consciousness, however, the idea of a transcendence of time within the space of the sacred, a hope of recovery or rediscovery of eternity. The experience of ecstasy is one such mode of transcendence, an aspiration of poetic imagination as well as religious mysticism. The poet W.H. Auden speaks in a secular voice of the sacred in gardens that time is forever outside. In philosophy, Nietzsche’s analytic transvaluation of values includes a poetic transvaluation of time, described in the cyclical cosmology and depth psychology of eternal recurrence. Nietzsche discovers the reconfiguration of time also in ecstasy experienced in the tragic drama of antiquity, in which an audience, in domesticated ritual of Dionysian celebration, is drawn into the time of the god, and so loses any sense of individuation or iteration of the ordinary commonplace of time. Heidegger’s pitched battle against what he regards as the dehumanizing mechanics of time in the modern world requires a similar poetic revaluation: the concept of Being and the grounding concept of human being is transfigured to gain an authentic and dynamic experience of time in which past present and future all remain open and alive within a human reality that transcends the commonplace of everyday. T.S. Eliot is the most obvious poet whose work focuses on the philosophical as well as spiritual questions concerning time and transcendence. From his very earliest work Eliot struggles with the paradox and conundrums of time that we have been discussing in an effort first to transcend time, or failing that, to transfigure time. In The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock familiar images embody a lyrical analytic in which time is specialized, as in the invitation ‘Let us go then, you and I while the evening is stretched out against the sky, like a patient,

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aetherized upon a table.’ Against the backdrop of this metaphorical spatialization, Prufrock gives into the muse of time: there will be time, for all the works and days of hands there will be time to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet time to murder and create time for a hundred visions and revisions if only to measure out one’s life with coffee spoons as we grow old The ironic self-deflating futility of an effort to transcend time is echoed throughout the early poems. Gerontion, who hast nor youth nor age, alive as it were in an after dinner sleep, an old man in a dry month, a dull head among windy spaces. The self mocking irony of Prufrock takes a bitter turn in the Wasteland, where we are shown fear in a handful of dust, to think that we are in rats’ alley where the dead men lost their bones, and it continues into the gathering of the Hollow men, stuffed men leaning together, headpiece stuffed with straw, where between the motion and the act, between conception and creation, emotion and response, a shadow falls. The journey through time slows to a haunting finality that re-echoes and confirms the aporia of wisdom, to the diminishing time when the world ends not with a bang but a whimper. Eliot initiates a new kind of spiritual quest to transfigure time, however, beginning with Ash Wednesday: in a resolution, that because I do not hope to turn again, because I do not hope that culminates finally in a virtual poetics of time in The Four Quartettes. The various and disparate temperaments of writers and thinkers as diverse as Nietzsche and Eliot, Heidegger and Yeats, all respond to the felt poverty of spirit in an age under the anxieties and aegis of time. They do not all share the same sense of resolution, of course, and Eliot may be thought to represent a kind of back-sliding into classical bifurcations of reality and appearance, of time and eternity. There is an advocacy of escape and ascendance in the later poems that mirrors both Plato’s liberation and ascendance from the flickering shadows of the cave, and Dante’s re-emergence from the dark fires of hell. Each of these stories of liberation intends to depict the possibilities of the human spirit to transcend time, to ascend to a synoptic vision, a god’s eye view of the world sub specie aeteri. Eliot’s version of this journey in The Four Quartettes traces a pilgrimage through the cyclical time of East Coker, in which the rhythm of dancers resonates with their lives in the living seasons, but comes full circle to death. The cosmic time of The Dry Salvages replicates circles of the dance in the eternal return of recurring patterns. Even the linear time of history collapses, in which time present, past, and future become one, toward a final poetics in which time is transfigured into an eternal reality – the journey ends at the still point of a turning world. The Rose Garden into which the soul finds access in Little Gidding becomes the symbol of this sacred space of the eternal, the same sense of the sacred that Auden discovered in gardens that time is forever outside.



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It is doubtful that Eliot’s poetics of time will prove more accessible or durable to the modern temper than the rational idealism of Plato’s Forms, or the Christian theology of Dante’s muse, but together they attest to a persistent spiritual streak and cultural effort to discover the meaning of human life in a transcendence of time. The poetic journey of imagination within time into eternity is symbolized in the line that becomes a circle. The linear of ordinary time becomes transformed through creative metaphors of imagination, so that what appeared a straight life line proves but a segment of the arc of a circle whose radius is infinity. The human journey grounded in the poetics of time connects to the same cycle in a circle of self-understanding, in which all our strivings will be but to arrive at the place where we began and (Eliot might add) with wisdom, with effort, and with undying resolution, and with luck we will recognize the place for the first time. As the symbolic form of time in eternity is the circle, so too with human understanding and spiritual resolution: the rule of integrity requires that we come full circle to ourselves in the fullness of time, life, and world. Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas

´ DEREK JOANNA HAN

CAMUS, TIME AND LITERATURE

One of the fundamental contentions of existentialism concerning the human being is defining the human existence as temporal. Heidegger’s Dasein is temporal, it is ‘being towards death’, which makes the human existence well in line with that specific time dimension. The human being exists within time, the human consciousness develops through time to acquire features specific for the individual. And, what is most important, discovering our finite nature in time has a fundamental meaning for Heidegger. The human is born to die and the awareness aroused in him is capable of taking advantage of this truth, breaking the dread of mortality. ‘Being towards death’ means to exist consciously, still being able to concentrate on one’s existence and fill it with the character peculiar to ourselves. Sartre uses Heidegger’s thinking about the human as being temporary, driven – by the finite nature and temporal boundaries – towards learning his existence and filling it with authenticity. Sartre’s human is a being-therefor-himself, an existence exploring and creating himself and choosing his existence. The being-there-for-himself is predominantly an open being which has no intrinsic essence and therefore is a possible being. It openly manifests the necessity of a constant searching for itself, undertaking the effort of selfconstitution. The time of the human existence on one side provides the signs of the Heidegger’s being-towards-death but it also explains why the human is not able to stop even for one moment. Sartre’s human is continuously searching for his own self as his temporal nature makes him face constant changes and fall into the background of a series of scenes that depict something he already ceased to be or is yet to become. The present time, just like an elusive butterfly, goes around in circles together with the human being in the latter’s daily becoming himself. Sartre’s concept of time was criticised on various occasions. Lévinas, for example, claimed that Sartre would make the present time too much angelic. This angelic (angel-like) nature of time allegedly coming – according to Lévinas – from attributing too excessive possibilities of controlling time by the human. And Sartre is consistent here. In his recognition of the human’s freedom to become himself, the freedom which would many times bring 271 A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana LXXXVI, 271–282. © 2007 Springer.

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bitter consequences of an absolute self-responsibility for the human, Sartre has acknowledged that even time does not determine the human. Choosing ourselves we choose us alone, the world and the time. We are therefore able to change our past and either accept or reject it as the determinant. It is up to us whether we become victims or heroes. Playing behind the closed door or choosing the ways of freedom picture well this thought of Sartre’s. These themes peculiar to existentialist thinking also appear in the works of Albert Camus. Yet Camus’ writing seems to go well beyond Sartre’s or Heidegger’s philosophy. In relation to those two philosophers, Camus maintains the position of a rejected co-founder of existentialism. Despite the fact of being so very close to the views on freedom and self-constitution of the human existence as well as his exceptional character, Camus still remained an outsider in the intellectual world contemporary to him. The literary output of Camus comprised predominantly essay and novel writing. He never did attempt to give a full, systematic lecture on his views. Neither can we find in Camus’ works the historic and explorative passion that showed in the works of the young Sartre, who – in his doctoral dissertation and later in “L’imagination” and “Esquise” – encompassed his discoveries and concepts within the framework of a specific philosophical tradition. Sartre’s dissertation “l’Etre et le Néant” constitutes an explanation of his views in the spirit and method that are close to phenomenology (more precisely we could say that this monumental work of Sartre’s shows how existentialism was founded on phenomenology – and especially that of Heidegger). At the same time, Camus writes a series of essays and novels while his most systematic lecture (if the word “systematic” can be used at all in his case) is given in two collections of essays “The Rebel” and “The Myth of Sisyphus”. Similarly to Sartre, in his recognition of the inalienable nature of freedom of the human awareness and the resulting different problems for the human fate, Camus seems to draw a more literary picture thus making it more open to interpretation. Camus’ characters take us inside their psyche and their inner state evoked by their own freedom. The time is much more subtle here. It speaks from the solitude and the old age of his characters. Sometimes we know nothing about them save for the fact that they are lost in their own existence, lost in the ceaseless experience of their own death. This phenomenon opens a series of short literary impressions in Camus’ “Myth of Sisyphus”. An old woman left alone when others want to go to the cinema, an old grandma whom everyone is really fed up with, waiting for her to die. An old man not listened to as nobody can understand his stories anymore, his demands towards the world and willingness to still be able to talk to someone at least for a while. On the other side of these characters – on


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the other side of their drama as one might say – we can notice empty interiors, dirty walls, small rooms with a table as the only furniture, where one sits down either to remain silent or ride on one’s thoughts around the light that comes from the lamp hung over the table. Immersed in those empty interiors the characters usually sit at the window or in an open balcony door – no association with peeping with interest at the surrounding world or observing the life around at all. What they show is rather a contemplation of how others manage their solitude, how they are breaking it. On “two pages” of the same work, at the beginning the old woman arouses pity in the young guest of her children but at the end of the visit she starts to arouse his aggression. This negative feeling – growing slowly in him – makes him first feel touched by her situation but in his compassion he can gradually discover a feeling of disgust with the woman. Perhaps the young man’s compassion has never been free from that negative feeling. The interesting thing is, however, how Camus makes the emotions and the young man’s attitude towards the old woman develop. The closer he gets to her, drawn by his compassion and empathy, the more he becomes aware what solitude really means. The closer he scrutinises himself, too. Heidegger’s being towards death is getting hold of the young man. The horizon of death, and what is most important, its ruthlessness, the silence of solitude is shown to the young man in the moment when he leans over the old woman with compassion. He starts hating her because, as Heidegger shows, he has already managed to dress his own being in a daily routine. He is immersed in important things – his professional life, freedom – filled with entertainment, friends and other people – leaving no room for reflection. The presence of the old woman destroys that peace in him, this perfect daily routine of his. Time is suddenly beginning to rush. He has to go to catch up with his young friends to go to the cinema and here the old one wants to talk, she is asking – saying no word – for anybody to be with her. This is a real scandal that occurs to his homely world. He therefore feels the hatred for the woman rising in him, he wants to hit her, leave her as soon as possible. Once again his time is rushing. But it does not make him closer to leaving for the cinema but sets his existence in an ascending speed. The awareness of death and solitude starts claiming him. It is therefore not enough to leave the flat with the lonely woman lying there. After all, the dark windows of her room, seen from the street, will send him a sign of presence of something that is beyond the reality, reality in which he is desperately trying to re-immerse himself. Stuck in their absurd, people tend to differ in the ways they manage their lives and the absurdity of their lives. “Two sides of the same coin” introduces a woman who reconciled herself to death to such an extent that she felt no

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connection anymore with her still pending life. Not without a reason did Camus include this character in his collection of essays (that is, a collection of journeys of the conscious or sketches of existence and its absurdity). After the young man, who wanted to run away from the dying old woman, after the characters of old people holding back their past, their lives, moved forward by the inertial force towards the unavoidable, a description of a woman comes along, a woman who buys herself a tomb. What is interesting is, it was neither her initial intention to try to reconcile herself to death nor the awareness of her finite nature that occupied her mind. At first, it just seemed a good investment. Yet, soon after the purchase, that investment became quite significant. Not only does she begin to take care of her future grave but, most of all, the grave becomes the only destination for every step she takes. After staying at home all day long, she leaves home only on Sunday afternoon to head for the cemetery and sit inside her tomb. The more she becomes unified with the unavoidable future, the more she loses the present. She is no more a human of life, she is a human of death. When she finds flowers next to her tomb, she reads the sign in the following way: others have considered her dead, too. In this way her existence is held up in the pure being. However, contrary to the characters described earlier, this is a pure being of the future, not the present. This is because the woman passed beyond time in a simple step taken towards the future. “Two sides of the same coin” shows more than any other thing the unity of the life and the death experience. So intense can be both the experience of one’s death (one’s own death as in the case of the woman and her enclosure, almost to the point of physical experience, in her own tomb) as well as the experience of one’s life in its simplest, beautiful manifestations. Camus leaves the woman and her own death obsession at some point to start to admire, just one line below, the blooming plants. The mimosa blossom, a flower that personifies life, completes the picture of the woman bent to her knees praying in her own tomb. For both the life and death constitute the same moment of the absurdity of the world, of human expectations and feelings. It is therefore not possible either to waste or gain any time when dealing either with one’s life or death. The contemplation of the mimosa, just as the care for things that will happen after death, has the same meaning in time: the self-constitution of the human existence. And for Camus, who remained consistent in avoiding any attempts to judge what is better and what is worse in the human existence, every self-constitution had an equally significant meaning. The understanding of time by Camus is not direct. It is not just the awareness of time or the temporal character of the human existence which makes the anxiety and change a part of his existence, similarly to his striving


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for inner development and his discoveries of other ways of being. Time is mainly a network surrounding the human. It usually shows not in conjunction with dramatic and significant events but in relation to prosaic and boring things. After all, Heidegger did write about being in the mood of boredom which sends the human out to discover existence. In the works of Camus, a daily routine writer and a philosopher who claimed that discovering reality could happen to everyone in any place, the daily routine had a specific meaning. In “The Stranger”, Meursault apparently lives a boring life. It is a life of stagnation and being tired of his daily routine. Yet Meursault neither wants nor needs to step out of that routine. The funeral of his mother, the love affair, the homicide – all that is kept in the same weary dimension of his consciousness. He is an absurd man who has already discovered that nothing is waiting for him behind the façade of the reality and he himself lacks the power, the strength, to deny the entire non-sense reality. The absurd man is a man who has discovered that there is a conflict between his expectations and projections of how the reality should look or what it is and what it really is. Things that we are expecting from the world, the way we see it, is only our desire to add sense to the reality and our existence in the world. But the need to add sense to the reality is not the reality itself, not yet. Therefore, when we discover that there is no coherence, unity between ourselves, our expectations and the reality, we may fall into the absurd, experience the absurdity of the world. Meursault is just such an absurd man. As explained by Camus in his “Myth of Sisyphus”, the absurd can get hold of us anywhere, on our way to work, just around the corner or near our home. The daily routine provides the whole range of occurrences and necessary things which will effectively suppress or cover the absurdity of our existence from our eyes. Yet it is also the daily routine that may suddenly unveil the absurdity to us. And then, as in case of Meursault, the human loses his strength deriving from his daily routine. Ordinary activities manifest in their lack of purpose. The daily routine becomes wearisome and tiresome. And nothing can break the spell, not even the mother’s funeral. The absurdity of the world, of ourselves, the weariness that emerges from that absurd are ruled by their own laws. The title essay from “The Myth of Sisyphus” emphasises that phenomenon. Camus declares his chief interest in Sisyphus, who already knows the judgment of Gods, rolling his stone to the top of the mountain in an arduous effort to see his work turning into an absurd nil when the stone falls back down again. The most interesting Sisyphus for Camus is the Sisyphus descending from the mountain, calm and reconciled to the situation, resuming the senseless work. Why is it at this moment that he becomes so important to the philosopher? Because then he becomes the absurd

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man. He can see his daily routine lacking sense, his existence condemned to resuming labour that will never bear any fruit (what a sophisticated plan of god’s punishment, after all!). And, what is more important, Sisyphus knows already the mechanism that absorbs him and feels reconciled to it. The absurd man knows he has no choice, being is the only thing that is left. In this way we can see Camus’ interesting concept of the temporal nature of the human existence. Being is the pure existence and actually the pure existence beyond time or into being forever. The absurd man is a man of existence, as one could say – of the pure – pure experience of being. Just as the Heidegger’s boredom reveals the pure being in its hopeless weariness to us, similarly the absurd man is immersed in such a being. This is because he expects nothing more, wants nothing more, knows that the only thing that is left is the existence itself, living here and now irrespective of any purpose or sense. That pure being is a pure experience of time, of becoming immersed in the present in its entire overwhelming continuity. If we look at the life of xx, we can clearly see that he is deep into that pure being where there is with no place for things that would allow him to cover the present and add a little sense to it. In his essay: “Between Yes and No” Camus writes: “If this hour is a kind of a pause between yes and no, I leave the hours of hope or disgust at life to others. Yes, to collect just the transparency and simplicity of the paradises lost: all into one picture”.1 The time expands between our assent to act, our desires, expectations, memories on one side and refusal, doubt, renouncement to act or just forgetting on the other. The main character of the essay “Between Yes and No” is an emigrant who returns to his family home. That path quickly turns out to be mainly a path of his memories and thoughts, an internal space kept between the physical road left behind and his own willingness to reach the beginnings. Yet it is not possible to return to the family home, although not for the reason of being unable to recall the future. The past is hidden in the conscious, awaiting our assent to come into the light. The emigrant is not coming back to his past because he has already become someone else. His conscious equipped the past with a completely different meaning. We can say the main character ceased to be the emigrant and has become a traveller who travels all over his existence. (Similarly, Samuel Below in his “Under the shelter of sky” describes a traveller, a road man, who enters a new dimension to get to know not only the world but most of all himself in the things that surround him. Therefore a traveller never knows how long he is going to stay at one place because his path is actually a never-ending journey within himself.) The time niveaus start to create one, coherent picture of himself.


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The concept of a journey being alienation and at the same time the selforientation due to the status of a stranger, plays quite an important role in Camus’ essays. In “The Myth of Sisyphus” a number of impressions from a journey arouse awareness of the time. As analysed by Heidegger, a man becomes rooted in his ordinary life, he makes himself at home there. The ordinary life allows for the routine which releases one from the effort of thinking and asking about our condition. A journey breaks the routine, it becomes a moment in which – alienated from our every-day places, our ordinary lives – we may rediscover ourselves. The moment of alienation, as described by Camus, the fact that I do not know how much a railway ticket costs in a country I travel through makes me see my own self, as only it alone is not alien to me in the surrounding world. But what is it really? Do I know myself? Thus the journey becomes a road inwards. The meaning of time changes during the journey. The death described by Camus in the hotel room in Prague demonstrates that the traveller is a stranger not only to the new country but also to the life itself. And the time is my time only. Beyond the hotel rumours and astonishment or horror of the remaining guests. Heidegger’s concerns, the talking, making oneself at home in the surrounding world – all of them serve the purpose of filling the being and the pure present. The human immersed in the world influences it, has a whole load of necessary and important things to be taken care of or roles to be played, he tends to add sense to the occurrences happening to him and is able to explain how to act and how not. Meursault is beyond this possibility. All that remains is his last attempt to understand his own existence just before his death – while waiting for the death sentence to be executed. And then the awareness of the real pure being comes to him. It is the warmth he felt on his skin, the water and the air (the whole of Camus’ novel is dominated by the atmosphere of hot, sweltering air. The Sun and hot temperature become a symbolic space filled with human dramas, developing slowly under the callous, hot sky.) What he grasps is the very pure being, the time stretched within his body as a result of his own acts; the pure existence which – dressed in the different moments from his life – becomes a kind of an attempt to live. Yet, under the factual surface of events we can see only the pure being without purpose or sense – just its existence. The absurd man stays in opposition to the rebel man. We can say that the rebel goes on. Although he has the same awareness as the absurd man does, yet, he knows that reality lacks sense and is hardly projectable, thus the rebel man is a man who acts. He undertakes action – and this is where Camus differs significantly from other existentialists, especially Sartre – the rebel man undertakes action in the name of another human.

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In his essays about rebellion, Camus creates a different picture, a picture of both existence and temporality, departing the furthest from the Sartre’s concept. First and foremost, Sartre has shown that the time experience may not so much be subjective, but can become the inner adventure of the conscious. In his “l’Etre et le Néant”, he presented a concept of freedom of a human which consists inter alia in the fact that a human is able to rule his time by manipulating the past and determining the future. For a man is what-heis-not and is what-he-is.2 So the present constitutes a platform for changes. Every choice of some kind of action and fulfilment of some projection is of a temporary nature. In this concept, the present is open to the future (projected and expected by the human conscious) and the past (dealt with by the human conscious in the same way as with the past). Such depiction of time focuses only on the time itself which could be called “inner time”, “a time of conscious”. This means experiencing the temporality, sensing it in the context of changes in the human existence. Sequences of past sensations and perceptions emerging from various experiences, memories and sensations create the human experience. For Sartre, the human remains active in this recollection process, expanding his past sensations and reconstituting his past existence. This specific activity enabling the interference in past events and projects, is attributable to the human thanks to the open structure of his own being. The open structure of the human marked by the lack of essence condemns the human to a continuous self-creation, to the multiple attempts of determining who he is. Therefore, the human makes constant choices and projections. According to Kierkegaard, a man is the biggest riddle for himself, a riddle which he is to solve and which makes him concentrate on his own existence and analyse choices he has made. In Kierkegaard’s opinion, this phenomenon cannot remain unnoticed especially because we live under a continuous pressure of making choices that doom us to the either–or alternative. Being the riddle posed to himself by himself, the human becomes the most important problem for himself where the solution means striving, change, formulation of questions and further attempts at answering the question who I am and whom I will become. On the other hand, Sartre shows we are not so much a riddle to ourselves but rather a task. This is why our existence drives us to make constant choices, attempts to find the solution to the riddle that we are. This, in turn, leads us to further renewed acts of self-constitution. We are looking for our own essence which – due the open structure of our being-there-for-ourselves – shall never be given to us. The existence goes before the essence3 therefore we always end up with the very acts of existence that negate the entire formal aspect. The temporality of conscious is built into being-there-for-oneself and is built in as the inner time. Similarly to the inner


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time, the outer time (the history time, the time governed by laws other than the laws of conscious) is for Sartre a projection, a constitution of the human awareness. For, by choosing himself, the human chooses the entire world. The acts of self-constitution actually mean the act of constitution of the world. The choice described by Sartre means each time bringing a specific state of affairs into existence. It is up to the human to choose who he is and what the world around looks like (whether dependent or independent, predetermined or free, etc.). The conscious is the effective cause. The time of the human is a space organised by the conscious. This is why it is the conscious that constitutes what is now (the present) and what used to be (the past). Within the sphere of the free human choice Sartre treats the past in the same way as the present. For the past can be recreated by the human, chosen and evaluated. What has been closed in it can be brought forward again, changed and reconstituted. In this sense, the past – being a platform that is still open for human choices – is treated by Sartre as the present. The present is the moment of the just occurring experiences, is a category of existing here-and-now. It is a single act of self-constitution. Being the niveau of the current happening, the creation, the present is a moment of choice which is each time basic and primary in the same way. The present opens before the human an indefinite freedom of making choices (it is bound to this freedom). Such an approach towards time causes the human to be able to choose his past, too. Remaining in the present time, he reaches out to the past (in the memory, reminiscence, events referring to what is past) and – drawing upon the past events – he constitutes them at the same time. For the act of recollection is really an act of bringing forward and presenting things that have passed. That is why the past is being created anew, it is being chosen once again, saved, changed or rejected. For Sartre, it is the human who decides what was in the past, what from the past will be carried to the present and what will be entirely changed. The conscious of the human, who is freedom, constitutes the past within the present. It is the human who chooses who he is, making his choices using even the past. In “L’imaginaire” and “l’Etre et le Néant”, in his investigation of the conscious, Sartre shows its action, inter alia, in the sequence of time. In “L’imagination” he analyses what is happening to a human experiencing the presence of another human, plus his memories. First of all we can see a specific ontologisation (as Lévinas would put it) of the existence. Another human ceases to be a secret for us as we try to get to know him and approach his selfconstitution. When recalled, the picture becomes an object. And in this way, from being-there-for-ourselves in the memory, we objectify and bring the existence down to certain predetermined features of being-in-oneself. According to Sartre,

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the conscious can constitute the past in a radical way as it determines its events and, therefore, our memories. Using Sartre’s expression, the human is freedom and therefore he can rule even his time. Being the open being-there-for-himself, he can self-constitute what he is, create himself in every aspect – including the past one. In “l’Etre et le Néant”, Sartre refers in his argumentation even to the moment of our birth. Rejection of freedom that is embedded in our existence can manifest in the statement that we never wanted to be born. Sartre quotes this commonly repeated statement: “it wasn’t my decision to be born”, “it wasn’t my choice”.4 However, according to the existentialists, already in this very statement we can discover the act of choosing the past, both what we were and what we are. “I am ashamed of being born or get rid of my life I affirm that I live and I assume this life as bad. Thus in a certain sense I choose being born. This choice itself is integrally affected with facticity since I am not able not to choose.”5 Creation of the world and oneself is an inevitable process. The human conscious stands across or against the causality of the world external to it. The related process of objectifying has a negative dimension as it reduces the self-creating existence to a few features or qualities ascribed to that existence by the exploring and remembering perception. According to Sartre, that process makes the existence “dry, scholastic, abstract, focused on an unreal object which has itself lost in its individuality, it develops slowly toward absolute emptiness.”6 If we were to compare this notion of Sartre’s with the concept of Lévinas who stood in opposition to the objectifying tendencies in the cognisance, we could clearly see that Lévinas’ philosophy was close to the existentialist thinking about the individual and the problems resulting from the interaction between two existences. The conscious and its temporality present in the Sartre’s concept exposes the human action in relation to the present and the past. At the same time it allows one to describe how the sensation of time, experiencing the time influences the human, how the conscious deals with what it feels to be the time and what action the conscious takes in relation to the time. In Lévinas’ philosophy, too, we can see that unusual connection between the conscious and the time, where in his case we notice something we can call joint conditioning. The conscious develops under the influence of time but also the time appears and flows thanks to the conscious. In “The Rebel”, Camus points out to the rebellion being stage two of the human existence. Having discovered the absurd, the human can either remain the absurd man or take up the challenge to become the rebel man. The protest is the action in the name of another human being, a challenge put out to the world, god, reality or history in the name of the sense or the meaning the rebel man wants to save for another human. In this sense Camus goes beyond


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Sartre’s way of thinking that excluded any acts in the name of another human as being non-genuine or squandered in view of the absence of any possibility to establish relations between humans other than objectifying and closure. The fact that another person may not understand me or – as Sartre wrote – may objectify me in his rebellion, has no meaning for Camus. Despite that, the rebel man takes up the challenge, as did Prometheus (a metaphysical rebel) or Spartacus (a historical rebel). The rebel places himself in the real time. Just as doctor Rieux who acts against the world, becoming a man of ethics being beyond ethics. It is a metaphysical rebel who, despite the inability and lack of any prospects of defeating his enemy, keeps on fighting. The plague is not only a disease, it is mostly an absurdity that imprisons all people around. Stripping of any sense the efforts, the life, the future, it closes down the city and people fighting inside it. Despite the force and the absurdity of it, doctor Rieux continues his medical activity, he is not leaving his patients, choosing to be the man of action – even in the face of inability to accomplish his task. He gets involved with the external nature of things, the time imposed by the disease and the absurdity, he keeps trying to tear every minute of somebody’s life away from death. Sartre rejected external time, Camus shows that the human can fight the time. And although, contrary to Sartre’s viewpoint, he cannot rule or create it and is actually defined by that temporality, he still can define himself in time by manifesting his rebellion. In a word, the metaphysical rebel does not have that freedom as Sartre’s being-there-for-oneself does, but it has the power to oppose things he cannot rule and create value against them. Just like the absurd man experienced a pure existence in pure temporality, similarly the rebel man enters the already existing reality, the time structures expanding and demanding a concrete action. A rebellion, even the lost one, is always an action, activity, motion. Camus speaks about three types of rebellion: metaphysical, historical and artistic. The metaphysical rebellion is the first move of protest against being, against the reality and the world. The historical rebellion assumes a form of a chosen revolution protesting against the existing historical situation. The sensitivity of Camus allowed him to perceive any signs of negation of the rebellion in every revolt, even one organised in the name of laudable ideas. A rebel who draws a gun and sanctions murder of another human becomes a revolutionist who squanders the meaning of the protest itself and loses its values. The artistic rebellion is the most comprehensive one. For we can call it a consummated rebellion that allows one to overcome the absurd. An artist who draws upon the elements of the world, the components of the surrounding reality, creates a completely different world. He can therefore give the reality a totally different meaning.

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He transfers the world into a sphere where things lacking sense will be able to acquire it. In the process of creation of a work of art and its reception, the human becomes reconciled with the world and thus the absurdity is forced back. That phenomenon is explained by Camus on the example of literature. In his novel he creates a reality, corresponding, as one could say, to the real world. In his descriptions he draws upon things and phenomena he could find in the surrounding world; sometimes, he would actually just describe the reality itself. Furthermore, the human world and the human interactions are also a mixture of things taken from the world. However, contrary to the real world and the surrounding reality, the literary world drawn by the creator’s pen acquires some sense. In his creation of the world of a novel, the purpose of the writer is it to achieve a certain goal, to imprint some sense into the structure of his world, allowing the reader to grasp that sense that is so desperately sought by him out there in the world. In this way art can be soothing because it allows one to find something the human so much cares for: the purpose, the sense and the value. The artist-rebel can not only make the world sensible and thus carry the absurdity away from the human. He is also able to defeat the time, the time he cannot rule and the time that is fought by the metaphysical and historical rebel. The attitude of an actor and the actor’s profession presented by Camus goes straight to the point of that phenomenon. As shown by Camus, the actor has the one and only possibility to live the whole individual life within one hour, one show. On the stage, the time is subjected to processing, its meaning is intensified and it shows the human existence in its entirety. In this way the sensation of pure being experienced by the absurd man returns. But this being is much involved, bearing some features of a specific character of the drama. Most of all this is the time that allows to solve the riddle of the existence of the presented character. In this way the artistic rebellion achieves its goal: the reconciliation of the human with himself. Jagiellonski University, Krakow, Poland NOTES 1 2 3 4 5 6

The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 33. Cf. J-P. Sartre, L’existentialism est une humanisme. Cf. J-P. Sartre, L’existentalism est une humanisme. Cf. J-P. Sartre, l’Être et le néant, p. 265. Ibid., Being and Nothingness, p. 312. Sartre, L’imaginaire, p. 305.


S E C T I O N IV

MASSIMO DURANTE

THE “DEEPENING OF THE PRESENT”∗ THROUGHOUT REPRESENTATION AS THE TEMPORAL CONDITION OF A CREATIVE PROCESS

“Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul” Divinity School Address, Ralph Waldo Emerson “Your mistake, my sister had said, is to isolate yourself completely in our house. You don’t go and visit friends any longer, though we have so many. What she said was true. But what does one mean by friends?” Concrete, Thomas Bernhard

1. W I D E N I N G T H E L I M I T S O F R A T I O N A L I T Y : T H E L O G I C OF CONTRADICTION

In this paper, we intend to reconcile and justify two propositions which contradict each other: 1. I can only write if you are there: with you; 2. I can only write if you are not there: without you. These two propositions – the structure of which can be summarized by the formula nec sine te nec cum te – are plainly inconsistent. This inconsistency, however, is, in our view, the only rational structure that can account for the temporal sequence of loss and retrieval in terms of an essential phenomenological problem, the temporal structure and the limits of representation. Let us first sketch out the scope and the structure of our paper. The general aim of the present paper is to depict the rigid regime of rationality – based on the fundamental principle of non-contradiction1 – is more flexible than it seems, or is at least problematic. To this end, we consider one of the cornerstones of the principle of rationality in modernity: the act of representation. We have mentioned the notion of representation above; we add here that representation 285 A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana LXXXVI, 285–310. © 2007 Springer.

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has the status of an act. It is important to emphasize this point, since the idea of act is different, from a phenomenological point of view, from that of action or operation. It adds something more to the notion of action or operation and this added quality, which delineates the act from the action (or operation), will be the guiding theme in our analysis of representation, to which we will devote the first part of our paper, which is divided in three parts: (1) in the first part, we will analyse the status and the logic of representation with a particular reference to its assumptions as well as to its limits. The analysis will be conducted by considering the philosophical results laid down in the well known article by Emmanuel Lévinas: “La ruine de la représentation”.2 (2) In the second part, we will look more closely at the core of our reflection, which involves a consideration of the logic of contradiction as a different regime of rationality. We will support our thesis by examining a particular case, which we believe could shed light on the creative process, considered from the viewpoint of the temporal sequence of loss and retrieval. To accomplish this, we cite two literary works, The Notebook, the Proof, the Third Lie: Three Novels by Agota Kristof3 and Concrete by Thomas Bernhard. 4 (3) In the third part, we will attempt to draw several conclusions from our reasoning, in order to point out the role played by the logic of obsession – especially in Thomas Bernhard’s writing – in the structuring of representation. The way representation is structured, within a creative process, implies a reflection on the idea of solitude, whose understanding defines the assumptions and the limits of the act of representation. The reflection on the idea of solitude will afford a deeper understanding of temporality, since solitude is understood as a deepening of the present, that is to say, a fragmentation of the present within itself. This fragmentation implies a fragmentation of reason,5 which is not a form of irrationalism or relativism, but a different way of conceiving the sense in which our representations are meaningful; that is to say, how they can be integrated together in a significant way. Before entering in medias res, we briefly focus on what we have referred to as the logic of contradiction and make several preliminary remarks on the status of the act of representation. The principle of non-contradiction implies a certain understanding of space and time. Time is the limit of space in the sense that A and non-A cannot coexist in the same space but have to succeed each other: time is the order of succession and succession excludes coexistence. Space is the order of coexistence and coexistence excludes succession. In the logic of contradiction past and present can coexist: succession implies coexistence and time is, therefore, understood as a coexistence between coexistence and succession. This logic of contradiction is illustrated by Remo Bodei6 through the reference and the analysis of delirium: we will try to make use of this line of reasoning in our

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evaluation of the idea of obsession. From a temporal point of view, we insist on the difference between two models of time (two ways to understand the temporal sequence of loss and retrieval): the first based on (1) succession and the second based on (2) the coexistence between coexistence and succession. According to succession, the present has a logical priority: it is the dividing line which separates and thus articulates past and future. The present is paralleled by the activity of consciousness which controls the dispersion of time and gives it continuity as when we posit a third term which ensures commensurability. The unity of the self ensures, through its ability to synthesize, that consciousness bears the mark of what is lost: the trace of the past. For this reason, what has been lost is always already waited for and retrieved by the work of consciousness which replaces it by the image of the lost object: the modification of the object is compensated by the fact that consciousness remains identical to itself precisely because it is the consciousness of such a modification. As we shall see shortly, this is the prerogative of intentionality which is a form of horizontal transcendence: consciousness is entrenched in representation and representation is always referred to an object. The idea of intentionality means that representation is always a representation of an object, of an object as it is modified. Representation tells us how the object can be recognised through its modified status. In the language of intentionality, representation is a modification that affects the object. Through modification, representation accounts for the temporal sequence of loss and retrieval. We will see this in more detail in the next paragraph. We now return to the second model of time listed below. According to the idea of coexistence between succession and coexistence, the present does not have priority in the definition and shaping of temporality. Time is not viewed as a line made of successive instants producing, through retained modifications, an image of continuity. The synthesis the self is intended to operate is more complicated and even put at risk (we will speak of a transcendental activity). The past is not conceived as something lost but already subsumed in a present which can account for it: the past is not really already past but it lives, to some extent, within the present which cannot simply modify and thus subsume it. The past affects the present: it demands from the self to effect a synthesis which involves a transformation of the self. As Bodei7 suggests, following a philosophical interpretation found in several of Freud’s works, this happens, of course, within the logic of delirium. We will thus try to judge whether we this also holds in the case of obsession, that is, if obsession may be said to play a role in the act of representation, as we intend to show. To this end, we will make some preliminary remarks on the status of the act of representation. As we have said before, representation is a dynamic process characterised by both a

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diachronic and a synchronic aspect. The diachronic aspect is concerned with the genetic problems of representation and involves the temporal dimension of the sequence of loss and retrieval more directly. The synchronic aspect is concerned with the synthesis that representation produces once representation has been accomplished and involves the dimension of sequence more directly, that is to say, the specific relation which links what has been lost to what is retrieved. The idea of action or operation does not suffice to account for this double dimension, at once temporal and spatial, in the act of representation. An action is punctual in time and does not hide all the genetic problems of representation; operation seems to suggest the idea of a mechanical activity and does not explain how the synthesis displayed by a representation works. Why then should we refer to the idea of act? How should we understand it? We will consider the idea of act in the sense of an act in a play (as we say, using theatrical terminology, “first act”, “second act”, etc). In this paper, we will refer several times to plays, focusing on the idea of representation as it is conceived in theatrical staging. As in narration, the phrase is the nucleus of meaning and the scene8 is the nucleus of theatrical staging. If the unity of a scene is based on theatrical action, we cannot say the same for the unity of an act, which is a linked series of scenes. From this definition, we have a first account of the notion of act, which is not, as we have said before, an action or an operation, but a linked, ordered series of scenes. We have add to the previous definition the idea that the series of scenes is not only linked (i.e., that is revelatory of a connection between the different scenes), but also ordered (i.e., that this connection is governed by a principle of order which is not mere succession). Thus, the idea of act suggests immediately that representation is not based on (a model of time conceived as) succession. This principle of order, which identifies the unity of the act from a series of scenes, is made necessary, as in phenomenology, by the necessity of avoiding the natural attitude: timing of theatrical staging cannot be the same timing of the events represented. Naturalism or realism in a play is always a reconstruction of reality. More precisely, the problem of realism is vividly evoked in Arthur Miller’s plays. We always speak about Arthur Miller’s realism but we should properly speak about Miller’s ibsenism, since the technical problem of Miller was already the problem of Ibsen. This problem – which is a problem of phenomenological nature – is: how does one dramatise what has already happened? How does one explain the process through which the present has become what it is? How does one introduce the spectator in the present of the drama? As it is known, the first act of Ibsen’s and Miller’s plays is often concerned with the vivid revelation of the contrast between past and present as an introduction to the drama. Thus, the series of scenes which


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compose an act is not ordered according to a sequence of time but according to the revelation of this contrast. Can we generalise this assumption? We can thus say that an act is the cutting out of a series of scenes aiming to give them unity in such a way that they may reveal a contrast that marks the passage of time. What drives the author in this cutting out, in the synthesis that produces an act? As we have said, it is not something arbitrary but an attempt to express the unity of meaning. This unity is not based on the simple correlation between past and present, between what has been lost and what is retrieved, but on the contrast, on the struggle, between past and present. If along a succession the present is the necessary result9 of the past in virtue of a correlation between positive and negative, loss and retrieval, in the act of representation the coexistence between coexistence and succession transcends the regime of correlation and can be accounted for only by reference to this contrast or struggle between past and present. We should try to see how this contrast constitutes, according to our analysis, the guiding assumption behind the dynamics of representation based on intentionality. 2. T H E D Y N A M I C P R O C E S S O F R E P R E S E N T A T I O N : FROM INTENTIONALITY TO OBSESSION

It is plainly evident that we do not intend here to perform a comprehensive analysis of the concept of representation: it would not be possible and goes beyond our possibilities. We shall limit our analysis to only one aspect of representation that has however played an important role: the assumption on which the act of representation is based. This assumption is important since it proclaims, according to Lévinas’ interpretation, the downfall of representation. It is also important since it delineates, from the point of view of the history of philosophy at least in the context of Lévinas reconstruction,10 Husserl’s phenomenological approach from that of Heidegger: the former being concerned with the intellectual evaluation of presupposition in transcendental terms, the latter being concerned with its existential evaluation in terms of facticity. Lévinas’ interpretation of representation is significant because it bridges the gap between the phenomenological approach of Husserl and that of Heidegger and explains how the act of representation is necessarily governed by the assumption on which is based. The starting point of Lévinas’ interpretation is the evaluation of the first basic step in Husserl’s attempt to build phenomenology on the concept of intentionality: the refutation of the natural attitude11 toward the object of representation. Phenomenology first tells us that immediate presence to things never suffices to account for the meaning of things.12 The interest of phenomenology thus does not consist

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in the correlation between subject and object, between present and past, but in the possibility to assign a different meaning to presence.13 Intentionality is a relation (in terms of an horizontal transcendence) toward the object that goes beyond the object and moves toward an implicit meaning which is the horizon in which the object can be accounted for without reference to a natural attitude or naïve description.14 Here, within the concept of horizon, Heidegger’s idea of facticity is stated, of an implicit situation,15 which constitutes the pre-supposition of the act of representation. What is to us of main interest is the classical depiction of the relation between subject and object, which Lévinas counters with the concept of intentionality. According to this classical conception, the object is present to the subject in such a way that it corresponds perfectly to what the subject thinks of it. The relation between subject and object is the effect of the actual representation displayed by consciousness: within this representation, the object appears as an actual, permanent present fixed by the self who can always retrieve what has been lost under the regime of a perfect correlation.16 Intentionality modifies this picture,17 since it implies that the act of thinking depends on several implicit assumptions, which constitute the horizons of the constitution of the object itself. The main consequence of such a theory, i.e., of intentionality, is that the concept of actuality is no longer viewed as something which coincides with absolute certainty and the intellectual lucidity of consciousness.18 The act of representation is path-dependant and this path is not at all anything that can be thought in a mechanical way: as we have said before, representation is a complex act and not merely an operation.19 The idea that the subject always depends, in his activity, on implicit conditions, which can be revealed only through reflection, calls into question the idealism of representation and the sovereignty of the subject. This also means, more importantly, that consciousness is open and subject to a dimension of passivity which does not simply coincide with sensibility but implies the possibility to receive, to be affected by, what is not yet been present, even potentially, in the consciousness.20 As we have suggested in a footnote,21 the horizon implied within intentionality is not the context of an object, as it is understood for the most part in post-modern thought, but the situation of the subject.22 Of course, we do not have to understand the idea of situation in an empirical sense: this idea has promoted different philosophical reflections, as the phenomenology of sensibility, the analysis of the pre-predicative, the analytics of existence, the phenomenology of body etc., which share the same assumption. This assumption, for instance in the language of Heidegger, is that situation is a being-to-world. This means, on the one hand, that situation is a relation to a worldly dimension, but, on the other hand, that this relation is not an empirical


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but an ontological relation. In this sense, the idea of situation does not stand against objectivity but implies a different understanding of its premises.23 The major consequence of our study results from this evaluation of the act of representation, which is radical in the sense that it is conducted by referring to the genetic assumptions on which the act of representation is based. The subject of representation is implied in the act of representation. As we have said before, representation is not only a modification of the object but also a transformation of the subject.24 This idea is very much disputed: Lévinas seems to accept this idea only if it implies the downfall of representation.25 We should say that this idea logically implies only the downfall of a certain conception of representation, i.e., the conception based on the model of time conceived as succession. We should also note that Lévinas, while proclaiming the downfall of representation, stresses the decisive role played by the object in the structuring of consciousness: intentionality does not only mean that consciousness is always consciousness of an object, that is to say that the object is constituted; but above all that the object is also constitutive, that is to say that it affects and haunts consciousness.26 This means that the act of representation, as we have said before, is not an act of synthesis which deduces the present from the past through the unity of consciousness and in virtue of her power of actualisation.27 The different scenes or fragments which compose the unity of the representation are linked by several acts which condition each other in a transcendental way. This means that the object of representation is somehow able to condition the act itself of representation, but this does not happen in any idealistic or realistic sense.28 The meaning of the object is never immediate or given. The act of representation which attempts to retrieve a loss, i.e., to restore a past, is always resolved in the intention that governs it. In this sense, representation is not an act of appropriation of the other: the intentionality that animates the representation is in turn guided by something which is implicit and to which representation can only allude in the form of horizons, that is to say in its otherness.29 Lévinas suggests that the horizons – the life – within which the acts of representation receive meaning can consist of human (ethical) relations and not necessarily in objective conditions,30 conditions characterised by the reference to an immediate or given object. This means, according to Lévinas, that the act of representation does not have to be understood only within the horizon of space, i.e., the horizon of constitution of the object, but also within the horizon of time, i.e., the horizon of the relation with the other. We should then ask ourselves how the other can affect representation. To answer to this question, we return to the structure of representation and take into account the fact that the relation with the other is constitutive of the act of representation. Representation is always an attempt;

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it is an attempt and an initiative, taken in the present, to confront the absence of the other. Representation always deals with absence and the question of absence structures the act of representation, which is necessarily, in this sense, a sign of the following underlying question: the integration of a negative through a positive. The act of representation is, consequently, the writing of an absence, the other being present within a representation only as an absent. What, therefore, is the condition for representation to be possible? For the act of representation to be possible in its temporal structure, the present must someway, somehow be affected by the absence of the other. Lévinas’ interpretation of representation has shown that intentionality is not only based on intention but also on something implicit that carries out that intention and structures it. We should then try to elucidate what this something implicit consists of. When the act of representation is supposed to be at the basis of a creative process, we cannot hold to the idea that mere spontaneity is the only basis of the intentional act. According to this idea, the act of representation would entirely rely on the priority of the present, which is supposed to be always capable of retrieving a loss in the form of a past traced back in the consciousness of the self. This construction is inconsistent with the idea that representation can account for the otherness of the past, namely the absence of the other. As we have said, for the act of representation to be possible, the present must someway, somehow be affected by the absence of the other. The present of representation does not occur in the presence of the present, in the self-transparency of consciousness always aware of its intentions, always contemporary with itself. The present of representation occurs before any present, in the conjunction of events, in which the present is affected by something which is absent. How can something absent affect the present? This is only possible if the present enters into a relation with something which is other than the present, other than the faculty of consciousness to synthesise all the forms of temporality in a unitary single phase. The absence of the other must affect the present in virtue of this absence, that is to say as an absent. The thesis of our paper is that this is possible only through obsession. Obsession is thus the presence of an absent affecting the consciousness precisely because of this absence or otherness. The act of representation relies on something implicit: this implicitness is an effect of the past on the present. This effect can be expressed in terms of a real obsession of the present for the otherness of the past, i.e. for the absence of the other. The other really obsesses the present with its absence (as Cristina Campo suggested in her wonderful poem La tigre assenza, by imagining absence as a tiger which continues to assault us from the past31 ). All this language may seem contradictory (the presence of an absence, the effect of the absence of the other on the present) but the


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point is that obsession, as the implicit condition of representation within a creative process, consists of this contradiction. It follows the logic of contradiction. Obsession suggests the coexistence between succession (the temporal sequence of loss and retrieval, i.e. the absence of the other) and coexistence (the other still affects the present of representation in virtue of his absence). The other is both present and absent. The more the other is definitely absent, the more the other is present through obsession. In such a perspective, we do understand that the implicit horizon of representation is the horizon of death. We cannot explore this idea here but can only suggest that the event of death is not viewed as the horizon in which loss is transformed in a sign always already retrieved but in an obsession that haunts the present of representation. As Lévinas has pointed out, the event of death, though with reference to the other’s death, is the event which enables us to think about the reality and autonomy of future, i.e. the otherness of time. In other words, the present has no priority over past and future: the forms of temporality are not necessarily given a meaning according to those of the present. Through obsession, the forms of temporality are given a different meaning that can be understood only within the logic of contradiction. According to this form of logic, what is possible is at the same time impossible: the relation with the other is possible only because it is impossible to fix the otherness of the other within the framework of an eternal present. Representation does not retrieve the past by fixing it in an eternal present, but only accounts for the otherness of what has been definitely lost. In this sense, representation cannot appropriate the otherness of the other as long as it is based, through the obsession for the other, on this implicit otherness of the past (of what has been definitely lost). From the point of view of the self, solitude becomes at the same time possible and impossible: it is indeed possible to be without the other (even though we will see that this privative conception of solitude cannot entirely account for the idea of solitude). But in this case, the absence of the other starts haunting the present of the self. It is impossible to retrieve what has been lost but this impossibility allows what has been lost to haunt the present of representation through obsession. This obsession must be analysed within the framework of literary works since it gives, according to our hypothesis, a deeper comprehension of the temporal sequence of loss and retrieval of every creative process. As in Plato’s dialogue Phaedo,32 love is witnessed by the suffering that its absence generates, creation is always activated by the impossible desire (the status of this impossibility being the philosophical problem) and attempt to escape one’s solitude, namely to be with the other, when the other is no longer (structure of time thought in the horizon of death) there. This impossibility is still a possibility, even though

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it is of a different kind. The impossible desire to escape one’s solitude brings me to the limits of my own existence, the way I am attached to myself. This experience of a limit allows me to envisage the otherness of the other and confronts me with the logic of contradiction, i.e., with the intangible possibility of the other. On the verge of this limit, the presence of the other as an absent haunts and obsesses my present. Thus, obsession becomes a theme for literature in terms of solitude. From an ontological point of view, as Lévinas pointed out,33 solitude cannot be overcome (I can share everything with the other but not my own existence). Solitude can only be deepened through the symbolic evocation of other lives in the form of representation as in Lesage’s tale Le Diable boiteux,34 always with the risk of confusing evocation with appropriation like in the morals of this tale. We intend to explore the meaning of this deepening of the present through solitude in a reading of the works of two authors: Agota Kristof and Thomas Bernhard, the latter being, in this perspective, the privileged reference of the former. For this purpose, we will limit our analysis to two texts: The Notebook, the Proof, the Third Lie: Three Novels by Agota Kristof and Concrete by Thomas Bernhard. 3. O B S E S S I O N A S A T H E M E F O R L I T E R A T U R E : A G O T A KRISTOF’S AND THOMAS BERNHARD’S WRITINGS

Why do we refer to Agota Kristof’s and Thomas Bernhard’s writings? For several reasons: first of all, the rhythm and style of their writing convey in a powerful way a sense of obsession, which haunts the solitude of their main characters. Secondly, obsession becomes in their writings a theme for reflection: it is around obsession and through the contradiction that obsession generates in terms of presence/absence of the other (nec sine te nec cum te) that representation is organised. Thirdly, the contradiction that obsession displays involves the act itself of writing, that is to say, the condition of possibility of writing. It is the case of the rhetorical figure of mise en abyme: by writing we reflect on the possibility or impossibility of writing. As in Heidegger’s philosophy, Bernhard explores, in his writing, the relation between the possibility of impossibility (writing) and the impossibility of possibility (existence). If in Heidegger’s philosophy, the heroism of the possibility of impossibility in the free project that being-for-death opens is maintained, this possibility is rejected by Bernhard. Theatre, that is to say, the representation of existence, is, in his definition, the sum of all missing ways-out. These missing waysout imply that existence is, above all, the fact of being forever bound and attached to our own existence. It is the fact that we are alone. In this sense, solitude does not differ from existence, except for in one sense, as we will


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see: existence remains identical to its present, while solitude is a deepening of the present. This missing way-out, this impossibility of possibility, this radical attitude toward life is what Agota Kristof states in her autobiography regarding Thomas Bernhard’s writings: Içi, je dois penser à Thomas Bernhard, le grand écrivain autrichien, qui n’a jamais cessé de critiquer et de fustiger – avec haine et amour, et aussi avec humour – son pays, son époque, la société dans laquelle il vivait. Il est mort le 12 février 1989. Pour lui, il n’y a pas eu de deuil national ou international, pas de fausses larmes, de vraies non plus, peut-être. Seuls ses lecteurs passionnés, auxquelles j’appartiens, se sont rendu compte de l’immense perte pour la littérature: Thomas Bernhard, désormais n’écrira plus. Pire: il a interdit qu’on publie ses manuscrits laissés derrière lui. C’était le dernier « non » à la société du génial auteur du livre intitulé Oui. Ce livre est là, devant moi, sur la table, avec Béton, Le Naufrage, L’Imitateur, Des arbres à abattre et d’autres. Oui est le premier livre que j’ai lu de lui. Je l’ai prêté à plusieurs amis en disant que je n’ai jamais autant ri en lisant un livre. Ils me l’ont rendu sans avoir pu le lire jusqu’au bout, tant cette lecture leur paraissait « démoralisante » et « insoutenable ». Quant au « comique » du texte, ils ne le voyaient vraiment nulle part. Il est vrai que le contenu en est terrible, car ce « oui » est bien un « oui », mais un « oui » à la mort, donc un « non » à la vie. Pourtant, qu’il le veuille ou non, Thomas Bernhard vivra éternellement pour servir d’exemple à tous ceux qui prétendent être des écrivains”.35

This long passage not only bears witness to the relation between Kristof’s and Bernhard’s literature, which we will deal with shortly, but it also offers us an introduction to Bernhard’s way of thinking, which we will consider in our reasoning. We will limit our analysis of Agota Kristof’s novel to only a few passages, which are contained in The Proof, the second and central part of her trilogy. There the author presents us a character, Victor, who may seem quite incidental in relation to the whole structure of the book. This is not really the case. Even if Victor is not a central character, he represents someone who intends to justify his whole life by writing a book. Agota Kristof wants to show us that the project of justifying and rationalising the own existence, for instance through writing, is always conducted when one is on the verge of a delirium or a madness to which it is always possible to fall prey.36 Let us quote a long passage that expresses the logic of contradiction of Victor’s attempt: I’ve lived with my sister for almost to years. I sold the bookshop and house I owned in a little town far away near the border. I came to live with my sister in order to write a book. I thought I would be unable to do it in the little town far away because of the solitude that threatened to make me ill and turn me into alcoholic. I thought that here, with my sister taling care of the housework, the meals, and the clothes, I would lead a healthy, regular life, which would at last allow me to write the book that I’ve always wanted to write. Unfortunately, the calm and quiet life I’d anticipated quicly turned into hell on earth. My sister watched over me, spied on me constantly. Right from my arrival she forbade me to drink or smoke, and whenever I returned from an errand or a walk she would kiss me affectionately, solely, I realized, in order to detect the smell of drink or tobacco on my breath. Many times I sat down at my desk with some

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sheets of paper, but my mind was completely blank. What could I write about? Nothing happened in my life, nothing ever had happened in my life or in the world around me. Nothing worth writing about. And my sister disturbed me all the time; she came into my room on the slightest pretext. She brought me tea, dusted the furniture, put away my clean clothes in the wardrobe. She would also lean over my shoulder to see how my writing was coming along. Because of this I had to fill in sheet after sheet, and since I didn’t know what to write on them, I copied out excerpts from books, any books. Sometimes my sister would read a phrase over my shoulder that pleased her, and would encourage me with a contented smile.37

The only subject Victor can, in a certain sense, write about is his impossibility of writing: his life is the copy of the life he has expected for himself but the copy sensibly differs from the original that remains impossible. As we have suggested, Concrete by Thomas Bernhard is the point of reference of the passage of Agota Kristof which we have quoted. In this novel, Bernhard presents us a character, Rudolf, a Viennese musicologist, whose main concern is the possibility of writing a book, which he has been thinking over for quite some time. We must not carry a naturalistic attitude toward the story told in the book: the subject of the book is not the psychological despair of a man who has procrastinated his task. The subject of the book is the idea itself of possibility, namely the possibility of orientating one’s own existence. This possibility becomes meaningful only if it is projected onto the horizon of freedom. Freedom is a constant theme in Thomas Bernhard’s meditations. This idea is thought of as the possibility of orientating existence toward a goal, i.e., the act of writing, which can account for the limits and the difficulties of the hypothesis of freedom. As in Heidegger’s philosophy, the way to understand the subjectivity of a human being is to question the essential possibilities that form her/his existence, in particular, the possibility for the self to be free within her/his own historicity. From the very beginning of this novel, Thomas Bernhard puts forth this question, which we focus on in our paper. This question, namely the relation between freedom and solitude, is meant to be the condition of every creative process. As the author says: “We must be alone and free from all human contact if we wish to embark upon an intellectual task!”38 Solitude is the condition for an intellectual task to be achieved in so far as solitude is the possibility of freedom. If freedom is necessary for every creative attitude, freedom is always put at risk by the presence of someone else. Solitude becomes thus desirable. It is even viewed as the starting point of the creative process: I had been planning it for ten years and repeatedly failed to bring it to fruition, but now I had resolved to begin writing on the twenty-seventh of January at precisely four o’clock in the morning, after the departure of my sister, who was due to leave on twenty-sixth, and whose presence in Peiskam had for weeks put paid to any thought of my starting work on Mendelssohn Bartoldy.39


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As soon as the possibility of writing (i.e., of orientating one’s own existence) is evoked, it is immediately confronted, in Bernhard’s line of reasoning, with an impossibility, which precisely stems from that possibility: Although she had gone, I still felt the presence of my sister in every part of the house. It would be impossible to imagine a person more hostile to anything intellectual than my sister. The very thought of her robs me of my capacity for any intellectual activity, and she has always stifled at birth any intellectual projects I have had. She’s been gone a long time now, and yet she is still controlling me, I thought as I pressed my hands against the cold wall of the hall.40

The structure of time, through which Bernhard represents the relation between Rudolf and his sister, is to be emphasized: his sister’s absence is still a form of presence which haunts Rudolf’s present. The author suggests that, in the horizon of writing (namely the horizon in which existence can turn out to be orientated), reality is the reality of mind. The present of this reality made of thoughts is consistent with what we have sketched out as the logic of contradiction: the absence is still a presence, not a loss retrieved by the present such as, for instance, in a souvenir, but as something that haunts and obsesses the present. The possibility of being alone, i.e., the possibility of writing, is the possibility of an impossibility. This is the line of reasoning of Bernhard and Rudolf, which is consistent with the concreteness of the logic of contradiction: Having been unable to stand breakfast with my sister every day, I now couldn’t stand having it alone. Breakfast with my sister had nauseated me, just as it now nauseated me to breakfast alone. You’re alone again, you’re alone again. Be happy, I said to myself. But unhappiness was not to be hoodwinked so crudely. You can’t turn unhappiness into happiness as simply as that, by such blatant tactics.41

There is no a simple correlation between loss and retrieval, the negative and the positive: You can’t turn unhappiness into happiness as simply as that. A synthesis of the dialectic between the negative and the positive is not necessarily there since no antithesis is necessarily there to resolve. Both a possibility and an impossibility are the horizon of Rudolf’s thoughts. At the same time, Rudolf needs his sister to be there (cum te) and needs his sister not to be there (sine te) for him to be able to write. This is not an opposition that can be solved: it is a coexistence between the absence of the other as solitude and the presence (absence) of the other as obsession.42 Both the possibility of solitude and the impossibility of solitude become the impossibility of writing: this impossibility being the only condition and subject for writing. This is the most striking idea of Bernhard: we can only write about such an impossibility of writing, existing, orienting our own life. Writing about this impossibility prevents us from becoming fools,43 as

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Bernhard states in the following long passage which we reproduce in its entirety because it expresses the logic of contradiction that underlines his whole creative process: They said, You do have someone, whereas I knew for certain that I not only had no one, but – what was perhaps the crucial and most annihilating thought – needed no one. I imagined I needed no one, and this is what I still imagine to this day. I needed no one, and so I had no one. But naturally we do not need someone, otherwise we inevitably become what I have become: tiresome, unbearable, sick – impossible, in the profoundest sense of the word. I always believed that I could get on with my intellectual work if only I were completely alone, with no one else around. This proved to be mistaken, but is equally mistaken to say that we actually need someone. We need someone for our work, and we also need no one. Sometimes we need someone, sometimes no one, and sometimes we need someone and no one. In the last few days I have once more become aware of this totally absurd fact: we never know at any time whether we need someone or no one, or whether we need someone and at the same time no one, and because we never ever know what we really need we are unhappy, and hence unable to start on our intellectual work when we wish and when it seems right.44

What is expressed here is the logic of contradiction as it has based on the temporal coexistence (at the same time) between the possibility and the impossibility of being alone: the absence of the other – of the past – is still a presence, not because it has been retrieved, but because it haunts the present of the writer. We do not deal with what has been retrieved (the idea that everything remains still possible) but with what has been transformed in a definitively lost past (in a definitively lost possibility: the crucial and most annihilating thought), which begins to haunt the present and to obsessively guide the intentionality of representation. It is what has been perceived as definitively lost that begins to be obsessively present within the solitude of imagination. It is the regime of impossibility which really structures and orientates the spectrum of possibilities: I believed fervently that I needed my sister in order to be able to start my work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy. And then, when she was there, I knew that I didn’t need her, that I could start work only if she wasn’t there. But now she’s gone and I’m really unable to start. At first it was because she was there, and now it’s because she isn’t. On the one hand we overrate other people, on the other we underrate them; and we constantly overrate and underrate ourselves; when we ought to overrate ourselves we underrate ourselves, and in the same way we underrate ourselves when we ought to overrate ourselves.45

As we have pointed out, the structure of our essential possibilities characterises, from the point of view of the analytics of existence, who we are; but these possibilities are always confronted with the limits of possibility and with impossibility, and the striking relation to impossibility makes us underrate or overrate ourselves, that is to say, it makes us unable to determine once and


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for all the image of who we are. The identity of the self – as the temporal notion of present – no longer consists in a self-reference (like in a tautology) but in a contradiction, which is a form of coexistence, between who we are and who we are not. Rudolf is at the same radically alone and unable to be alone, both, for exactly the same reason, because his present consists in both the absence and the presence of the other in virtue of the obsession for and by the other. According to the logic of delirium and contradiction of Bernhard’s character, Rudolf, writing is understanding one’s own solitude, since solitude is not only a matter of fact, but, above all, a relation with the obsession for the past, for the otherness of the past, for what has been definitively lost. Thus, the creative process is always inscribed already, in virtue of the act itself of representation, in the horizon of death: “Where’s your great work? She said. You associate only with the dead. I associate with the living. That’s the difference between us. In the society I mix with there are living people, in yours there are only dead people”.46 “The only friends I have are the dead who bequeathed their writings to me – I have no others”.47 Death is the event in virtue of which we think the transcendence of time.48 Time becomes definitive through the event of death but its definitiveness lies, as we have said, at the very beginning of what haunts the present, i.e., the present of representation. But the event of death, the death of the other, is thus at the same time both the possibility and the impossibility of solitude. Only death can really give us the sense of being without the other; but only this possibility can make us perceive the sense of being with the other, which is the possibility of an impossibility: nec cum te nec sine te. It is this obsession by and for the other that structures our own relationship with solitude: it is only because we can always lose the other that we are with the other. The beloved other is never where we are and the timing of the logic of contradiction is the impossibility of synchronicity between me and the other. But it is also the timing of love in the tragic rhythm of the final scene of Romeo and Juliet: one of them seems to be dead, the other cries, being unable to live while the other does not; the one dies, the other comes back and dies. Neither can be found where the other is. Even love confronts us with the essential question of solitude. What has been lost is never retrieved as such be it in narration or in representation: it can only be accounted for as something transformed into what haunts our present, i.e., what transforms the self. In this perspective, solitude can be viewed as the limit of representation, since representation always implies the reference to the other. But then the most difficult question arises: what does solitude mean in this perspective, in the temporal dimension of a creative process?

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4. T H E D E E P E N I N G O F T H E P R E S E N T T H R O U G H O U T S O L I T U D E

We now deal with the main problem: what do we mean by solitude? All questions introduced by what, all the what-questions, are ontological questions,49 which assume either the positive existence of an object to be described or the possibility of representing something in terms of an object that can be described. Or, solitude exists (which cannot be refuted), but it doesn’t exist as an object nor as something which can be represented as an object that could be positively described. Solitude cannot be treated in transcendental terms. It cannot be perceived and described as an object nor can it be considered the representation of a phenomenon. To speak of the phenomenon of solitude would be incorrect: it amounts to a confusion between a state of affairs (being alone) or a state of mind ( feeling alone) and the possibility to access, as from the outside (from the position of a third, of a spectator), the inside of solitude, namely what solitude is to me. “What solitude is?” is what solitude is to me, not in a subjective sense, but in the sense that “what solitude is” is the unique and personal way I am attached to my own existence, which can by no means be represented, since representation always involves the evocation of the other and positing the existence of a third member. Solitude is in this sense the limit of representation. It is what we cannot represent, what escapes representation: both in a play and in a novel (it would be the same for a poem or any other literary form) it is not possible to represent solitude as such, to give a positive representation of solitude. I can represent someone being alone or even feeling alone, but I cannot represent his being or feeling alone. If I could – and in a sense the very fact that I cannot is a fact that preserves the otherness of the other – everybody would have access to the life of the other as the other does to himself: there would be a pure and complete self-transparency – which is a monstrous dream and a recurrent and dangerous ideal. Would it mean that we can’t say anything about solitude? This would be incoherent and false. A world in which everybody is consigned and chained to his solitude is a world of violence, since there is no room left for the possibility to meet the other, to establish an act that is gratuitous, not merely per-se, that is to say to accomplish a moral relation. But a world within which everybody is consigned and chained to pure transparency is just as violent, since anybody could be robbed of his own voice: it would be an illiberal50 world in which freedom is excluded and anyone can speak in the name of the other. Let us return to our central problem: how does one speak about solitude? As we have said before, solitude cannot be represented: we can represent someone who is alone (this is a negative account of what solitude is, represented by referring to the absence of the other), but there is no sense in saying that we can show what his own solitude is. When Willy


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Lomax, the great character of Death of a Salesman,51 asks if there is a seed store in the neighbourhood, because he has to get some seeds since nothing is planted, we perceive that he was a lonely man; we understand that anything in his life has transcended the limits of his own existence; we see that he couldn’t realise anything that is permanent and lives beyond his limited life; but still we do not have any positive access to his own solitude, to the representation of the solitude that has imprisoned and haunted his whole life.52 What we understand from the structure of the play, that is to say from the temporal sequence of loss and retrieval, is that his solitude is, once more, a deepening of the present. The present is not – in this play – a part of time, which is the most important part, since it delineates past from future. The present is the scene in which past and future converge: the past and future do not happen and they are not represented along a succession of time, but they consist at the same time by haunting the present. The present does not consists in an instant that separates past from future; it consists of the obsession for past and future. The so-called forms of temporality – past and future – are not understood as modified forms of the present; they are not measured by reference to the priority of the present that would be given by its immanent or self-transparent character, namely the possibility to access immediately itself. The forms of temporality – in the play, the representations of past and future that occupy the present of the scene – are measured by reference to the weight they place on the present: they are images which do not inform us of the past – what is lost – or of the future – what is waited for and in this sense retrieved – but that haunt the present and affect the representation and the comprehension of present time. The image of past and future in form of phantoms who haunt the present is the self-understanding of solitude as the desperate attempt to reaffirm freedom, which culminates in the act of suicide, understood precisely as the only and ultimate way to reaffirm freedom and give meaning to life. Even though we could establish, by this reference to Arthur Miller’s major play, a relation between solitude and phantoms, we haven’t yet tried to answer our question: how does one account for solitude? If solitude cannot be directly represented, we should ask ourselves whether or not it can be indirectly testified to by something which accounts for the impossibility to be either with or without the other. We should perhaps try to expound this relation between solitude and phantoms. If we remain with the reference to plays as a good illustration of representation, we have to evocate the drama of solitude that opens modernity since it questions the self and casts some doubts on its centred position, the drama of Hamlet. This drama is placed, from the very beginning, under the sign of doubt, formulated as a question investing the idea of subjectivity. The first line which opens

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the play is the famous question the sentinel Bernardo addresses to someone unknown: who is there? As the sentinel is the metaphor of the consciousness which attempts to vigil on what is outside of it, this question puts at stake the difficulty of the self to recognise who is the other and, thus, who is the self. In phenomenological terms, we are familiar with this problem, as it has analysed by and large in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation by Husserl,53 under the heading of: gnoseology of transcendence, namely how does one recognise the other who is before me, how does one know if the other has the same prerogatives I acknowledge to myself. Is the other, who is before me, a real person as I am or a mere production of my representation? Is the other an alter ego – a self in the same sense in which I am a self – or only a phantom? To put it in a different way, is the alter ego necessarily understood in terms of a representation, as a phantom? The answer is affirmative as long as the relation with the other is inscribed in the horizon of space in the form of the question, “who is there?” The whole drama of Hamlet is situated along this line which divides the self from the representations, the phantoms, with which he enters into relation. This relation is not anyway an intellectual relation trough which Hamlet represents the other and dominates it. It is, on the contrary, a real struggle from which he suffers and for which he strives. Representation is governed by the regime of obsession which determines the act of representation and the logic of contradiction, namely the impossibility to be either with or without the other. This sheds some light on the understanding of solitude. We cannot limit ourselves in saying that Hamlet is and remains alone within this struggle, but we should notice that this struggle expresses the solitude of Hamlet, it is the testimony of his solitude, it is his own solitude. We now come closer to the answer to our question: how does one account for solitude? Solitude cannot be represented but it can be testified to. We can express this idea with the following formula: Solitude is testified by the struggle with phantoms who have the consistency of flesh. In this sense, solitude is the limit 54 of representation, since representation always implies the evocation of the other: it cannot be represented but only testified by the representations of the other (echoing Derrida’s spectres) that it commands. If solitude cannot be represented, but, as a limit to representation, it commands and determines the act of representation, the production of representations (phantoms who have the consistency of flesh) is not the result of any invention. The temporal sequence of loss and retrieval of any creative process is made possible not by the invention of the other, but by its representation. This distinction is important, since representation is not a mere appropriation of the other but it implies a real dynamic of obsession for and by the other. This obsession calls into discussion the logics based on the principle of non-contradiction


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whose rigour seems to be weakened when it is upheld within the regime of solitude. The creative process is not simply rooted in imagination or invention but in the obsession for and by the other. The way representation is normally understood is to say that representation – a creative process – give us access to what has been lost in the form of a retrieved reality which is a kind of substitution. It tells us something about how I make the other appear within my own solitude. We have tried to demonstrate that such a voluntarism is false. The present of representation is not made by the substitution of one with another along a temporal succession of instants, but by the coexistence of the presence and the absence of the other within the obsession that affects and haunts my solitude. Through representation, we cannot really and positively say what we have lost – we cannot, in other words, make the other appear within my solitude as someone who is always retrieved. We can only say how what we have definitely lost – the otherness of the other – affects my own presence, haunts and transforms my self. Representation in the sense of a creative process gives us access only to the way the self has been transformed by the obsession for and by the other, namely by the struggle with what has been definitely lost. This struggle is the way the self understands his own existence. Representation does not fix in an eternal present what is retrieved but only tells us how the self has been transformed by what has been definitely lost, this loss being the obsession for the other who endlessly haunts our present. The other is testified by the affection or obsession that his disappearing is able to generate: this otherness or disappearing which affects and haunts the present is the only possible relation with the other, with what is not anymore or not yet there. This form of affection or obsession is not understandable within the principle of non-contradiction if not as the limit of contradiction. This obsession is the presence of an absent. It is the only way the absence of the absent can be made somehow present, namely affecting the present of representation. If we don’t understand this paradox, which provides us with the essence of obsession, we cannot understand solitude. Solitude is not the absence of the other, who was present, along a succession of time in which the present is the dividing line between past and future; solitude is the presence of an absent throughout obsession: it is the deepening of the present which does not consist of an instant that articulates past and future, but of the coexistence of past and future which affect, haunts the present and commands the representations of the other. The other is in this sense both the limit and the object of representation, even if it may appear contradictory: it is the limit of representation within the horizon of time and the object of representation within the horizon of space. There is however a logic in this contradiction, that is to say, the logic of every creative process as long as it is understood

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as the writing of one’s own solitude. Nec cum te nec sine te: neither with you nor without you. As Agota Kristof’s and Thomas Bernhard’s literature have been able to show, a creative process is the deepest act of solitude: an act within which we become, at the same time, forever and no longer alone. This temporal structure is thus the possibility itself to narrate: writing is always – according to the authors we have made reference – writing the struggle with the phantoms who really affect and haunt our own solitude, that is to say, our own freedom. Università di Torino, Italy

NOTES ∗ We owe this expression “deepening of the present” to a quotation of Thomas Merton: “Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it”. This quotation is contained in the book of Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas, New York, Harvest Book, 2002. 1 We limit here our analysis, for the brevity of the purpose, to the principle of non-contradiction, which is mainly affected by our reasoning, but we should also evocate the principle of identity and the principle of the excluded third (or excluded middle). 2 See “La ruine de la représentation” in Emmanuel Lévinas, En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger, Paris, Vrin, 1967, pp. 125–135. On the complex relation of Lévinas with phenomenology see, Jan De Greef, “Lévinas et la phénoménologie” dans Revue de métaphysique et de morale, n. 76, 1971; Stephan Strasser, “Antiphénoménologie et phénoménologie dans la philosophie d’E. Lévinas” dans Revue philosophique de Louvain, n. 75, 1977, pp. 101–124; Craig R. Vasey, “Le problème de l’intentionnalité dans la philosophie d’E. Lévinas” dans Revue de métaphysique et de morale, n. 85, 1980, pp. 224–239; Jacques Colette, “Lévinas et la phénoménologie husserlienne” dans Jacques Rolland, Cahiers de la nuit surveillée, n. 3, Verdier, 1984, pp. 19–36; Marc Richir, “Phénomène et infini” dans Cahier de l’Herne: E. Lévinas, Le Livre de poche, 1991, pp. 224–256 ; François David Sebbah, “Aux limites de l’intentionnalité: M. Henry et E. Lévinas lecteurs des Leçons sur la conscience intime du temps” dans Alter, n. 2, 1994 ; Rudolf Bernet, La vie du sujet. Recherches sur l’interprétation de Husserl dans la phénoménologie, Paris, Puf, 1994; Arno Münster, “L’autre dans la phénoménologie de Husserl, chez Sartre et chez E. Lévinas, ou de l’alter ego vers le désir d’autrui” dans Arno Münster, La différence comme non-indifférence. Ethique et altérité chez E. Lévinas, Paris, Kimé, 1995, pp. 49–68; Calvin O. Schrag, “La récupération du sujet phénoménologique. En dialogue avec Derrida, Ricœur et Lévinas” dans Analecta Husserliana, 50, 1997, pp. 183–192; Hugues Choplin, De la phénoménologie à la non-philosophie (Lévinas et Laruelle), Paris, Kimé, 1998; François-David Sebbah, “Faut-il sortir de l’intentionnalité? Les aventures de l’intentionnalité dans le parcours lévinassien” dans Cahiers philosophiques, n. 81, 1999, pp. 145–162; Paul Olivier, “Diaconie et diachronie: de la phénoménologie à la théologie” dans Noésis, n. 3, 1999; Giuseppe Lissa, “Phénoménologie et/ou herméneutique chez Emmanuel Lévinas” dans Pardès, n. 26, 1999, pp. 129–161; Françoise Dastur, “Intentionnalité et métaphysique” dans E. Lévinas, Positivité et transcendance (suivi de Lévinas et la phénoménologie), Paris, Puf, 2000, pp. 125–141; FrançoisDavid Sebbah, L’épreuve de la limite. Derrida, Henry, Lévinas et la phénoménologie, Paris, Puf,


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2001; Didier Franck, Dramatique des phénomènes, Paris, Puf, 2001; John E. Drabinski, Sensibility and Singularity: The Problem of Phenomenology in Levinas, SUNY Press, 2001; Elena Bovo, “Le temps, cette altérité intime. La critique de la temporalité huserlienne par Lévinas” dans Cahiers d’études lévinassiennes, n. 1, 2002, pp. 7–20; Yasuhito Murakami, Lévinas phénoménologue, Grenoble, Jérôme Millon, 2002; Reiko Kobayashi, “Totalité et Infini et la cinquième Méditation cartésienne” dans Revue philosophique de Louvain, n.1–2, février-mai 2002, 2002, pp. 149–185; Jean Greisch, “Les yeux de Husserl en France. Les tentatives de refondation de la phénoménologie dans la deuxième moitié du XX siècle” dans P. Dupond et L. Cournarie, Phénoménologie: un siècle de philosophie, Paris, Ellipses, 2002, pp. 45–74; Hugues Choplin, “L’homme ou la littérature ? Lévinas et la phénoménologie de la transcendance radicale” dans Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, n.2, 2004, pp. 199–210. 3 Agota Kristof, The Notebook, the Proof, the Third Lie: Three Novels, Grove Press, 1997, translated from French by Alan Sheridan, David Watson, Marc Romano (original title: Le cahiers; La preuve; Le troisième mensonge). 4 Thomas Bernhard, Concrete, Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1986, translated from Germany by David McLintock (original title: Beton). On the works of Thomas Bernhard, see Chantal Thomas, Thomas Bernhard, Paris, Seuil, 1990; Matthias Konzett (dir.), A companion to the works of Thomas Bernhard, New York, Camden House, 2002; Jonathan J. Long, The novels of Thomas Bernhard: Form and its Function, New York, Camden House, 2001; Donald G. Daviau, “The Reception of Thomas Bernhard in the United States” Modern Austrian Literature, 21, 1988, pp. 243–76; Aldo G. Gargani, La frase infinita. Thomas Bernhard e la cultura austriaca, Bari, Laterza, 1990. 5 We borrow this expression from Stephen Stich, The Fragmentation of Reason: Preface to a Pragmatic Theory of Cognitive Evaluation, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1991. 6 For this analysis we refer to the work of Remo Bodei, Le logiche del delirio. Ragioni, affetti, follia, Rome-Bari, Laterza, 2002. In this line of reasoning you may also see Patrick Nerhot, L’ipotesi perduta della legge, Padoue, Cedam, 1994. 7 See R. Bodei, op. cit., p. 11 et s. 8 See recently on the meaning of scene for a creative process, Milan Kundera, Le rideau, Paris, Gallimard, 2005. 9 A good illustration of and a strong critique against this way to formalise time – especially the relation between past and present – and thus to understand rationality are conducted by Patrick Nerhot, Questions phénoménologiques suivi de lectures freudiennes, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2002. We owe to this author the way he considers past as not already past and thus communicated to present along the succession and continuity of time, but as a signifier activated by the present strive for meaning. See in this sense, Patrick Nerhot, “La vérité en histoire et le métier d’historien. Réflexions à partir de La France des Lumières”, in Quaderni Fiorentini. Per la storia del pensiero giuridico moderno, XXIV (1995), Milan, Giuffrè, pp. 11–138. 10 See Emmanuel Lévinas, En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger, op. cit. 11 See Emmanuel Lévinas, “La ruine de la représentation”, op. cit., p. 129: “La nouveauté de la phénoménologie husserlienne, dans ses prétentions gnoséologiques consiste à recourir à la conscience pour éclairer les concepts d’une science et pour les préserver contre des équivoques inévitables dont seraient chargés pour une pensée qui, dans l’attitude naturelle, reste braquée sur les objets”. 12 See Emmanuel Lévinas, “La ruine de la représentation”, op. cit., p. 127: “La phénoménologie enseigne que la présence immédiate auprès des choses ne comprend pas encore le sens des choses, et, par conséquent, ne remplace pas la vérité”.

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See Emmanuel Lévinas, “La ruine de la représentation”, op. cit., p. 129: “A moins que tout l’intérêt de la recherche annoncée, au lieu de se porter sur la corrélation sujet-objet qui définirait l’intentionnalité, ne découle d’un autre dynamisme qui anime l’intentionnalité. Sa vraie énigme ne consisterait pas dans la présence auprès des objets, mais dans le sens nouveau qu’elle permet de donner à cette présence”. 14 See Emmanuel Lévinas, “La ruine de la représentation”, op. cit., p. 130: “L’intentionnalité désigne ainsi une relation avec l’objet, mais une relation telle qu’elle porte en elle, essentiellement, un sens implicite. La présence auprès de choses implique une autre présence auprès d’elles, qui s’ignore, d’autres horizons corrélatifs de ces intentions explicites et que la plus attentive et la plus scrupuleuse considération de l’objet donné dans l’attitude naïve, ne saurait découvrir”. 15 We should not anyway take the reference to an implicit situation as an empirical reference, which is not the case. Presupposition is the formalisation of this “pre”, that is to a say of an anticipation, which accounts for a different conception of temporality. This formalisation stems from a deformalisation of time, which is not anymore intended by Heidegger as the intuition of an a priori form. This deformalisation is conducted by reference to a situation which is capable to account for a conception of anticipation which is entrenched with an ontological certainty. This situation, as it is well-know, is the dimension of being-for-death of Dasein. 16 See Emmanuel Lévinas, “La ruine de la représentation”, op. cit., p. 130: “La classique relation entre sujet et objet est une présence de l’objet et une présence auprès de l’objet. La relation est comprise, en fait, de telle manière que le présent y épuise l’être du sujet et de l’objet. L’objet y est, à tout instant, exactement ce que le sujet le pense actuellement. Autrement dit, la relation sujet-objet est toute conscience. Malgré le temps qu’elle peut durer, cette relation recommence éternellement ce présent transparent et actuel et demeure, au sens étymologique du terme re-présentation”. 17 See Emmanuel Lévinas, “La ruine de la représentation”, op. cit., p. 130: “Par contre, l’intentionnalité porte en elle les horizons innombrables de ses implications et pense à infiniment plus de ‘choses’ qu’à l’objet où elle se fixe. Affirmer l’intentionnalité, c’est apercevoir la pensée comme liée à l’implicite où elle ne tombe pas accidentellement mais où, par essence, elle se tient. Par là, la pensée n’est plus ni pur présent, ni pure représentation”. 18 See Emmanuel Lévinas, “La ruine de la représentation”, op. cit., p. 130: “Cette découverte de l’implicite qui n’est pas une simple ‘déficience’ ou ‘chute’ de l’explicite, apparaît comme monstruosité ou comme merveille dans une histoire des idées où le concept d’actualité coïncidait avec l’état de veille absolue, avec la lucidité de l’intellect”. 19 See Emmanuel Lévinas, “La ruine de la représentation”, op. cit., p. 131: “Une pensée qui oublie les implications de la pensée, invisibles avant la réflexion sur cette pensée, opère sur des objets au lieu de les penser. La réduction phénoménologique arrête l’opération pour remonter vers la vérité, pour montrer les êtres représentés dans leur surgissement transcendantal”. 20 See Emmanuel Lévinas, “La ruine de la représentation”, op. cit., p. 131: “L’idée d’une implication nécessaire, absolument imperceptible au sujet se dirigeant sur l’objet, ne se découvrant qu’après coup, dans la réflexion, ne se produisant donc pas dans le présent, c’est-à-dire se produisant à mon insu – met fin à l’idéal de la représentation et de la souveraineté du sujet, met fin à l’idéalisme où rien ne pouvait entrer subrepticement en moi. Dans la pensée se révèle ainsi une passion foncière qui n’a plus rien de commun avec la passivité de la sensation, du donné – dont partaient empirisme et réalisme”. 21 See note 15. 22 See Emmanuel Lévinas, “La ruine de la représentation”, op. cit., p. 132: “L’horizon impliqué dans l’intentionnalité n’est pas donc le contexte encore vaguement pensé de l’objet, mais la situation du sujet”.

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See Emmanuel Lévinas, “La ruine de la représentation”, op. cit., pp. 132–133: “Toute l’ouvre de Heidegger consiste à ouvrir et à explorer cette dimension, inconnue dans l’histoire des idées et à laquelle il donne cependant le plus connu de Sein. Par rapport au modèle traditionnel de l’objectivité, c’est un terrain subjectif, mais d’un subjectivisme ‘plus objectif que toute objectivité”’. 24 See Emmanuel Lévinas, “La ruine de la représentation”, op. cit., p. 133: “L’activité transcendantale reçoit, en tout cas, dans la phénoménologie cette nuovelle orientation. Le monde n’est pas seulement constitué, mais aussi constituant. Le sujet n’est plus pur sujet, l’objet n’est plus pur objet. Le phénomène est à la fois ce qui se révèle et ce qui révèle, être et accès à l’être”. 25 See Emmanuel Lévinas, “La ruine de la représentation”, op. cit., p. 133: “Ce retournement où l’être fonde l’acte qui le projette, où le présent de l’acte – où son actualité – vire en passé, mais où, aussitôt, l’être de l’objet se parfait dans l’attitude qui se prend à son égard et où l’antériorité de l’être se place, de nouveau, dans un avenir – ce retournement où le comportement humain est interprété comme expérience originelle et non pas comme le fruit d’une expérience – c’est la phénoménologie elle-même. Elle nous mène hors de catégories sujet-objet et ruine la souverainété de la représentation”. 26 See Emmanuel Lévinas, “La ruine de la représentation”, op. cit., p. 134: “L’intentionnalité signifie que toute conscience est conscience de quelque chose, mais surtout que tout objet appelle et suscite la conscience par laquelle son être resplendit et, par-là même, apparaît. L’expérience sensible est privilégiée, parce que, en elle, se joue cette ambiguïté de la constitution, où le noème conditionne et abrite la noèse qui le constitue”. 27 See Emmanuel Lévinas, “La ruine de la représentation”, op. cit., p. 134: “Les notions qui jusqu’alors demeuraient sur le plan de l’objet forment, dès lors, une série dont les termes ne se rattachent les unes aux autres ni analytiquement, ni synthétiquement. Elles ne se complètent pas mutuellement comme les fragments d’un puzzle, mais se conditionnent transcendentalement. Rapprochements que jusqu’alors ne se permettaient que les poètes et les prophètes, par la métaphore et la ‘vision’ et que les langues accumulaient dans leurs étymologies”. 28 See Emmanuel Lévinas, “La ruine de la représentation”, op. cit., p. 135: “Nous sommes au-delà de l’idéalisme et du réalisme, puisque l’être n’est ni dans la pensée, ni hors de la pensée, mais que la pensée elle-même est hors d’elle-même. Il faut un acte second et un esprit de l’escalier pour découvrir les horizons cachés qui ne sont plus le contexte de cet objet, mais les donneurs transcendantaux de son sens. Il faut pour tenir le monde et la vérité plus que l’instant ou l’éternité de l’évidence”. 29 See Emmanuel Lévinas, “La ruine de la représentation”, op. cit., p. 135: “Mais dans une phénoménologie où l’activité de la représentation totalisante et totalitaire est déjà dépassé dans sa propre intention, où la représentation se trouve déjà placée dans des horizons que, en quelque façon, elle n’avait pas voulus, mais dont elle ne se passe pas – devient possible une Sinngebung éthique, c’est-à-dire essentiellement respectueuse de l’Autre”. 30 See Emmanuel Lévinas, “La ruine de la représentation”, op. cit., p. 135: “Cette vie qui prête un sens se livre peut-être autrement et suppose pour sa révélation des relations entre le Même et l’Autre qui ne sont plus objectivation mais société. On peut rechercher dans une éthique la condition de la vérité”. 31 We refer to Cristina Campo’s poem, La tigre assenza: “Ahi che la Tigre, /la Tigre Assenza, /o amati, /ha tutto divorato /di questo volto rivolto /a voi! La bocca sola pura /prega ancora voi: /di pregare ancora /perché la Tigre, /la Tigre Assenza, /o amati, / non divori la bocca e la preghiera ”. 32 See Plato, Phaedo, Cambdrige, Cambdrige University Press, 1993. 33 See Emmanuel Lévinas, Le Temps et l’autre, Paris, PUF, 1998.

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See Alain René Lesage, Le Diable boiteux [1707], Paris, Flammarion, 2004. See Agota Kristof, L’analphabète: Récit autobiographique, Paris, Zoé Editeur, 2004, pp. 28–29. 36 See Agota Kristof, The Notebook, the Proof, the Third Lie: Three Novels, op. cit., p. 296: “Lucas pours a drink. ‘Where have you been?’ ‘To my hometown. I was summoned there by the local magistrate concerning Victor. He strangled his sister in a fit of delirium tremens.’ Lucas says, ‘Poor Victor. Did you see him?’ ‘Yes, I saw him. He’s in an insane asylum.’ Lucas asks, ‘What will become of him?’ ‘I don’t know. They haven’t had the trial yet. I think he’ll spend the rest of his days in the asylum. Victor doesn’t belong in a prison. I asked if there was anything I could do for him. He said to send him a regular supply of writnigs materials. ‘Paper and pencils are all I need. Here I can finally write my book,’ he said”. 37 See Agota Kristof, The Notebook, the Proof, the Third Lie: Three Novels, op. cit., pp. 297–298. 38 See Thomas Bernhard, Concrete, op. cit., p. 4. 39 See Thomas Bernhard, Concrete, op. cit., p. 3. 40 See Thomas Bernhard, Concrete, op. cit., p. 7. 41 See Thomas Bernhard, Concrete, op. cit., p. 13. 42 See Thomas Bernhard, Concrete, op. cit., p. 24: “What I actually hoped for from her was help, not destruction. But it’s always the same: I beg and beseech her to help me, and she ruins me! And knowing this, I wired her. For the hundred time I invited my destroyer to my house. It’s true that I wired to her for help: she didn’t come to Peiskam uninvited. The truth is always terrible, but it’s always better to stick to the truth than to resort to lies, to lying to oneself ”. Also pp. 26–27: “On the one hand we can’t be alone, people like us; on the other we can’t stand company. We can’t stand male company, which bores us to death, or female company either. I gave up male company for years because it’s totally unprofitable, and female company gets on my nerves in no time. Admittedly I’d always credited my sister with the ability to rescue me from the hell of being alone, and, to be honest, she often has succeeded in dragging me out of the black, hideous, revolting, stinking bog of loneliness, but lately she has no longer had the strength, and probably not the will either; perhaps she has doubted for too long whether I am really serious, as I proved, after all, by the way she continually teases me unmercifully about Mendelssohn Bartholdy. I hadn’t written anything for years – because of my sister, I always maintain, but perhaps also because I am no longer capable of writing”. 43 See Thomas Bernhard, Concrete, op. cit., p. 35: “To exist alone in such fog is madness!”. 44 See Thomas Bernhard, Concrete, op. cit., pp. 28–29 (we underline Bernhard’s expressions and phrases). 45 See Thomas Bernhard, Concrete, op. cit., pp. 29–30. 46 See Thomas Bernhard, Concrete, op. cit., p. 17. 47 See Thomas Bernhard, Concrete, op. cit., p. 28. 48 See Emmanuel Lévinas, Dieu, la mort et le temps, Paris, Le Livre de Poche, 1997. 49 See Martin Heidegger, What is Philosophy?, New York, NCUP, 1956. 50 See Emmanuel Lévinas, Totalité et infini. Essai sur l’extériorité, Paris, Le Livre de Poche, 1992, p. 125. 51 See Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman, New York, Penguin Books, 1998. 52 See Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman, op. cit., for instance act one, p. 15: “Willy: Figure it out. Work a lifetime to pay off a house. You finally own it, and there’s nobody to live in it. Linda: Well, dear, life is a casting off. It is always that way. Willy: No, no, some people – some people accomplish something.” 35


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See Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1977, translated by Dorion Cairns. 54 We use this term in the sense in which it is employed by Vittorio Mathieu when he says (pp. 10–11): “Solo dunque col dare un senso alla contraddizione si può dare un senso al principio di non-contraddizione; questo avviene allora ad essere la legge universale e necessaria non di una conoscenza assoluta, ma soltanto di un modo di conoscenza ben definito: la conoscenza che si sviluppa nell’ambito della possibilità trascendentale che, appunto perché definita, trova al limite la contraddizione”. See Vittorio Mathieu, “Kant e la contraddizione”, in Rivista di Filosofia, vol. XXXVIII, 1947, n. 4.

REFERENCES Rudolf Bernet (1994). la vie du sujet. Recherches sur l’interprétation de Husserl dans la phénoménologie, Paris: Puf. Thomas Bernhard (1986). Concrete, Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press. Translated from German by David McLintock (original title: Beton). Remo Bodei (2002). Le logiche del delirio. Ragioni, affetti, follia, Roma-Bari: Laterza. Elena Bovo (2002). “Le temps, cette altérité intime. La critique de la temporalité huserlienne par Lévinas”. Cahiers d’études lévinassiennes, n. 1, pp. 7–20. Hugues Choplin (1998). De la phénoménologie à la non-philosophie (Lévinas et Laruelle), Paris: Kimé. Hugues Choplin (2004). “L’homme ou la littérature? Lévinas et la phénoménologie de la transcendance radicale”. Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, n.2, pp. 199–210. Jacques Colette (1984). “Lévinas et la phénoménologie husserlienne”. Dans Rolland, Jacques Cahiers de la nuit surveillée, n. 3, Verdier, pp. 19–36. Françoise Dastur (2000). “Intentionnalité et métaphysique”. Dans E. Lévinas, Positivité et transcendance (suivi de Lévinas et la phénoménologie), Paris: Puf, pp. 125–141. Donald G. Daviau (1988). “The Reception of Thomas Bernhard in the United States”. Modern Austrian Literature, 21, pp. 243–76. Jan De Greef (1971). “Lévinas et la phénoménologie”. Revue de métaphysique et de morale, n. 76. John E. Drabinski (2001). Sensibility and Singularity: The Problem of Phenomenology in Levinas. New York: SUNY Press. Didier Franck (2001). Dramatique des phénomènes, Paris: PUF. Gargani,bibitem[Aldo Gargani(1990)]ch20:aldogargani1990 Aldo G. Gargani (1990). La frase infinita. Thomas Bernhard e la cultura austriaca, Bari: Laterza. Aldo G. Gargani (1990). La frase infinita. Thomas Bernhard e la cultura austriaca, Bari: Laterza. Jean Greisch (2002). “Les yeux de Husserl en France. Les tentatives de refondation de la phénoménologie dans la deuxième moitié du XX siècle”. dans Dupond P. and Cournarie, Phénoménologie: un siècle de philosophie, Paris: Ellipses, pp. 45–74. Martin Heidegger (1956). What is Philosophy? New York: NCUP. Edmund Husserl (1977). Cartesian Meditations. Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Translated by Dorion Cairns. Alain René Lesage (2004). Le Diable boiteux [1707]. Paris: Flammarion. Emmanuel Lévinas (1967). En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger. Paris: Vrin. Emmanuel Lévinas (1992). Totalité et infini. Essai sur l’extériorité. Paris: Le livre de poche. Emmanuel Lévinas (1998). Le Temps et l’autre. Paris: PUF.

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Giuseppe Lissa (1999). “Phénoménologie et/ou herméneutique chez Emmanuel Lévinas”. Pardès, n. 26, pp. 129–161. Jonathan J. Long (2001). The novels of Thomas Bernhard: Form and its Function. New York: Camden House. Agota Kristof (1997). The Notebook, the Proof, the Third Lie: Three Novels. London: Grove Press. Translated from French by Alan Sheridan, David Watson, Marc Romano (original title: Le cahiers; La preuve; Le troisième mensonge). Agota Kristof (2004). L’analphabète: Récit autobiographique. Paris: Zoé Editeur, pp. 28–29. Reiko Kobayashi (2002). “Totalité et Infini et la cinquième Méditation cartésienne”. Revue philosophique de Louvain, n.1–2, (février-mai) pp. 149–185. Matthias Konzett (ed.) (2002). A Companion to the Works of Thomas Bernhard. New York: Camden House. Milan Kundera (2005). Le rideau. Paris: Gallimard. Vittorio Mathieu (1947). “Kant e la contraddizione”. Rivista di Filosofia, vol. XXXVIII, n. 4. Thomas Merton (2002). The Sign of Jonas. New York: Harvest Books. Arthur Miller (1998). Death of a Salesman. New York: Penguin Books. Arno Münster (1995). “L’autre dans la phénoménologie de Husserl, chez Sartre et chez E. Lévinas, ou de l’alter ego vers le désir d’autrui”. Dans Arno Münster, La différence comme non-indifférence. Ethique et altérité chez E. Lévinas. Paris: Kimé, pp. 49–68. Yasuhito Murakami (2002). Lévinas phénoménologue. Grenoble: Jérôme Millon. Patrick Nerhot (1994). L’ipotesi perduta della legge. Padova: Cedam. Patrick Nerhot (1995). “La vérité en histoire et le métier d’historien. Réflexions à partir de La France des Lumières”. In Quaderni Fiorentini. Per la storia del pensiero giuridico moderno, XXIV. Milano: Giuffrè, pp. 11–138. Patrick Nerhot (2002). Questions phénoménologiques suivi de lectures freudiennes. Paris: L’Harmattan. Paul Olivier (1999). “Diaconie et diachronie: de la phénoménologie à la théologie”. Noésis, n. 3. Plato (1993). Phaedo. Cambdrige: Cambdrige University Press. Marc Richir (1991). “Phénomène et infini”. Cahier de l’Herne: E. Lévinas. Paris: Le Livre de poche, pp. 224–256. Calvin O. Schrag (1997). “La récupération du sujet phénoménologique. En dialogue avec Derrida, Ricœur et Lévinas”. Analecta Husserliana, 50, pp. 183–192. François-David Sebbah (2001). L’épreuve de la limite. Derrida, Henry, Lévinas et la phénoménologie. Paris: Puf. François-David Sebbah (1999). “Faut-il sortir de l’intentionnalité? Les aventures de l’intentionnalité dans le parcours lévinassien”. Cahiers philosophiques, n. 81, pp. 145–162. François-David Sebbah (1994). “Aux limites de l’intentionnalité: M. Henry et E. Lévinas lecteurs des Leçons sur la conscience intime du temps”. Alter, n. 2. Stephen Stich (1991). The Fragmentation of Reason: Preface to a Pragmatic Theory of Cognitive Evaluation. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Stephan Strasser (1997). “Antiphénoménologie et phénoménologie dans la philosophie d’E. Lévinas”. Revue philosophique de Louvain, n. 75, pp. 101–124. Chantal Thomas (1990). Thomas Bernhard. Paris: Seul. Craig R. Vasey (1980). “Le problème de l’intentionnalité dans la philosophie d’E. Lévinas”. Revue de métaphysique et de morale, n. 85, pp. 224–239.

VALERIE REED AND MAX STATKIEWICZ

“MY DEAR TIME’S WASTE”: THE EXPERIENCE OF TIME AND CREATION IN PROUST

On perd son temps à rechercher le temps perdu. Jean-François Lyotard1

Lyotard’s formula is unsettlingly ambiguous. It could serve as a warning to those who want to be competitive in our agonistic world: theirs should be the time of the future, the time of their pro-jects, and any pause to consider the present, let alone to look backwards, would be considered a waste of time. But one could also read the formula – and this is undoubtedly Lyotard’s own view – as proclaiming the necessity of “wasting time” in order to achieve the most desirable goal: a recovery, a re-appropriation of time itself. And art is perhaps, for Lyotard as well as for Proust, the only way of transforming the wasting of time into the creation of a world, even if this also requires the dismantling – or, as Jean-Luc Nancy puts it, the interruption or unworking – of ordinary temporality and the ordinary (and “mythical”) world. The title of Marcel Proust’s novel has recently been retranslated into English as In Search of Lost Time.2 Although not as beautiful as the line from Shakespeare that provided the original title for Moncrieff and Kilmartin’s translation, Remembrance of Things Past, it is claimed to be more exact, as an almost literal rendering of À la recherche du temps perdu. The only problem with the new title is the ambiguity of the French perdu, translated as “lost.” In fact, temps perdu means not only “lost” but also “wasted” time. We would like to argue that it is this latter meaning, somewhat lost in the new translation, that determines the real significance of Proust’s novel, namely, the importance of wasted time to the (non-) work of imagination. In an essay published at about the same time as the Recherche, Bertrand Russell praises idleness for being essential to artistic creation.3 But within the tradition of Western thought, this suggestion might appear to be a kind of provocation rather than a serious statement. Only a thorough inquiry into the process of artistic creation of the kind we find in Proust’s novel can ground Russell’s claim. Such an inquiry suggests 311 A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana LXXXVI, 311–325. © 2007 Springer.

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that the very notion of wasted time needs to be resituated in respect to work. Indeed, one of the greatest revelations of the Recherche is that wasted time is a condition sine qua non of a successful “work” of art. And this is because it is only wasting time that both makes possible the artistic experience of time, and subsequently allows the necessary work of intelligence, of art or of phenomenological research, fully to reveal the truth of that experience. The view of wasted time as the source of artistic imagination runs counter to traditional interpretations of Proust that take memory – crucial to the recovery of time lost, but not necessarily wasted – and in particular involuntary memory (epitomized by the famous madeleine episode) as the key to the novel. Such interpretations bring together the Recherche with Henri Bergson’s theory of remembrance, delineated in his book Matter and Memory (Matière et mémoire),4 and seem to motivate the older English title of the novel, with its emphasis on memory rather than (wasted) time. They are of course justified by Proust’s familiarity with Bergson and with his theory of memory, and we do not maintain that they are incorrect; but they must be situated within the framework of the experience of wasted time. It is Gilles Deleuze who has argued most forcefully for the importance of wasted time to artistic creation in Proust’s novel.5 In his view, the novel deals fundamentally with learning how to interpret signs: an “apprenticeship to signs,” rather than the work of memory, involuntary or otherwise. He emphasizes the distinction between lost and wasted time – le temps perdu and le temps qu’on perd.6 The experience of wasted time is what allows the apprenticeship to signs to proceed, and allows for the possibility of eventually attaining the truth of lost time, itself fully accessible through art alone. Indeed, we learn not by assimilating content but by reading signs and thus, one might say, by wasting time, since involvement in the seemingly inconsequential activity of worldly life, or superficial love, provides a necessary focus on the “form” of signs rather than their “content” or consequences. Thus the significance of wasted time belongs to the system of the apprenticeship to signs, in other words, to the whole structure of enculturation, art being merely the most eminent manifestation of this process. Does this mean that the artist’s wasting of time is a well-integrated part of a totalizing ideological system? Not entirely; for a literary work of art is not only a cultural product, but also an experiment in which the smooth workings of apprenticeship are interrupted and questioned. Indeed, wasting time can be made productive only to a degree, and only in relationship to a final product. But the work of art might not correspond to any such model of completion, and

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as such can itself become a waste that challenges the ideological system. Proust’s novel is a fine example of such a challenge; its fragmentary character manifests its resistance to any completion or totalization as an oeuvre, and thus its resistance to any recuperation of art or time into a system governed solely by notions of efficient production. I c’est au XIXe siècle que se poursuit une double élaboration: celle d’un concept physico-scientifique de Travail et celle d’un concept social-économique de force de travail out de travail abstrait Imposer le modèle-Travail à toute activité, traduire tout acte en travail possible ou virtuel, discipliner l’action libre, ou bien (ce qui revient au même) rejeter celle-ci du côté du “loisir,” qui n’existe que par référence au travail. Deleuze and Guattari, Mille Plateaux 7

But what in fact do we mean when we speak of “wasting time”?8 We seem to imply that our time could have been productive but was not, through some fault of our own, or of whomever has “wasted” it. Wasted time in this sense is necessarily a relational term, only meaningful in contrast with a productive, purpose-directed activity, that is, in respect to some notion of work. What notion of work one has, what it is that is “not getting done,” is thus crucial here; one must bear in mind a difference made explicit in French: that between work in the sense of travail, labor, and work in the sense of the “work of art,” the oeuvre, the thing created. The artist’s work (travail) is to bring about the work (oeuvre) of art; but the two cannot be collapsed without distinction, particularly if the oeuvre may in fact demand just the opposite of travail to be accomplished, and the oeuvre itself may not correspond to the requirements of the ordinary results of productive work. This does not mean, however, that the two kinds of work have not often been conflated in the Western tradition of literary theory. In Ian Watt’s wellknown analysis, the novel, at the moment when it is first constituted as a genre, is associated – at times almost exclusively – with one or the other extreme of a work-leisure binary that seems to exclude art entirely.9 Watt links the rise of the “reading public” that would become the novel’s audience in early 18th-century England with an increase in the availability of leisure time for more and more people – a change often viewed as dangerous and morally suspect (Watt quotes a religious writer who deplores “all the painful and dismal consequences of lost and wasted time” [p. 45]). At the same

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time, he describes the success of the novel as increasingly governed by the laws of the marketplace, leading to concern on the part of some writers that literature is being turned into a commodity and the writer into a “worker,” whose job is to write quickly and plentifully, preserving the unedited details of life.10 What is missing from this account is a sense of the novel as a work of art, as something other than mere unmediated transcription: the literary work is transformed into one more product for consumption in a binary division between writer-as-laborer/producer and reader-as-leisured-consumer, inscribed within a historical context governed by the twin powers of ascetic Protestantism and industrial capitalism. Both insist on the strict delimitation of the two categories and place a high premium on work rather than leisure; the latter, outside of strictly regulated limits, is seen as a danger to the system’s telos (whether salvation or the accumulation of capital). In this context, wasted time cannot be thought otherwise than in a (negative) relation to work, which becomes the unavoidable governing concept of any activity. The most thorough analysis of this inclusion of work within the allencompassing techno-scientific complex is that of Heidegger in his essay “The Question Concerning Technology.” The result of this process is expressed in his notion of Gestell or Enframing. In Heidegger’s lecture-course on Hölderlin’s “The Ister,” the very notion of reality, Wirklichkeit, appears to be a function of “actual effectiveness”: “The actuality of what is actual consists in its actually effecting, that is, in its actual effectiveness, which is to say, in its performance, in its function” (Die Wirklichkeit des Wirklichen besteht in seinem Wirken, d.h. in der Wirksamkeit, d.h. in der Leistung, d.h. in der Funktion).11 In this system, the very essence of beings or entities depends on – is a function of – their capacity for performing or receiving work, their capacity for taking part in a productive process. “Function,” derived from the Latin fungere, to accomplish or perform, is essentially just another word for an expenditure of energy that minimizes waste. It should be noted that the notion of labor in this system is restricted to the use of mechanical energy; but it has consequences for human activity more generally. The notion of labor as a specifically physical concept has, according to Heidegger, marked the notion of human work since the 19th century, measured precisely by its performativity, its prevention of waste. It is significant that Heidegger opposes this view of the labor-dominated techno-scientific system of Gestell to the one produced by the poetization of human dwelling in his analysis of Hölderlin’s river hymns. His analysis suggests that it is perhaps only through art as a creative, foundational poetizing that the work/waste binary can be dismantled, and that time spent outside of work can be understood in


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a different sense than the one imposed by 19th-century sociology, economics, and religion. Lyotard’s reflections on art are also explicitly centered on the experience of time, especially on the sublime resistance to the (apparent) flow of time in the civilization of rapid technological development. Modern artistic experiments do not exclude the “wasted” time of pause and reflection. The remembrance of things past in Proust is, for Lyotard, the foremost example of the excess of time over the identity of consciousness, one of the aspects of what he calls the modern nostalgic form of the aesthetic of the sublime. Wasting time is the explicit condition of successful reflection on time, and of the recovery of what might have been lost to the civilization of progress and development with its illusion of “saving” time.

II When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste William Shakespeare, Sonnet 30

Can the relationship between wasted time and the work of art be understood outside of the context of the Protestant work ethic and the modern, industrial notions of work and productivity that derive from it, outside of the techno-scientific system of Gestell or Enframing, outside of the imperatives of economic development and progress? Does the word “waste” itself contain the potential for another meaning that transcends this system? In fact, this word need not have, and did not always have, the single connotation that tends to predominate in our age. In Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30, for instance, “my dear time’s waste” is not time that could better have been spent doing something else; it is simply time that has gone by and cannot be recovered – “waste” is here closer to the sense of the French perte de temps, in which wasted time and lost time are in a way two facets of the same experience. In the melancholy sense of the sonnet, one loses all of one’s time, productive or otherwise – all time becomes, sooner or later, “wasted time.” But eventually, it is perhaps an aspect of the notion of “waste” that is not immediately related to the notion of time that can bring us closest to the meaning of Proust’s wasted time. This meaning is conveyed in expressions such as “waste land,” or the now-obsolete “waste words” and “waste pages,”

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in all of which “waste” means unused, useless, or superfluous, without necessarily carrying with it any negative connotation. “Waste land,” for instance, originally refers to land that is “uncultivated and uninhabited or sparsely inhabited” (OED). This notion of waste is still, it is true, only possible in contrast with a sense of human appropriation and production, defined by what it is not (in this case, land that is not used for any purpose). There is a distinction to be made, though, since there is no sense here that the land could or should have been used; indeed, “waste land” often means land that cannot be cultivated or inhabited. It is rather something perpetually prior to use, entirely other to use, a place that resists the technological attempt to make everything functional or productive. Moreover, the noun waste can also mean a “profusion, lavish abundance of something.” Here too, waste is no longer defined merely as negation; it is abundance, but an abundance of something other, outside of the field of production. A grammatical problem with this understanding of “waste” is that there seems to be a radical shift when one moves from the adjectival and nominal forms of the word to the verb “to waste.” This latter never involves something that is simply unused; it means only, in various ways, to make useless what could have been or once was useful: to ravage and destroy a town, to wear out or spoil a thing, to consume or spend (time or money) uselessly, to no purpose, idly and unprofitably. In other words, as soon as waste becomes an action rather than a state, it must be negative and destructive, since waste is, by definition, the opposite of production, that place or moment in which no action takes place, unless it is in the form of undoing, not poi¯esis, not building or creating, but ruin, unworking, decay. It is in terms of this wider range of meanings for “waste” that we must consider Proust’s text, which seems to call into question the rule of the work/leisure binary over wasted time, and (as Watt’s analysis would suggest) over the genre of the novel; indeed, the Recherche radically resists any ideological attempt to recuperate the genre – precisely through the notion of wasted time, considered in all the range of its possibilities. Watt makes a sharp distinction between pre-Renaissance literature’s temporal conventions, linked to a (Platonic) notion of timelessness, and a post-Renaissance – “novelistic” – view of time as ever-changing and historical, linked to an increased literary interest in “minute-by-minute and day-to-day temporal setting” (p. 23). Yet, although we do find in Proust a radicalized interest in the details of everyday life, we also find there a return to that notion of the timeless, of that which exists outside of time, as something that can only be accessed by the “creative” waste of time that leads to the (un)work(ing) of art.


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III Et je compris que tous ces matériaux de l’oeuvre littéraire étaient venus à moi, dans les plaisirs frivoles, dans la paresse, dans la tendresse, dans la douleur Proust, Le temps retrouvé 12

In Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Proust, there is a basic distinction between lost time and wasted time (le temps perdu and le temps qu’on perd), as well as between time recovered and time regained (le temps qu’on retrouve and le temps retrouvé), each of the four types of time being associated with a particular kind of sign. Wasted time is related primarily to worldliness, that is, to the social events Marcel attends.13 Indeed, the narrator and his parents frequently lament the fact that he is wasting his time visiting salons or attending parties instead of sitting down and writing. Yet, in the last volume of the book, it becomes obvious that no artistic awareness of the world could have been achieved without all those years spent unproductively. As Deleuze argues, however frivolous they might appear, his experiences of wasting time are in fact crucial to Marcel’s artistic development insofar as they permit him to learn how to read, and perhaps, we might add, to emit, signs: “there are certain truths of this wasted time [il y a des vérités de ce temps qu’on perd]” (21), “when we think we are wasting our time we are often pursuing an obscure apprenticeship until the final revelation of a truth of ‘lost time’ [ quand nous croyons perdre notre temps nous poursuivons souvent un apprentissage obscur, jusqu’à la révélation finale d’une vérité du temps qu’on perd]” (22). The truth of wasted time would thus be a quintessential manifestation of the al¯etheic principle of art (tekhn¯e) that in Heidegger’s view is set in sharp contrast to the productive principle of technology (tekhn¯e), the separation of these two aspects of tekhn¯e being, in his view, the principle characteristic of the modern age of technology. Considering the question of how Octave, who was always last in his class at school and only interested in games and fashion, might have become a great painter, Proust’s narrator finds himself unable to explain the mystery satisfactorily, and declares that, whatever explanation might be found, he was “no less struck to think that perhaps the most extraordinary masterpieces of our day have come not from the official competitions, from a model academic education à la de Broglie, but from the frequentation of paddocks and of the great bars and cafés.”14 No amount of diligent work will guarantee the production of a masterpiece, but not only that; time “wasted” on frivolities may be, in a certain sense, the most rigorous artistic “training” of all. Much

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later Marcel will note that, in his own case, it was idleness that “preserved [him] from the dangers of facility” (la paresse m’avait protégé contre la facilité) (525, 349); such idleness is in fact what allows the artist’s full “apprenticeship” to proceed. This reading seems to be borne out by a crucial scene in the final volume of the Recherche, in which the narrator, on his way to a party hosted by the Princesse de Guermantes, at last comes to understand the relationship between his work as an artist and (what he thought was) wasted time. He has arrived for the party despairing over his inability to write and assuming that, because of this, frittering away his time with the “frivolous pleasures” of the party won’t matter: there is no reason, he thinks, to deprive himself of “the pleasures of social life if the famous ‘work’ which for so long [he has] been hoping every day to start the next day, is something [he is] not, or [is] no longer, made for.”15 But in a famous scene of revelation, stepping out of his carriage, he trips on the paving-stones and is transported back to his time in Venice, in a moment parallel to the madeleine episode early in the book. His discouragement replaced by happiness, Marcel, still not understanding his reaction to the unforeseen event, is ushered into the library, where he has two similar experiences: the sound of a teaspoon, which evokes an earlier experience in a train, and his perusal of François le Champi, which recalls an early reading scene with his mother. Seeing a connection between all these experiences, he tries “to extract the lesson which they might be made to yield” (de dégager l’enseignement que je devais en tirer) (Time Regained, p. 259; Recherche, p. 869). This phenomenon is traditionally understood as part of the process of remembering something that happened long ago, in other words in a psychological way. But in fact, as Proust emphasizes, the world that appears in this moment, and that will give rise to artistic creation, is not the world of the historical past. It is rather an ideal, absolute past of artistic creation, the process of which begins at this moment. The narrator realizes that, trying to interpret the sensations he receives involuntarily, to “think what [he] had merely felt” (de penser ce que j’avais senti) is perhaps nothing other than “the creation of a work of art” (qu’était-ce autre chose que faire une oeuvre d’art?) (Time Regained, p. 273; Recherche, p. 879). Thus, what these sensations allow, what will lead to the work of art, is the experience of the timeless essence of things. In general, it is important for Marcel to step outside of the ordinary flow of time, to be “liberated from the contingencies of time” (pour les soustraire aux contingences du temps) which he associates with the “daily preoccupations” that conceal real life and, again and again, with the damaging effects of habit. It is only in those moments of leisure when the narrator accidentally is made to recall something – the


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madeleine, the paving stones – that he is able to step outside of time and thus experience it artistically. In this view, the major themes of the novel, love and worldliness, appear not as historical or cultural categories, but rather as poetic categories. Marcel comes eventually to realize that all those moments that had been wasted and irremediably lost were nevertheless not wasted from the artistic point of view since they led to the recovery of time: the materials for his art had come to him precisely “in frivolous pleasures, in indolence, in tenderness, in unhappiness ” Indeed, when one is busy, one is not receptive to sensuous signs; the only time open to their reception is time that is wasted for purposeful activity. As David Gross argues in a recent book, it is precisely because these sensations “stand outside the realm of utility, [that] they are able to evoke a swarm of long-forgotten and literally useless memories”; the “insights” one gains by the examination of these sensations’ effects “are fundamentally impractical by their very nature.”16 Gross is perhaps not altogether justified in bringing this properly artistic phenomenon within the realm of the unconscious. Such an approach might suggest a determinist and mechanical rather than a creative view of the artistic process. But he is right to emphasize the crucial role of the frivolity of the sensations Marcel experiences for the artistic process. The Princesse de Guermantes’ party is an example of how important “frivolous pleasures” can be, since it is this quintessentially frivolous pleasure that has allowed Marcel to realize the importance of the whole category of frivolous but artistically stimulating experiences: “a fashionable gathering, my return to society, had provided me with that point of departure for a new life which I had been unable to find in solitude.”17 It is in such moments of idleness that he seems most likely to have the kinds of chance sensations whose occurrence he cannot control or predict; the “fortuitous and inevitable fashion” in which he encounters them guarantees their “authenticity” and allows them to act on his imagination in a way that well-planned experiments could not. IV Ce travail qu’avaient fait notre amour-propre, notre passion, notre esprit d’imitation, notre intelligence abstraite, nos habitudes, c’est ce travail que l’art défera. Marcel Proust, Le temps retrouvé 18

What kind of poetics might emerge from this consideration of the “effectivity” of chance and wasted time? Insofar as Marcel must wait for chance to bestow

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its gifts on him, there is some suggestion here of the Platonic or Romantic view of the artist; there is presumably no travail there, just the divinely inspired creation of the oeuvre. But after Marcel has gathered the necessary information by experiencing the wasting of time, one might have the impression that he has to “get down to work” to transform it into art: it is only the preparation for artistic creation, one might say, that is dependent on “inspiration”; the creation itself is labor or production, even if wasted time is newly discovered as beneficial to this production. Would this mean that wasted time is not really wasted after all? If wasted time turns out to be necessary to the creation of the work of art, then surely it is in fact productive time; yet wasted time is by definition that time which has no use, and it should not be possible to recuperate it by any “reconsideration” of its value. We might note that Proust’s narrator insists upon the difference between the impressions he receives accidentally and the kind of conscious notetaking and sketch-making a painter might perform. Within the schema of the Recherche, impressions voluntarily called up, sought out, and catalogued are ineffectual; only involuntary memories and involuntary sense-impressions allow for a transformation into the work of art. At the moment he is wasting time, then, it really is wasted, insofar as it is not directed, ahead of time, toward any purpose. Marcel’s frivolous experiences, in the “world” or in love affairs, for example, do not become less superficial because they provide him with the raw materials for his art; indeed, it is only in their superficiality, their uselessness, that they can later be useful to him. In this view, wasted time is non-productive, necessarily so, and in that very way, might prove beneficial; but there is no guarantee that it will. When Marcel decides that he might as well waste his time attending parties since “[he] possessed the proof that [he] was useless,” he is, then, in a certain sense, correct. He is “useless” insofar as every artist, all art, is useless, insofar as it can never be integrated into the productive process. But this uselessness, the time he wastes, the time he cannot help but waste, is precisely what allows him to experience time. How should we, then, think the relationship between waste and productive growth? How can something fundamentally non-productive be beneficial to production? – For is this not how we are still thinking of the work of art, as the artist’s product, the result of his labor? It is this notion that still needs to be interrogated, through a return to the notion of waste as other to work, destructive of work, waste as désoeuvrement or unworking – Maurice Blanchot’s and Jean-Luc Nancy’s term for the “work” of art, which is, in this view, not a work at all in the usual sense. For we should not be too hasty, perhaps, to associate the artist with an oeuvre produced by travail, artist as artisan, laborer, technician or creator.


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In Maurice Blanchot’s understanding, for example, the artist is idle, ineffective, useless – indeed, inactivity and passivity are required by the work of art itself, insofar as it is, by its very nature, perpetually unfinished, more “unworking” than work. Ann Smock, in her “Translator’s Introduction” to Blanchot’s The Space of Literature, notes that the book consistently links “literature’s purest and most authentic grandeur with just such expressions as ‘wasted time.’ It presents the literary work as that which permits no approach other than wasted steps [ ].”19 In this view, the writer is not a laborer at all, but rather, as Blanchot puts it, “the inert idler upon whom art does not depend” (l’inerte dont l’art ne dépend pas) (Space p. 24, L’espace p. 16); torn between daily life and the “essential solitude” of writing, s/he “doesn’t want to waste time” (il ne veut pas perdre le temps), yet is no longer able to live in the ordinary world of “action,” “common tasks,” “an occupation,” “unreflecting habit” (Space pp. 29–30, L’espace p. 25). Blanchot, drawing on Mallarmé’s distinction between ordinary and poetic language, notes that ordinary language is meant to be useful, something that “acts, labors, constructs” (Space p. 40). It gives us the habitual (one might think of Proust’s narrator and his distrust of habit) disguised as the immediate. Poetic language, essential language, is the opposite; here, words destroy themselves as they make a thing arise, they “accomplish eternally by destroying themselves there endlessly” (ils accomplissent éternellement en s’y détruisant sans fin) (Space p. 43, L’espace p. 45). Thus, the moment in which the poem completes its poetic work is also the moment in which it dissolves. For Blanchot, the work of art, “neither finished nor unfinished” (p. 22), does not fit into the ordinary, productive process of completion: “instantly done, [it] is instantly undone” (p. 45). This makes the work impossible, since it depends upon a process that will always destroy the work in advance and always restores there what Blanchot calls a “vain superabundance of unworking” (la surabondance vaine du désoeuvrement) (Space p. 46 [translation modified], L’espace p. 48) – a notion which brings us back to that strange “extra” meaning of “waste,” waste as excess. There is a waste of waste here, an excess of unworking.20 In Proust, the narrator has had his whole life to write, and yet, “instead of working [he] had lived a life of idleness, of pleasures and distractions, of ill health and cosseting and eccentricities,” so that in the final pages of the book, he finds himself beginning his work “almost at the point of death,”21 and becomes preoccupied by the thought that he might not live long enough to accomplish it. The vastness of the project he has set for himself suggests a cathedral built over the course of generations: there are parts of a long book, like parts of a great cathedral, he says, that “will no doubt never be completed”

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but must “remain unfinished” (Time Regained, p. 508). Then he corrects himself, in modesty; the book will not be like a cathedral, he says, but merely like a dress (je bâtirais mon libre, je n’ose pas dire ambitieusement comme une cathédrale, mais tout simplement comme une robe) (Time Regained, p. 509; Recherche, p. 1033); and he thinks of his old servant Françoise, patching up her sewing as he glues together the scraps of his own writing. Yet this comparison too must be adjusted; Françoise despairs over pieces of his written pages that have been torn away and lost, but the narrator suggests, obliquely, that his “work” is not constructed as an organic whole that would suffer from the loss of one of its constituent parts. The book he is writing is composed of many different impressions of people, places, works of art, dinners and parties; it not cathedral or dress but – somewhat improbably – like Françoise’s boeuf à la mode, in which all the different pieces of meat have jelled into a single sauce; or, we might also say, like a patchwork quilt to which pieces may continually be added,22 the combined effect of which is not produced by their orderly arrangement within the structure of a closed and finished work. Deleuze writes that when the narrator compares his writing to a cathedral and a gown, “it is not to identify himself with a Logos as a splendid totality but, on the contrary, to emphasize his right to incompletion, to seams and patches” (161). This work is not an organic whole awaiting completion; it is, as the narrator says about its progress during his illness, “perpetually in process of becoming” (en perpétuel devenir) (Time Regained, p. 522; Recherche, p. 1041). And of course, this notion is emphasized by the fact that the narrator’s book is not finished at the end of Proust’s book; indeed, it is barely begun, its future still in doubt. Yet if the frivolity with which he has filled his life has acted again and again to interrupt his work, if even at the end of the book this work is interrupted once more by his sudden, mysterious illness, this, too, may be fundamental to the view of art that emerges here. In Jean-Luc Nancy’s view, interruption is not just fundamental to the work of art, it is the work of art, art’s own work or, rather, unworking: literature manifestly interrupts myth, the habitual view of the world, and at the same time the writer interrupts his own speech. This interruptive speech inaugurates community, a perpetual inauguration that is, itself, never finished, always beginning precisely because it consists in interruption and thus must continually begin again. In this view, the myth of the writer itself – that is, the myth of the writer as creator, producer, worker – is also interrupted.23 In the Recherche, the narrator’s and his parents’ constant complaints about his wasting of time function as precisely such a perpetually inaugural interruption, since each time the complaint is followed by a firm decision to initiate


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the “real,” productive process of writing, which apparently functions well – until the next interruption. In a sense, wasted time can only reveal itself as a disappointment.24 There must be a tension between the desire to produce a work and the inability to do so. Otherwise, wasting time would become just another artistic technique, a method that would eventually be put to work. But the time wasted by the narrator has not prevented the completion of his work; that work cannot be completed, insofar as it is constituted by interruption, by unworking, by waste itself. University of Wisconsin-Madison

NOTES 1

“One wastes one’s time searching for lost time.” Jean-François Lyotard, L’Inhumain (Paris: Galilee, 1988), p. 11; English translation by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, The Inhuman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). 2 For both the revised version of the Moncrieff and Kilmartin translation and the new Penguin translation – Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, 6 vols., trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, rev. D.J. Enright (New York: Random House, 1992); In Search of Lost Time, 6 vols., ed. Christopher Prendergast (New York: Penguin, 2002). 3 Bertrand Russell, “In Praise of Idleness,” in In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays (London: Routledge, 1994). 4 Henri Bergson, Matière et memoire (Paris: Alcan, 1906); Matter and Memory, trans. N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1990). 5 Gilles Deleuze, Proust et les signes, 3rd rev. ed. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2003); Proust and Signs: The Complete Text, trans. Richard Howard (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 6 The ambiguity of the French at times seems to present difficulties for Deleuze’s translator. 7 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille Plateaux: Capitalisme et Schizophrénie (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1980), p. 611; “During the nineteenth century a two-fold elaboration was undertaken: of a physicoscientific concept of Work and of a socioeconomic concept of laborpower or abstract labor Impose the Work-model upon every activity, translate every act into possible or virtual work, discipline free action, or else (which amounts to the same thing) relegate it to “leisure,” which exists only by reference to work” – A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 490. 8 Paradoxically, given the difficulties of translating perdre le temps, it may be only through the particular constellation of meanings attached to the English word “waste” that we can begin to understand what is truly at stake in Proust. The problem of translation becomes here not a difficulty to overcome, but a significant part of thinking through the questions of time and the work of art. 9 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957).

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So Defoe: booksellers as “Master Manufacturers or Employers,” writers as “workmen employed by the said Master Manufacturers”; Goldsmith: “writing is converted to a mechanic trade”; etc. (pp. 53–54). 11 Martin Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymne “Der Ister,” Gesamtausgabe 53 (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1984), p. 49; English translation by William McNeill and Julia Davis, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister” (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 41. 12 Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu, 3. vols., ed. Pierre Clarac and André Ferré (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), vol. 3, p. 899; “And I understood that all these materials for a work of literature were simply my past life; I understood that they had come to me, in frivolous pleasures, in indolence, in tenderness, in unhappiness ” – Time Regained, trans. Andreas Mayor & Terence Kilmartin, rev. D.J. Enright (New York: Random House, 1993), p. 304. 13 “ the worldly signs, especially the worldly signs are the signs of a ‘lost’ time, of time wasted [les signes mondaines sont les signes d’un temps “perdu.” Ce sont les signes d’un temps qu’on perd.]. For it is not reasonable to go into the world, to be in love with mediocre women, nor even to make so many efforts in front of a hawthorn tree. It would be better to frequent profound people, and, above all, to work. The hero of the Search often expresses his disappointment and that of his parents over his incapacity to work, to undertake the literary work he announces” – Deleuze, Proust et les signes, p. 30; Proust and Signs, p. 21. 14 “ je ne fus pas moins frappé de penser que les chefs-d’oeuvre peut-être les plus extraordinaires de notre époque sont sortis non du Concours général, d’une éducation modèle, académique, à la Broglie, mais de la fréquentation des ‘pesages’ et des grands bars” – Recherche, vol. III, p. 607. 15 Time Regained, p. 240; “Ce n’est vraiment pas la peine de me priver de mener la vie de l’homme du monde, m’étais-je dit, puisque le fameux ‘travail’ auquel depuis si longtemps j’espère chaque jour me mettre le lendemain, je ne suis pas, ou plus, fait pour lui” – Recherche vol. III, p. 856. 16 David Gross, Lost Time: On Remembering and Forgetting in Late Modern Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), pp. 48–49. 17 Time Regained, p. 332; “ une réunion mondaine, le retour dans la société, n’eussent fourni ce point de départ vers une vie nouvelle que je n’avais pas su trouver dans la solitude” – Recherche vol. III, p. 918. 18 Recherche, vol. III, p. 896; Time Regained, p. 300 – “Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs.” 19 Maurice Blanchot, L’espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955); The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), p. 3. 20 When Georges Poulet writes that “aussi beaucoup plus radicalement encore que Proust, Maurice Blanchot apparaît-il comme l’homme du ‘temps perdu,”’ he has in mind precisely this particular conception of the work of art and of the artistic process. 21 Time Regained, p. 521; “ au lieu de travailler j’avais vécu dans la paresse, dans la dissipation des plaisirs, dans la maladie, les soins, les manies, et j’entreprenais mon ouvrage à la veille de mourir” – Recherche vol. III, p. 1041. 22 Cf. Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of the patchwork as “smooth space,” with its “infinite, successive additions of fabric” (ses ajouts de tissu successifs infinis) an “amorphous collection of juxtaposed pieces that can be joined together in an infinite number of ways” (une collection



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amorphe de morceaux juxtaposés, dont le raccordement peut se faire d’une infinite de manières) – Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 476–77; Mille Plateaux, pp. 594–95. 23 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 68–69. 24 Cf. Deleuze, Proust and Signs, p. 34 ff.

DAVID DOYLE

INDEXICALITIES OF IMAGE, TEXT AND TIME

In this paper, I review some of the synergies between phenomenology, photography and the wider realm of social theory before concluding that (a) photography has and has had a critical role in permitting us to deindexicalize the buzzing, droning Armageddon that modern life is said to be becoming and, (b) that insofar as there is text and image, photography is a literary form: i.e., there is a special literature called photography which has a distinctive relationship to time and to temporality. TIME, NOSTALGIA AND THE PHOTOGRAPH

For all the struggles of philosophers to separate the emotions from the rational or intelligent segment of human life; to set up barricades between the ontological, the epistemological and the metaphysical, life is a mess. That is to say life in a melting pot of cultures flirting with ‘globalization’ is a mess because, for one reason, inter-generational times do not mesh. The anthropological wonder of photography was that it provided for the first time – since Man or Woman looked at their reflection in still water – the possibility that objects from other times could be preserved ‘whole’ for later reflective study. Other artistic endeavors from sketches on bark to portrait oils never provided the true-to-like facsimile of the two-dimensional original. Intimations of control are here linked with objectivity so that we have powerful forces which collude unconsciously to promote a sense of power in troubled Man whose uncertainties crave power, immediate power over the relevant parts of his environment. The ability to fashion, model and depict one’s enemies, and also one’s friends (including the Gods), has long been a simple mechanism to allay fears of inferiority. Failure to persist through time is always linked with the imperfections of man’s existence, both at the individual and cultural level. Temporal dimensions of that failure go all the way back to one’s sense that the clothes in that style shot in Vogue have (just) lost their fashionable status 327 A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana LXXXVI, 327–353. © 2007 Springer.

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through to Heidegger’s preoccupation with the death urge or instinct, seeing fulfilment in death. Is it coincidental that at the end of a century which saw the rise, in academic debates, of ever regressive indeterminism, of de-construction, of relativity, so we find developments in photography which commonly allow photographic representations to be morphed, instantly, continuously and without limit? If methodological critiques question our ability to define any political goal, any religious ethic, or scientific paradigm, what are we to think? Once one ‘believed’ with conviction and solidarity that such-and-such an institution or institutionalized practices were warranted [by who wasn’t always known]. Can the instantaneous rendition of reality provide security albeit at one stage removed? For example, all the apparent certainties of a man’s life suddenly shake when depicted in the fine details of large format, silver gelatin portraits and are transmogrified into the image which will thereafter be associated with the name of the sitter. Even before computer-generated transformation was possible, prophetic photographers by lens-managing and other tricks and artful dodges managed to cast doubts on the authenticity of the photographic image. These devices have been commonly used in photography since its earliest invention. By the late 1880s burning in and masking and double negative plates, to name but a few techniques, were part of the average darkroom. But they were trade secrets; they did form perhaps part of the public mind concerning photography: like so many philosophers, the common man needs his ‘givens’. The repute of the photograph as the emblem of truth has thus diminished since awareness spread in the general public of the ways in which ‘nontruthful’ technology can be used to advance the cause of evil, of mis-truth. The photograph has been used commercially as a cosmetic device to improve appearance and enhance face and figure. In this century, cheap digital cameras have allowed the ordinary visage to appear beautiful. Ordinary people have thus been permitted to enter, virtually, into the backrooms of the old-time shamans in Main Street photographic salons. The macro lens and modern creams and colours have extended Egyptian burial decoration to living models and those who can do it acquire vicariously their occult powers. The occult may only be a deviation from the 50mm/35mm lens which our eyes have as their accustomed field of vision, but it is experienced differently in the wideangled doming assault of modern ‘reality’ pressing ever closer to our visual senses as its distortions provide the freedoms given by other possible world we viewers can internalize. But that very democratization has had the other effect of evaporating the rarity creating the mysterious perfection of these same powers, as so


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frequently happens in matters of fashion where the epitome of the art lies in its exclusiveness, an instantiation of Simmel’s principle of the secret. A mystique has gone. Even beyond the simple grasping thrust whereby the picture captures its subject, there are deeper dimensions to the conquest of the photographic subject. Far from being a dead inscription on some light sensitive inorganic material the digital photograph is an image which changes with every change in the surrounding environment to which it cannot react. The change derives from our inability to see the photo independent of what we always bring to our observation of any reflective scene, all those taken-for-granted, common sense assumptions first drew Husserl’s attention, and later Garfinkel’s. We bring our background, our expectations, our disappointments and our desires to the front stalls of the image. Today the image becomes the most common method by which we measure passing time. It is in the photograph, and the television ‘still’ in news broadcasts and celebrity shows that the past most commonly presents itself. In days where the recovery of ‘unconscious memory’ is notoriously fought over in court cases, in fact, each of our memories fights for accuracy, for completeness, for existence with that assertion of time past we find in front of us the photograph image. To the extent that literature will be used as a means of re-integrating the traumatized victim into social life when their sense of time passing no longer enables them to sequence sense impressions. Manufacturers of digital printers offer in their most common products life spans, archival durations, of their prints which exceed the human life span by a factor of three. The adherence to originality in the photograph, that limited truth, is thus so much less finite. Yet the expressive potentiality of photography, its capacity to represent, to stand for the inarticulate who merely presses a button is still a component of the tension between text and vision; between message and image. Our memories compete in vain against the binary records of the computer memory, adding a smell or sense impression perhaps to the congeries of visual stimuli, if there are others who are present to smell, or shiver, or react to energy fields. For the most part the email reader will use his or her imagination to supplant the viewed image. Like the primitive truth of the evanescent still-lake mirror, the photograph too mirrors our changed life in how we understand the time past in the image thus observed. The very indicia of verisimilitude, those photographic canons of focus, correct exposure and composition, so well capture the era in the postures, the attitudes, the fashions of the subject that it can but age, or alternatively, lose its strangeness in remaining the image it was.

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Those sociological characteristics, of course, are viewed through ocular lens which are aging physiologically, connected to minds which are approaching (however slowly or imperceptibly) a time when issues lose focus, merge into final concerns, or forget the images themselves. Forgetting, it must not be forgotten, is that simple measure of epistemological common-sense where the importance of the memory is vectored against the chronological time passing since its creation, the living relevances, and then ‘forgotten’. One result is that photography is oddly disappointing to its critics. Susan Sontag is one such critic who bemoaned the way in which photographs subverted objectivity, memory and flaunted their non-partisanship. Ironically, opinionated persons are fond of alleging that photography is incapable of art. Why is this so? Ignoring the debate over artistic essence or not, the artistic pretensions of many photographers and their models may emerge as much from their media as the sculptor’s stone or hammer is a challenge and also the essence of three-dimensional representation. One old chestnut is the often unspoken belief that photography lacks the range of emotional expression for true art to be created, as if this were an inherent limitation of two-dimensional representation which lacks at least two other dimensions of true art. Implicit in this illicit criticism is the sense that all photography is prey to nostalgia. Nostalgia has existed before photography and would continue to be felt were photography to become impossible. But there is a truth in the apprehension. While Byom in The Future of Nostalgia skips brilliantly over the field, her consensus remains that nostalgic feelings are sentimental. Which is to say that the emotions evoked by photographs, as by nostalgic writing, are second grade, inferior somehow to grander passions. But this is not merely an aesthetic preference for elegance or distinction or style. At a more profound level we are content that nostalgia is always fake. Change which creates nostalgia is real and one cannot go back as Heraclitus saw. In recognizing nostalgic ‘feelings’ we are at the same time aware that the object or subject of those feelings is no longer ‘with us’, that these ‘feeling’ are ersatz emotions which would not have been felt in the face of the real subject or object because the reality of a fully contexted confrontation would have substituted a less indulgent appreciation of the subject. And it is true, no matter how “real”, how ‘kitchen sink’ photographic images are, they must always remain significantly two-dimensional depictions of three dimensional objects, objects which affect our intelligence and our senses in quality and quantity.


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We can no more relate to black and white images of the Oklahoman panhandle during a Great Depression dust storm than we can to the coachman who drove a set of Constable’s draught horses to a ford. A crowd scene captured on film is unlike what a crowd scene can be where an artist re-creates the two dimensional scene so that it approximates more closely the object as it is, or could be perceived by the naked eye. The issues of foreshortening and projection, of entirely manipulated perspective, are not related to the limitation of commonly available lens-ing equipment alone, but the differing sources of the focus-sing in each case. The painter can determine how the object will appear, the photographer can only meliorate the subject (but of course this phrasing of the epistemological song begs many questions, like the tacit assumption that art is superior to a photograph). There is a sense where the scene over-rides the photographic reference as recorded in the caption or the description of the photograph. For every shot, even bad ones, a likelihood exists that in a relatively short time, those aspects of the scene which were not important to the photographer will come into their own importance because they exist in their own right, independent of the artistic motive. While most medieval historians would find their access to those times – in paintings, sketches, drawings and other two-dimensional renderings of scenes of their time – the autonomous value of the photographic image is arguably more resistant to loss. Yet in turn, that leads us to see that after photography our vision of those times is forever keyed to the common visual representations that survive each period. To the romance of the poet and author of antiquity, we now add the possibility of authorship about topics of renown to many more people. Where every photographer is potentially a recorder of history, a man of letters, what price the measure of quality: Does quantity matter? At what critical mass do ‘many more people’ create the possibility of, or frustrate the existence of, items previously known or unknown, as the case may be? Society since the digital photograph will be retrievable to a much larger class than the limited enclave of the published historian, (who may himself have been reduced to a talking head usher in a different theatre). All talk of the collective unconscious, or of myth, re-centres itself in the precipitation of the caption in front of the image. This captioning process is a rarefied literature marked not by its musicality, its pausation, pulsation or power in the ear generally, but by the distilling process which captures the image for intelligent transmission. Of course, the addition of text, the captioning process, can be oral (as in most television “voiceovers”). Jung writes of his provisional interpretation of the interviews with patients upon which he based his theory of instincts:

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multiplicity and order; duality; the opposition of light and dark; the upper and lower, right and left; the union of two in a third; the quaternity (the square, cross); rotation (circle, sphere) and finally, the centring process and a radial arrangement that normally followed some quaternary system. (Nature of the Psyche, p. 213)

As with the shared circumscription of a lens of certain focal length, it is composition which sets photographs alive, and gives the specific image its share of timelessness. THE MUSEUM EFFECT IN REVERSE

The diffusion of ‘art’ through galleries open to the public and dependent on general taxation for their upkeep goes hand-in-hand with economic progress, of subsistence-plus livelihoods. It has thus created the institutionalisation of the keepers of the art, and the galleries and museums that house these artefacts. So far there is little such phenomena with respect to photographs. The photograph lacks the inherent exclusivity of rarity which attaches to concert performances, and limited reproductive technologies such as lithography and etching. Even celebrated photographs can be viewed most satisfactorily in the mass media in the way no other art form can. Where dimensions are at the whim of the reproducer or publisher of photography, the uniqueness of the traditional objêt d’art is absent. Where once the museums can be said to influence the way in which art is appreciated, the same is not true for photography unless one says that the elite media attack and devour the best photography and to that extent democratization is delayed. Is photography art’s democratization itself: cf. Bourdieu? No! The single photograph is never valuable enough to sustain a series of galleries in large metropolitan centres displaying hung works of photography. Nor, generally, are photographs able to be produced so cheaply that the prodigious outpouring of the photographer can be made available on any scale in supermarkets. Besides, photography has other uses: news, and for re-collection in other forms of literature, including technical manuals and collections of family snaps taken by members of that family. The nostalgia commences as soon as the news is no longer news, after the divorce, or the de-commissioning of the plant. Once the family has grown up or passed on there remains a world of existence once-upon-a-time (to which we can virtually return to live). Inherent in all photographs which are not mere records, is the trusted immediacy of the felt emotion of apprehended memory loss. Why are there periodic fashions in nostalgia? Does the importance of nostalgia relate directly to the speed of perceived change in the relevant peer


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group, and if so, are there aspects of cultural life which more urgently demand the re-integrative processes of nostalgia? To what extent is the aesthetic preference for black and white photography a preference for valuing the old, the past, for conserving tradition, for aligning oneself with generations of un-met ancestors? Perhaps it is no more than an indication that the more we remove the particulars, like colours, from the image, the more the image can be generalized as to more times, more places. More fictional licence is part of the permission granted by an image of this nature. There always was, in every artificially black and white image, a fantastical deception of reality. The ‘glamour’ of black and white photography is a function of the reduction of the real image by omitting direct colour codings and their referents, and forms an implicit key to the non-realist romances of early stills in Hollywood movies. But in so being, Time within the photograph is revealed as a multi-referential creature in which the machine tools themselves type, structure and form the image in the beholder quite as well as any new additions to Photoshops’ filter selection. It may be that there is an effective distortion of photographic art by its assemblage in books of photographs, which in preserving access to the image take over the gallery’s role in maintaining access to the work over time. The book is to the gallery what the photograph is to the oil painting. Walter Benjamin found photography distinct in its proneness to just this mechanical re-production. But mechanical re-production does nothing to dissipate the uniqueness, the timeless nature of that which is reproduced. Perhaps this characteristic made photography non-collectible for Benjamin because, unlike his books there are too many editions, and the first edition is rarely the most remarkable. In its book form the literature of photography is displayed: fictional, shocking, moving and seductive. And in many public shopping centres the photographic literature is equal in size and display to the literature of the novel, once one excludes detective fiction. But not just in shopping malls is the vitality of the visual in everyday matched in philosophic thought since the early decades of the last century. CONFUSED OVER WHEN PHENOMENOLOGICAL REFLECTION SHOULD BEGIN?

Few philosophers have taken the broadest interchange with photography as the level of design, as well as concept, as Baudrillard, who has published photographic literature as well as philosophic literature to do with visual recording.

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In the phenomenological tradition since Husserl there has been a continuous dialectic between the signified and the signifier. Both are inherently visual approaches to the study of meaning and communication. There is no corresponding level of analysis over the English channel or across the Atlantic. Is it a question of level-of-analysis and nothing more? The ordinary language, logic-chopping thinkers in the Anglo-American tradition by contrast do not talk of ‘intention’ or dally with anything subjective, or purely self-referential (Anscombe is something of an exception here, and Findlay). Logical positivism discarded the merely transitory, individual or personal in favour of allegedly externalize-able study objects. Preferably, nouns of which apparently specific, identifiable, discontinuous, discriminable items may be predicated. Mental blindfolds are required for us post-modernists to comprehend the way in which ordinary language philosophers once did their ‘descriptive’ (cf. prescriptive) sociology’; H.L.A Hart’s, The Concept of Law, London: Clarendon Press: 1961 was a fine example. Much of the innate appeal of Baudrillard’s oeuvre in English derives from the topics he chooses to address, his powerful analytic on everyday puzzles. Astonishment, amaze, disgust, fury and frustration are the mark of his later works, but those works weave unsurely from the sublime to the ridiculous, from metaphor to cheap political message. His universe is not that of the narrowly-focussed ‘macro’ philosopher from Oxford: there are Nietschean insights, Adorno-like posturing at the banal and the evil. Yet overwhelmingly one understands that it is a search for meaning which forces the argument on every page. The Marx of the German Ideology in style and substance finds reflection in Baudrillard’s ruminations: in every reference to the production of seduction, for example. Anglo-saxon philosophy has eschewed philosophical topics such as will and intention by comparison, opting against individual souls in favour of intense study of statistical aggregates such as logical, social or linguistic rules. The scholastic tradition may yet form a bridge between these two factions. There is a solace in the ancient, ever-recurring, every-regressing, scholastic distinctions between form and substance, between material and formal parts; between actuality and potentiality, between intentional and objective aspects of meaning-units and layers of presented objects and nominal word meanings such as states of affairs. Solemnized in the recognition that only a further catalogue of ontic typologies can distinguish adequately between the levels or expression of Being which entities possess or relate to, an intellectual quietude prevails.


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Ingarden’s fluency in the vocabulary of all parts of the scholastic language-game meant he was less effected by the tendency for any rule system to distinguish beyond instrumental need. Scholasticism since Aquinas had become encyclopaedic, rule-bound in the sense of category-governed, screaming out for just such therapy as de-constructionism, in its various breeds, supplied. Falk discusses Ingarden’s approach to delineating the aesthetic domain in this way: A real (and also an ideal) object has existential independence; i.e, it does require for its subsistence (continuing existence) the existence of any other object. It may, if my consciousness is directed toward it, become the target of my act of consciousness; in this case the independent object becomes “also intentional”. An heteronomous purely intentional object, on the other hand, does depend on an act of consciousness for its existence (for its coming into being) and its subsistence. All objects, be they purely intentional or independent, are originally intentional if they are direct targets of our intentional acts and thus confront our acts of meaning. If, the other hand, we mean an object indirectly through the intermediary of meaning-units, we say that such a target is a derived purely intentional object. (Falk, p. 37)

The universes in which this bifurcated analytic have tension or reaction have clear correspondences in our analysis of the aesthetic of the photograph. Adopting Falk’s discussion of Ingarden, we (and Baudrillard) can agree that there is an interactive relation between the subject and object in an aesthetic experience: From the moment of our initial surprise and during our preoccupation with our experience of the affective quality we are undergoing a brief psychological transformation (provided, at all times, that we are receptive) which modifies our perception long enough for us to bridge the gap between naïve practicality and aesthetic insight. Because our intuition fills our now-phase, we feel separated from past and anticipated temporal connections, we “neutralize” the object, in which the affective quality has appeared, to such an extent that we become indifferent to what that object is and to whether it is real or only a semblance. (Falk, p. 164)

For Baudrillard this perfusion or immersion in the image or the world is such that the medium becomes the message as he adopts McLuhan and finds the absence of the [true] world in the fabrication of a [false] world which has no existence outside of the pseudo-excitation made on our senses. Where at the beginning of the twentieth century, Ingarden is looking at the in-formation of the observer, from the opposite perspective, at the end of the century, Baudrillard speculates: We need a term which would be to culture what ‘Aesthetics’ (in the sense of an industrialized aesthetic, a functional rationalization of form, a game of signs) is to beauty as a symbolic system. We have no word to designate this functionalized material of messages, texts, images, classical masterpieces or comic strips, this codified ‘creativity’ and ‘receptivity’ which have replaced

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inspiration and sensibility, this planned collective labour on significations and communication, this ‘industrial culturality’ haunted by cultures of every description and from every epoch, which, at the risk of total misunderstanding, for want of a better word, we continue to call ‘culture’ – forever dreaming, in this hyperfunctionalist cultural consumption, of the universal, of the myths enabling our epoch to be deciphered without being at the same time mythological overproductions, and of an art enabling modernity to be deciphered without causing it to disappear. (Baudrillard, Revenge of the Crystal, p. 74)

Eugene Falk continues describing linkages between Husserl, Bergson and Ingarden: Husserl’s term seiende zeit, inner time, designating what Bergson called ‘the time of inner life’ has to be understood as distinct from our concrete subjective time in the empirical world, because that inner time is immanent in the stream of consciousness. (p. 84) Lived continuity, is what, according to Bergson, duration essentially is. It is the experienced fluidity of the transitions by which our memory prolongs the before into what is now transitions which constitute our experience of duration itself without regard to the temporal extension of any intentional object or of any passing state of occurrence. This inner time, this lived time, cannot be measured, and the points in time, or phases of time are, again according to Husserl, mere abstractions and cannot be separated from the continuum of our experience, from our sense of continuity. (p. 83)

Heidegger’s great performance was to keep juggling enough of language in the air to make of immanence – by the majesty of language and everyday life – a transcendence of Being: an ontological canopy to entwine and enchant the mundane from its roots in mere existence to a place in the cosmos of Dasein. For most writers, the resort to transcendence indicates their preference for deduction over induction or abduction. Absent the facts required, so often regretted, entities proliferate, theorizing reigns supreme. A transcendental prophet like Sorokin finds the ground of sweeping nominalist abstraction less discomforting than does the seer who sees all power and conviction to be grounded in this or that context (itself infinitely regressive). Let us agree for the moment that as humans our intellects are part and parcel of the weltanschauung in which we have endured. Our emotional development cannot but make us more receptive to received wisdom we experience than to some of those parts of the general cultural norms with which one has never had a personal relationship. John Gedo in his autobigraphy Spleen and Nostalgia (Jason Aronson Inc., NJ, 1997) affords us empirical data on the production of what is taken to be knowledge for that era: in Gedo’s case, formally “membershipped” North American psychiatric professionals. One cannot but compare the careers and writings of Gedo and Victor Frankel to see how dichotomous are the preference systems, which, at very primitive


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levels, in time-lags and recovered desuetude, persist. Jung was right about the ontological status of myth and the reduction in data those simplifications wrought, albeit with constant, but limited, success. For some, it is the grandiloquence, the comprehensive pre-emption of the possibility of their being an answer to their ideological completeness which provides the emotional security they long for: see, George Steiner Nostalgia for the Absolute. For others, they see their own greatness in the paucity and minimalism of the horizons about them. Pre-figuring one’s propensity to believe in great systems or, with Vermeer or Barthes, in massive conquests of miniscule moments, lies the muscle of myth and culture. Teilhard de Chardin, in learning to talk of the whole world as if it had no lesser divisions, through thirty years’ isolation in China unable to speak Mandarin, came to be able to treat the onion as if it had only one skin, or as if all the skins were alike. His language has a modernity of phrase and theoretical ambition that few who wrote in the fifties or even the nineties could be said to enjoy. His later writing finds the world a universe and proceeds from a level of abstraction which sets up testable hypotheses for those social scientific concepts which are in fact universal. If one of the characteristics of post-colonial, post-soviet, post-modern living is that we all now all appear adrift on global sea of non-absolutism, so be it. This is the point at which Baudrillard arrives in Impossible Exchange. The apparent innocence shown off by rigorous logical positivism starts to dissimulate when thrown against a global curtain. All manner of ethnomethodological ‘takenfor-granteds’ now become mere possible universes whose immanence is as contingent as any previous transcendental world may have been thought to be. Concealed beneath the total linguistic formulae, or cultural clichés or normative statuses in the sociological jargon of the post-war epoch, the teleological structure of each semantic element of the language becomes visible and this, in turn, furnishes the background to a current image of society which daily becomes less provincial, less possessed, less visible. As the roles of the modern multi-cultural citizen of the universe multiply and diverge, so the ethical realm of unconscious ideals and short term goals recedes away from individual actors and their personal power positions. In proportion, the intimate relations of these unique actors diminishes. Without external relations of power, whether of knowledge or influence or physical force, our other relationships attenuate or wither. At least until a new equilibrium establishes itself in the cultural domain; until the children of the conquered re-assert a normal embeddedness in their society. Globalization, or the powerlessness of everybody, bears a paradoxical relation with intimacy and the possibility of lived integrity or truth, while both

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bear upon consistency and perceived adherence to objective, enduring values or priorities. In one way the ordinary everyday world is ironically exalted and given primordial significance in the work, for example of Ferdinand Braudel, or Lefebvre or Alfred Schutz or in yet another sense, in MerleauPonty. The bodily interactivity with which Man enters into exchanges with his environment is altered, because the world is everywhere a strange place with itinerant strangers, frei-arbeiters, to the left and right, and in vertical dimensions. At the same time, there is the incommeasurability of the fragmented scientific research establishments which continue about their own rebarbative specialities. Can it be wondered that in the cool, cosmopolitan style of Baudrillard is hidden a village child? Can all that be captured in a photograph without there being visible the caste-making intrusion of a world vision which sees the future as progress and the past as a matter of salvage amongst the regret?

INDEXICALITY

Writing in Volume 4 of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1967) Richard Gale commences his contribution in the following way: Demostratives, pronouns and tenses have often been grouped together under a single label, such as “indexical signs”, “egocentric particulars” pr “token-reflexive words”. This article will consider what is involved in these classifications and will then go on to show what philosophical importance they have What is there about demonstratives, pronouns and tenses that warrant their being subsumed under a common label? It is because what they denote is relative to the speaker; to know the referent to “I”, “now”, “here” and “you”, we must know who utters the word, and when, where and to whom he utters it. Thus knowledge of the speaker and his context is essential in determining the referent of such words. (p. 151)

The article concludes that the philosophical importance of indexicals lies in what they can contribute to the development of a context-free, ideal language. Although indexicality as a concept rated only a three page entry in this 2000 page work in 1967, its philosophical importance for language and metaphysics goes considerably further. Today there is widespread interest in the concept amongst both philosophers and cinema and film critics. While there is little sign yet that these two different bodies of intellectuals are aware of each other, except that both parties often acknowledge Pierce as their source, that position is sure to change over the coming years.


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Neither the philosophers of language who wish indexicals will play a role, in setting parameters for their studies, nor the critics who have been inspired by translations of Andre Bazin Qu’est-ce que le cinema?, have the same ontological interests as Bazin. The majority of contemporary writers still see indexicality as a shorthand for ‘other-referring’ connections embedded in the character or the direction or the production of a movie, or as a problem standing in the way of certain predication in (English) language. Bazin himself thought the role of photography was to wrest art from its slavery to mere representation, and, somewhat paradoxically, saw in the photograph the objectivity which surpassed all previous attempts at faithful objectivity in the representational arts. At a meta-theoretical level, both of these groups in a practical have little awareness that each of their own sentences’ indexicality (and more !) must be resolved before communication can take place. That most concepts, including the postulated ‘standard English speaker’, are ineluctably elusive, ambiguous and prone to unreliability, seems not to have been sensed by either of these opposite cultural groups. But there are notable exceptions. Once one realizes that indexicality is an attribute of every word in a language to a greater or lesser degree and not merely that of three parts of speech – the pronouns, the demonstratives (‘this’, ‘that’) and tenses – then it must be equally clear that context is the most rule-governed, context-dependent word in the sentence: “Thus knowledge of the speaker and his context is essential in determining the referent for such words.” To re-state this proposition, all words depend for their meaning on the meaning they have for the speaker(s) and hearers (the context). This position does not commit one to propose that only private languages exist, but is inconsistent with any belief in the notion that each word in a language has some universal, objectively, and temporally-independent exclusive referent. A fortiori, one might say after structuralism and deconstructionism have done their work. There may be differences in the extent to which, as a matter of fact, words are worked upon so that they are constrained, but this is a difference in degree rather than a more trenchant distinction. The phenomenological thrust in sociological study is away from the descriptive study of élites towards the understanding of the role of élites in facilitating the dynamism of the whole organism: more abstraction, less personalization; less history, more system. Thus we are pre-disposed to discover what is universal in the human condition by our very distance (as we perceive it) from the world – an isomorphic adoption of the selflessness component of objectivity. What is now called “globalization” is the occasion

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for our self-understanding of human society to move ever more slightly away from those non-universal phenomena whose accidental familiarity to us skewed social analysis away from what would have the path most true for the many. In so doing it (this indeterminate choice of knowledge source) is the occasion of a further paradox. The most common situation in all languages, as a statistical figure of the indexical in language, is in intimate contexts where the pronouns or the tensing are almost self-explanatory. In short, indexicals are the language of love. Some languages permit recognition circles of this intimacy criterion of the indexical in their treatment of the pronoun ‘you’. Yet it is here argued that the language of globalization is also the language of the indexical parts of speech. Perhaps that is the reason for the absence in literature of our generation of persuasive accounts of intimacy. Since Mann and Kafka yes, but also in Berger and Coetzee, the only intimacy sought is one which is time independent: where the intimacy is only claimed for a brief period in two people’s lives. Recall Heidegger’s discussion of a difference in the ability of some words to be sensitive to the contingency of other words in the language. If they are to achieve goals for the greater sequences of which they form part, the clause, the sentence, the chapter, the novel, culture, at least some words must contain their own teleologies, and not all of those will be demonstratives or performatives. Heidegger wrote: In Dasein there is undeniably a constant ‘lack of totality’ which finds itself an end with death. This “not-yet” ‘belongs’ to Dasein as long as it is; this is how things stand phenomenally. Is this to be interpreted as still outstanding? Outstanding, as a way of being missing, is grounded upon a belonging-to. For instance, the remainder yet to be received when a debt is due to be balanced off, is still outstanding. That which is still outstanding is not yet at one’s disposal. When the ‘debt’ gets paid, that which is still outstanding gets liquidated; this signifies that money ‘comes in’ or, in other words, that the remainder comes successively along. By this procedure the ‘not-yet’ gets filled, as it were, until the sum that is owed is “all together”. Therefore to be still outstanding means that what belongs together is not yet altogether. Ontologically, this implies the unreadiness-to-hand of those portions which have yet to be contributed. (Being and Time, 286: footnotes omitted)

Can one doubt that if this linguistic, epistemic and ontological project upon which Heidegger has embarked were to be carried through for every word, phrase, simile, metaphor and irony then we could imagine, if not handle, what it was for the whole of language to be said to be indexical. There is an over-arching, non-phonemic, non-semantic indexicality which is not limited to pronomial usuage, but extends more radically to the contextual use of every noun, adjective and phrase in the language system.


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All of which brings us back to the photograph. The technology and technique of photography is not only instrumental in expanding the universe for everyone in it, it is also part of the way in which that expansion is maintained. Only the visual image can supply enough cues so quickly that indexical questions can be answered swiftly enough for conversation (communication) to occur. The visual image is today critical to supporting the moral realm in which we are at once responsible to all future generations, the inheritors of past generations and beset by providing for the now. The speed and simplicity of the visual image is part of what makes for that possibility. It is thus important that we improve our familiarity with what conditions the image, what influence text has on the image, and the ways in which the iconographic potentialities of the graphic are but indexicality writ large. Where the image can merge and scan that which is not describable, because its dependence on context is either so overpowering or ultimately irrelevant to the meaning of the communication being attempted, then the image is part and parcel of the dynamic equilibrium we perform involved in controlling the ecstasy of communication. ‘Now’ for Heidegger sixty years ago was already a babel-ground: Correspondingly, the future as ecstatically understood-the dateable and significant ‘then’-does not coincide with the ordinary conception of the ‘future’ in the sense of a pure “now” which has not yet come along but is only coming along. And the concept of the past in the sense of the pure “now” which has passed away, is just as far from coinciding with the ecstatical “having-been” – the dateable and significant ‘on a former occasion’. The “now” is not pregnant with the “not-yet-now”, but the Present arises from the future in the primordial ecstatical unity of the temporalizing of temporality. (Being and Time, 479)

The proximate vice of the photograph is that it will be perverted to revere the past which never existed. The image can to transcend the limits of reality in its representations. This will lead to heighten the asymmetricality of nostalgia, will foster sentimental over the realistic. If the photograph is reified to the point where it is seen to have ethical significance in itself without reference to the hand and mind which unifies the image, and which reconciles it to its necessary text, it will have added to ambiguity, mistake and distortion. It will have become to those too hassled by the speed, anxiety and alienation of the global village yet another false signpost on the road to inauthenticity. When all is said and done, the photograph does not presuppose, or predispose the future no matter how few nanoseconds are required to catch the image on disk, the photograph is of the past, and that past which it can reach,

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if time becomes the photograph, is forever an un-reachable epoch subject to all the limitations of contexts lost to future light. EPISTEMOLOGY AND GLOBALIZATION

There is such a strong relationship between what we know – and our views of legitimate ways of reaching that knowledge – that the logical priorities in which knowledge we acquire first can be lost. If it be the same person for whom the experience is occurring, it is much more likely that the knowledge of the object and subject will be acquired before we acquire a sophisticated epistemology. Indeed, the way the world is, many of the knowledge producers in our culture would never have come to grips with the problems with which Husserl, Ingarden and Bergson grappled, nor with the methodological issues pursued by Alfred Schutz, or Karl Jaspers or Karl Popper. And, as a matter of practice, that does not affect the status usually accorded our typical, reified scientist, or technocrat or educationalist. What we take for granted in our ideas in accounting for Truth is implicit in successive instantiations of our total culture however. It is the cultural inheritance arbitrated upon by gate-keeper institutions (the professions, the educational and training systems and the dispute resolution mechanisms of our societies) which effectively, and irrevocably, provide us each with an inarticulate, unconscious methodology for what each part of our life will require to be treated as warrantably true. The persistence of society, in some recognizable identity with itself, is a phenomenon to be explored. Controversies of knowledge creation, the extent to which knowledge is socially constructed and therefore the extent to which it can remove itself from bitter clashes over undisclosed, concealed value systems and hidden agendas, have become ever more pronounced. After Derrida and Lacan the fault lines of the Mannheim/Scheler debate have, if anything, moved apart. What we take for granted, what operating system runs the specific programs of our life, will always require cautious skepticism to determine, since these questions may beg their answers, while the answers impinge on the way the questions come to be understood. The interactivity of the social milieu is neither more nor less than that which faces biological science routinely. The universalization of institutional practices, along with swift communication, travel and earth-orbiting, produces in turn new ways of abstracting from our personal space. Marc Auge’s non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity, considers the ramifications of how spatial terms as ‘place’ may have expanded; nevertheless the same may be said of our topic, time qua dimension as life-expectancies in all cultures lengthens.


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One cannot assume any common acceptance of ‘modern civilization’ for Braudel or Foucault, let alone for the scholars of the universe who do not speak French, for whom the precise course of Gallic argumentation of the last sixty years may not have all that much relevance. The majority of the world’s people live in India and China and it will be many years before that position changes in geo-political terms. And more, the essence of any culture, if that it be, is its capacity to reproduce itself; to be re-invigorated even in the midst of its ostensible destruction. The Red Guards may have been the modern Chinese equivalent of the Huns of Rome, but neither have had the success both demographic movements originally sought. Barthes and Baudrillard’s interest in the fashion industry-for-ideas tells us that there are critical masses formed by sociological and technological circumstances which pre-dispose one to spend more time thinking on some topics rather than others. And those priorities change with globalization. Psychologists and others, of course, vary in their broad attitudes to the replicable study of skill and knowledge acquisition. There are schools which hold that a fundamental awareness of how our external environment differs from our selves may be less important than an awareness of commonality; perhaps neither similarity nor difference has ontic or epistemic priority. As the everyday worlds of the global middle classes become increasingly more similar, so the relative differences in those political, military or ideological milieu in which that everyday is situated, also shrink. Nevertheless the level of our analysis of society has no more ontological priority for theory than it should for the biological scientist whose own specialism is engaged in rapidly evolving complex ethical issues related, for example, to tissue culture and what tissue is cultured, for what purpose (issues which will surely write Man’s future history). There have always been those whose account of Man’s history went beyond the town and countryside of one State or sovereign entity, and there are academic fashions too in the extent to which the world or some lesser territory, or cultural tryptych, is acclaimed as the critical level: thus Macaulay, Marx/Lenin, Spengler, Huxley, Sorokin, Foucault, Teilhard de Chardin for example (without discussing the provinciality of the internal content of a vast range of other philosophical standpoints). The contemporary fascination with what all the citizens of all those former empires have in common is not new, and will not last. Yet arguably it constitutes the problematic for today’s thinkers. The proposition being advanced here says that while the content of knowledge may be objective and remain replicable and/or equivalent, the choice of what knowledge content to acquire first will be significantly affected by factors external to that choice. More broadly, there is a sense in which we

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use the word ‘indexical’ to describe the nature of the relation between what is referred: i.e., one can only comprehend an indexical expression if one knows much more about the context in which the sentence is heard or read. The psycho/social/linguistic underpinning of the indexical utterance is compatible with an understanding that our ability to put into words the subject or object is somehow or in someway limited or restricted: ‘You know him, whatshisname ?’ This psycho/social/linguistic underpinning has a matching linguistic structure whereby the grammar of the language informs us – as we understand the expressions used – that the subject matter (as it were), is not well-known to the sentence. Realizing how indexicality has been understood by different writers shows how this aspect of language is exceptionally important in allowing cognitive change to occur without destroying its own context. For the larger thrust of the argument here as it relates to this paper’s topic, I should go on to say that as what we take for granted to be actual physical limits of our universe expands, so (perhaps temporarily), our personal, detailed, knowledge of the average subject or object in the world declines. A situation similar to that psychological underpinning referred to above may occur. Whole continents and countries and the largest of associations are brought into the mind’s focus first of all as ‘us’ and ‘them’. One must hear the phraseology and tonings in Heidegger’s strictures: Dasein’s projection of itself understandingly is in each case already alongside a world that has been discovered. From this world it takes its possibilities, and it does so first in accordance with the way things have been interpreted by the “they”. This interpretation has already restricted the possible options of choice to what lies within the range of the familiar, the attainable, the respectable – that which is fitting and proper. This leveling off of Dasein’s possibilities to what is proximally at its everyday disposal also results in a dimming down of the possibilities as such. The average everydayness of concern becomes blind to its possibilities, and tranquillizes itself with that which is merely ‘actual’. (Being and Time, Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1973, 239)

Again it must be expected that the larger the crowd (the more people in our universe), the greater the possibility of feeling lonelier, where lonely means apart from others; cf. Reisman’s The Lonely Crowd. The dimensions of the effect of this paradox may be better seen if we return to an earlier divergence: the nature of indexicality. THE RICH LITERATURE OF THE CAPTION

The ontological and metaphysical problematics of this early century are encapsulated in this convention’s theme: Literature and Temporality. The coalition between relativistic movements such as deconstructionism or Foucaultian


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history and those who believe that there is no existence beyond the senses, is a more dangerous alliance than we have seen before. There are those who say we cannot get beyond subjectivity because language and intention cannot be demonstrated objectively, are joined by epistemologists who hold that there is nothing out there deserving of such objectivity. Dimly Man’s drive for the meaning of life is lit by his limited comprehension with occasional help from his/her intuitive insight of the values of beauty and relevance. But Man’s finitude is also his splendor. On the outer galaxies of our ever-changing semantic and syntactic language, amid the fractal movement of the socio-cultural universes we each endure everyday, we peek at the under-pinning of the Being which phenomenology has long sought through such techniques as suspension of belief: of ‘bracketing’. ‘Bracketing’ is a term familiar to photographers as the skill of exposing film or digital media to lesser and larger temporalities. Bracketing has a somewhat different meaning for the photographer: it is a technique – largely pre-digital – for ensuring correct exposure by taking 3 or 5 slightly increased or decreased exposures of the one subject so as to ensure one of them will be optimally exposed. Photographers travel easily through multiple realities and universes of discourses adjusting focus, selectively bringing forward or blurring those foregrounds and backgrounds which do not advance the task-in-hand. Photographs are rarely comparable or compehensible – as the same image – without literal or figurative (contextual or oral) captions. Like advertising slogans, they are among the simplest forms of literary life. But photographs also bear an integral relation to time such that the time shown in a photograph is indistinguishable from the meaning of any photograph. Further the primordial time of the photograph is that of time past loved: any photograph is nostalgic until the last observer must regard it not subjectively as being part of him or her, but as a mere relic: a record visible but mute documentation of what once was. ‘Any’ photograph does not distinguish the many different purposes for which photographs are taken, the many who shoot those photographs and the genres into which many photos fall: Bourdieu’s analysis in 1965 probably needs re-assessment in this digital age. At the other end of the scale, the terms ‘literature’ and ‘temporality’ illustrate that our language is shot through with irredeemable indexicality. We must philosophize as if wading through swathes of silk if we are to hope to resolve the implicit questions and challenges in the theme literature and temporality. We might understand this riddle simply as literature as temporality. Or say the underlying issue for literature is time’s display; literature as a pre-eminent

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means of accessing time: caught in having been – as Victor Frankel describes – that part of Being of which we have the best grasp. So implicated is time in determining our metaphysical conception of reality, its analytic dimensions are kaleidoscopic. The disorder of images with which the modern world is confronted has expanded our everyday life way beyond the ever-present locale. We are now faced with the new context of existence. Finally we have a familiarity with what has been before, and not merely before here, but before everywhere after the invention of the camera. For now we have ‘seen’ it all before (in a photographic image). Memory is said to be the ability to recall times past accurately. Time which is passed is remembered. But the grammar of the language imposes itself reflexively on just these thoughts. For we remember events or series of events, or ‘memorable’ occasions rather than the abstraction, time. Good times betoken not intervals of passing, but connected selected items or processes which inevitably gain by comparison with just such a series as has succeeded them. Certainly we all know how partial, contrary and chancy memory can be, just as smokers lose most scent discrimination. It is never entirely clear whether inaccuracies in the initial perception or defects in the recall, or reticence in retrieving the memories accounts for the unreliability of memory. The exact mechanisms by which we remember are not well understood while habit, which is akin to memory, seems to have no past at all but an abiding presence. Our memories might be large-scale significant habits. The psychologists can distinguish long and short term memory sites and interpolate them with the analysis of brain states by surgeons and other researchers of trauma: see particularly, Transference and Trauma. (Ch. 12, The Metaphor of Play by Russell Meares). CURING INDEXICALITY

One speaks ironically in trying to ‘cure’ indexicality. There is no cure for immanence. Garfinkel was right to re-capture the verb to do and apply it to the repetitive acts constituting the simplest practices. You do indexicality curing, naturally, everyday – as for example in reading these lines. You do indexicality-curing better or worse, more or less, to the extent that you understand and are understood by your constituency, your audience, your significant Others. Thus it is plain that only time used as a theoretical divisor separates ordinary communication from the analysand of the grounds of that communication. The resolution of indexicality in all kinds of communication requires


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perpetual resolution – what Garfinkel calls the “accomplishment” and intent of normal, common sense, Husserlian background expectancies in light of the predecessors of those background expectancies. All forms of communication including ‘scientific’ information transfer have more-or-less-explicit sets of rule-governed accomplishments. This accomplishment is the same feature as its result: two sides of the one coin. To the extent that the accomplishment is not carried off, and to the extent that this failure is continued over a number of attempts, the expectancies may begin to imperceptibly change – but that involves other dimensions on the timescale and should not concern us here. Social scientists in the tradition of Goffman or F.G. Bailey have long depicted the myriad ways in which coping devices, role-playing, checking, twisting and recovery are accomplished. The description of these impression managements may use different, discrete vocabularies but these descriptions are no longer at the cutting edge of their discipline. For decades their intrinsic value has long been absorbed into the mainstream of thinking about how thinking about is thought about both by those doing the thinking and those thought about: so self-reflexitivity has existentialism for its outcome. Talcott Parson’s quandary is thus renewed and solved. Paralleling these analytic distinctions is that which deals with the analytic problem known as reification or misplaced concreteness. One must not make a slogan or find redemption in indexicality. George Kubler’s The Shape of Time might put it thus: Hence astronomers and historians have this in common: both are concerned with appearances noted in the present but occurring in the past. The analogies between stars and works of art can profitably be pursued. However fragmentary its condition, any work of art is actually a portion of arrested happening, or an emanation of past time. (p. 19)

From the individual’s perspective to non-perspective of social aggregates, authors have speculated whether there are collective memories and whether, and how, individuals share in those memories. With Carl Jung or Joseph Campbell we can speculate on the reasons why humans group fundamentally simple propositions into story-telling myths which are more readily recalled than the details which once gave rise to the myth or its amendment. But for this essay I want to concentrate on the similarities which may be deciphered in separate approaches in the social sciences to high level abstractions concerning human society. At the outset we (here) note that a sociology of the cliché, the proverb; the ordinary prejudices of ethnic sub-groups; the language game(s) of our tribe(s) and other reductions of the miasmic disorders requiring sorting by human intelligence, have never been carried out in the theoretical context

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which would provide meta-meanings from this research. Foucault’s method, if method it be, in social theorizing is simply to use other lenses to display objects from those commonly used. The eye-catching results discover new objects for our intelligence. In this way the tricks and effects of manipulating data to hypothezise certain conclusions are more common to photography than most philosophy. Foucault has had more institutional freedom to theorize as a diplomat turned historian than he would have had as a philosopher where he would be more strictly judged by the unity and homogeneity of his output. For all that, his social theories are none the worse. Foucault at his best, like Heidegger on another plane, was able to work comfortably with an idea of society more uniform and much more abstract than their contemporaries. Foucault’s discipline has much in common on the level-of-analysis with Heidegger’s notion of the ‘they’ (or the public) in Being and Time. In his analysis of Dasein, Heidegger also “overlooks” the labels applicable to nation-states, the limits of surburban milieux, in reaching out toward an analysis of items so universal as to avoid being culturally-bound in the conventional sense. Thus his analysis of the dynamics of anxiety, of idle talk and curiosity are capable of instantiation one would want to say in any place on the globe, notwithstanding that almost all “cultures” do not promote discussion of ‘the Dark Side’ of the Force which binds adherents or participants in fealty and secrecy to the end (one exaggerates a little). Foucault is by no means the sole philosopher who has broken new ground by changing the themes of what is discussed. A re-reading of Sorokin’s social and cultural dynamics can show us how far we have and how little pessimism can be justified. Herminio Martins, the Oxford theoretician, has shown in recent papers on the metaphysics of information and earlier papers in the history of science how technology at the broader level – and the machine at a more detailed level – have been additional factors which have reduced or allowed a homeostasis in the resolution of indexicality in our developed global system. We can say that cybernetics and the internet – key elements in the work of Barthes and later Baudrillard – are technologies which appear to have changed not merely the European stage (like the Caxton printing press), but to have globalized so many aspects of the institutional structures which make up modern civilization. The more abstract the less visual would seem a stolid and salient rule of thumb. But that dictum ignores the incredible compressions which are submerged in the visual image and comprehended at speeds beyond the fastest physical manifestations.


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The historicity of Heidegger is in part due to his unwillingness to show us the shoulders he had leant on in coming to his formulations of the ontological/existential puzzle. Doubtless his concept of the ‘they’ and his ruminations over Dasein owe a great deal to the mordant recriminations of Kierkegaard. But a sense of Time and History which originates in the European nation state of the nineteenth century is likely to play a dominant role in the global economy for many decades to come (until they are eclipsed in their partiality). In considering the role of time and social memory in this society we must examine the way in which information and theories are distributed within the members. We must ask: do centres/institutions for dissemination in society only preserve/publish nostalgic pictures of yesteryear? And if so, why is it so? The future can be image-ed (cf. imagined) but not photographed. The photograph, of all the genera of literature, delivers up its wealth instantly; an ephemeral but stable medium, swifter to appreciate than the pulsing poem. Nowhere is the (phenomenological) apperception of reflexivity between the external subject and the interiorized vision of the observer as quick and dramatic. The observer has so quickly interiorized the image that his/her biography is inextricably wrapped in the photo. Jung’s psyche – the unconscious – below reflexiveness, simply appropriates the image in the way other literature must achieve its response like a bricklayer’s wall, brick by mortared brick. Yet the photograph obtains the highest point on its trajectory of importance when its subject has vanished (died but remains within memory) and cannot be resurrected without artificiality of a very modern kind. Tongue-in-cheek I wrote above, “photography delivers up its wealth instantly”, but only in an instant, for an instant. On second glance at any valuable image one begins the textual paradox: are Baudrillard’s Cool Memories cool because they appear in neutral tones, or in the emotional, nostalgic black and white, or because there it implicit in photographic aides-memoires that the passion is spent; has been dried out and ‘perspectivized’ between shutter button and shuttered re-vision by the time intervening? Does the culture of the West fear passion after centuries of war? Collaterally: why is it that Barthes’ rhetoric of the image is developed in conjunction with his third meaning? How is my analysis here, of the re-constitutive, remedial action of the visual image on the indeterminacy of textual meaning, compatible with treating ‘photography’ as if it were limited to the single image? Why are there two kinds of photography: the still and the filmic? Remember Barthes:

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For written texts, unless they are very conventional, totally committed to logico-temporal order, reading time is free, for film, this is not so, since the image cannot go faster or slower without losing its perceptual figure. The still, by inserting a reading which is both instantaneous an vertical, scorns logical time (which is only an operational time); (Image Music Text, pp. 67–68)

Perhaps the truth is less sublime: overwhelmingly the resolution of the still image so much more closely approximates the ability of the cones in our eyes to detect fine discriminations that the two forms of photography, physiologically, are very far apart, and have totally different reception mechanisms in the psyche. The photograph, capturing memories which may have ‘escaped’ were it not for a documentary record, an emotion were it not for the photograph unrecalled, is calling into Being new entities from the unreachable past. Time’s becoming the photographic image is an attenuation of memory for technological ‘reasons’, the cheapness and availability of superior recording keeping systems. In turn, through the internet, Time may return unto its own simply by means of the greater dispersal of memories from less censored and certainly less formal sources. It may be the base from which newer visions of what is possible emerge. For photographic images of the past extend time ‘going forward’. Rodchenko’s icon of New [Socialist] Man has had reverberations beyond Russia and the thirties: has its strongest impacts in the next century. How grisly these handsome, masculine commanding vistas. These portals and high elevations, these vigorous emblems of the totalitarianism which failed. The University of New Mexico at Albuqueque recently held a large retrospective exhibition of his work. That ability of the image to transcend text, to represent itself to successive generations of observers naturally influences the relationship between Literature and Time is as striking as the sudden re-creation of forties and fifties soviet photography amid the deserts sands of New Mexico where the bomb was built. Leni Riefenstahl’s depiction of the Third Reich seems to show nervousness of the regime, or is it only the unforced confidence and apparent inclusiveness of Rodchencko’s graphic characters? A difference in the emotional stability of the photographers, or the underlying ethos of the whole regime? Helmut Newton grew up as a photographer in Australia but his work cannot be appreciated without understanding his family’s precise location in Hitler’s Germany. The photo alters the nature of temporality by contrast with that obtaining before the immediacy of the past image could affect the future: video tracks for music allow the young to re-design their world considerably quicker than readers of Swift or 1984.


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Husserl’s notion of the everyday common sense world is paradigmatic for a realm which is unchanging, in which historical cataclysms are absent, a world without time. For Merleau-Ponty there is the other possibility that time can subjectively transform itself. Every photograph worthy of remembrance shares to some degree in these words: In my present if I grasp it while it is still living and with all that it implies, there is an ek-stase toward the future and towards the past which reveals the dimensions of time as not conflicting but as inseparable: to be now is to be from always and forever. Subjectivity is not in time because it takes up or lives time and merges with the cohesion of a life.

Valuable to the extent that it allows us to see the rituals of remembrance at work in the world in which we live, the still images of reality are everywhere employed. Photography is cool in that it records humanity’s destitution for mercy and at the same time advertises Mammon. As powerful as the Gothenborg press for representing justice, still photography is at the same time a literature of dalliance and desire, of luscious blacks and burnished whites taken at decisive moments. Sydney, Australia SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY This essay was given as a shorter paper to the International Society of Phenomenology and Literature (an affiliate of the world phenomenology institute) Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA May 26, 2005 ([email protected]) Marc Auge (1995). non-places: introduction to the anthropology of the supermodern. London: Verso. Annalisa Baicchi (19xx). ‘Iconicity and Indexicality: A Perceptual Approach to Language’, AS/SA No 10-A1. Roland Barthes (1968). Writing Degree Zero. New York: Hill and Wang. Roland Barthes (1977). Image Music Text. London: Fontana Press. Roland Barthes (1975). The Pleasure of the Text. New York: Hill and Wang. Roland Barthes (1983). In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities. Semiotext(e). New York: Philosophy Hall. Columbia University. Roland Barthes (1993). Mythologies. London: Vintage Random House. Georges Bataille (1988). Inner Experience. Albany: State University of New York Press. Jean Baudrillard (1988). The Ecstasy of Communication. Semiotext(e). New York: Philosophy Hall. Columbia U. 1988 Jean Baudrillard (1990). Seduction. New York: St Martins Press. Jean Baudrillard (1987) Forget Foucault. Semiotext(e). New York: Philosophy Hall, Columbia University. Jean Baudrillard (1990). Cool Memories. London: Verso. Jean Baudrillard (1990). Revenge of the Crystal. Sydney: Plato Press Australia Ltd.

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Jean Baudrillard (1999). Photographies 1985–1998. Ostfiledern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz. Jean Baudrillard (2001). Impossible Exchange. London: Verso. Behlmer & Leventhal (eds) (2000). Singular Contiguities: Tradition, Nostalgia and Identity in Modern British Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Walter Benjamin (1977). Understanding Brecht. London: NLB. Van Den Boomen, Marianne (2005). ‘Indexicality: A matter of metaphors’, Conference paper, Bradford U.K. The Ethics and Politics of Idexicality and Virtuality, July (Utrecht Univ.). Pierre Bourdieu (1984). Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge Mass: Harvard College. Pierre Bourdieu (1990). Photography, A Middle Brow Art. Cambridge UK: Polity Press. Michael Brady, and Duncan Pritchard, (2005). ‘Epistemological contextualism: problems and prospects’. Philosophical Quarterly, 55 (219), pp. 161–171(11). Fernand Braudel (1977). Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism. Maryland: John Hopkins Unversity Press. Jane Corazza (2004). Reflecting the Mind; Indexicality and Quasi-Indexicality. Oxford: OUP. Alain Coulon (1995). Ethnomethodology. London: Sage Publications. Keith De Rose (2005). ‘The ordinary language basis for contextualism, and the new invariantism’. Philosophical Quarterly, 55 (219), pp. 172–198(27). David Doyle (1978). The Ethnomethodological corpus and its implications for sociological theory, unpublished D.Phil.thesis Oxford Univ. U.K. David Doyle (1982). ‘Everydayness in the thought of Martin Heidegger’. Paper given to Boston Forum on the Interdisciplinary Phenomenology of Man conference held under the auspices of the World Phenomenology Institute. David Doyle (1990). ‘The Justice of Mercy’. Analecta Husserliana Vol.31 (ed. A-T Tymienieska) The Hague: Kluwer. James Elkins (1998). The Object Stares Back: on the nature of seeing. Florida: Harvest Harcourt Brace. Eugene H. Falk (1981). The Poetics of Roman Ingarden. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Victor Frankel (1985). Man’s Search for Meaning. Boston: Washington Square Press. Harold Garfinkel (1967). Studies in Ethnomethodology. New Jersey: Prentice Hall. Worth Grace and Simmons (Eds.) Baudrillard West of the Dateline. Palmerston, N. NZ: Dunmore Press. Martin Heidegger (1973). Being and Time. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Martin Heidegger (1993). Nietzsche (vols 1 & 2). San Francisco: Harper Collins. Ben Highmore (2002). Everyday Life and Cultural Theory. London: Routledge. Laura Hinton (1999). The Perverse Gaze of Sympathy. New York: State University of New York Press. Edmund Husserl (1970). The Crisis in the European Sciences and in Transcendental Philosophy. Evanston, Ill. Northwestern Univ. Press. Roman Ingarden (1973). The Literary Work of Art Evanston Ill: Northwestern University Press. Carl G. Jung (1969). On the Nature of the Psyche. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Julia Kristeva (1980 ). Desire in Language. New York: Columbia University Press. George Kubler (1962). The Shape of Time. New Haven: Yale University Press. Janet Landman (1993). Regret: The Persistence of the Possible. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. Henri Lefèbvre (2004). Rhythmanalysis. London: Continuum. Donald N. Levine (1985). The Flight from Ambiguity. Chicago: Univ. Of Chicago Press.



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Herminio Martins (2001). “O corpo fast forward/the body fast forward”. Número Magazine pp. 34–47. (Bi-lingual Portugese/English.) Herminio Martins (2005). “The Metaphysic of Information”, RES-PUBLICA, 1 (1–2), pp.165–192. Russell Meares (2005). The Metaphor of Play. New York: Routledge. (3rd. Edn.) Maurice Merleau-Ponty, (2002). Phenomenology of Perception. New York: Routledge Classics. Kevin Mulligan and Barry Smith (1986). ‘A Husserlian Theory of Indexicality’. Grazer Philosophische Studien 28, pp. 133–63. Pitrim Sorokin (1962). Socio-Cultural Dynamics. New York: The Bedminster Press. (4 vols), Vol.1V, Ch. 7. Time Uniformities: synchronicity and temporal order in socio-cultural change. Susan Sontag (1978). On Photography. London: Penguin Books. Goran Sonesson (19xx). ‘Indexicality as Perceptual Mediation’, Indexicality. Papers from the third bi-annual meeting of the Swedish Society for Semiotic Studies, ed. Christiane Pankow, Gothenburg University. Barbara Maria Stafford (1999). Visual Analogy. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Katy Stevens (2005). ‘Vocal Indexicality in Buffy the Vampire Slayer’, Creative Commons licence. Allen S. Weiss (2002). Breathless. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press.

JERRE COLLINS

ACHIEVING A HUMAN TIME: WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM FAULKNER’S BENJY

Near the end of his investigation of time in Book 11 of the Confessions, Augustine laments: my life is a kind of distraction and dispersal. I have been spilled and scattered among times whose order I do not know; my thoughts, the innermost bowels of my soul, are torn apart with the crowding tumults of variety . (XI, 29:39)

Augustine might have been describing, avant la lettre, the quality of Benjy’s experience as portrayed in the first section of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. If we examine this section of Faulkner’s most famous novel, the section that is a tale told by the idiot Benjy, we find indications of the processes by which all of us attain a humanly meaningful time. And this discovery helps explain why the Benjy section of The Sound and the Fury is so powerful and moving for many readers. This first section of The Sound and the Fury verges on being a mimesis of pure phenomenal flow, a bracketing of all the constructions of “human” time, and thus an experience of time outside of all human meaning. Yet even in the brain-damaged Benjy’s experience we see traces of the full complex of human time, visible chiefly through his affective reactions, through the constellation of his memories around a few key experiences of loss, and also through a number of his actions which reveal at least a fitful and faulty attempt to mediate between time past and time present. To describe human time let us use a model of human temporality derived from the reflections of Augustine, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Paul Ricoeur.1 Using this model, we can say that “human time” is an ongoing project of constructing a meaningful time in the face of two kinds of meaningless time, one from within human consciousness and one from without. From “within” there is “duration” – the pure, unorganized flow of sensations and other mental events. From “without” there is a time that may be called at once cosmic and biological – on-going, irreversible, without resonance of human meaning.2 We might characterize cosmic time and duration as “the stars going by” and “Benjy watching the stars going by.”3 355 A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana LXXXVI, 355–365. © 2007 Springer.

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Over against these meaningless times, human time appears in the split of present attention or intention (Augustine’s privileged example of temporal experience is the intentional recitation of a psalm – Confessions XI, 28:38) into the present of the past (in memory), the present of the present (in attention), and the present of the future (in anticipation or expectation) (see Ricoeur, Time, pp. 20–21). This non-coincidence or split or splay of the present can be organized or configured in three characteristically different ways, three different “levels” or “kinds” or “poles” of temporal organization (something like the poles of an electromagnetic field): (1) mundane temporality, the time of ordinary “everyday” activity, configured by Care in the form of concerns or preoccupations; (2) radical temporality, the finite time of life in the face of death, configured by Care in the form of resoluteness (Heidegger’s “authentic time”); and (3) historicality (Geschichtlichkeit – Heidegger, Being, pp. 437–438), the time that mediates between the two, configured by Care in the form of repetition or fusion of horizons (see Ricoeur, “Human Experience”, pp. 19–20). In Faulkner’s novel, Benjy characteristically experiences movement through time as an unorganized flow of sensations and other mental events. For instance, early in the novel Benjy records a ride in a horse-drawn buggy through town and circling around the town square with its statue of a Confederate soldier: I could hear Queenie’s feet and the bright shapes went smooth and steady on both sides, the shadows of them flowing across Queenie’s back. They went on like the bright tops of wheels. Then those on one side stopped at the tall white post where the soldier was. But on the other side they went on smooth and steady, but a little slower. (p. 11)

In such temporal-spatial movement, the solid world approaches the condition of “fire,” whose bright on-going formlessness always captivates and soothes Benjy. Rarely is his experience quite as phenomenologically “pure.” Usually actions are perceived as activity, but without the names and concepts that “place” the actions and sequences within an interpretive context complete with finality–as in the opening scene, in which Benjy sees some men playing golf: Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the flag was . They took the flag out, and they were hitting. Then they put the flag back and they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit. Then they went on . (p. 3)

Here Benjy lacks the awareness of symbolic mediation or “cultural code” that would enable him to “read” this sequence as action, as a game of golf.

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He characteristically lives “below” the level of mundane temporality. At this infra-level time is registered as mere sequence, because the finality, intention, or convention that organizes activity into action is missing. Benjy lacks the understanding of “golf ” as a game that structures actions, and thus time, in a certain way. Even memory is included as part of the sheer temporal sequence. Benjy’s memories are triggered by “accidental” associations, as we see from the first sequence of memory-shifts (usually signaled in the conventions of this novel by a change from one font to another): “Wait a minute.” Luster said. “You snagged on that nail again. Cant you never crawl through here without snagging on that nail.” Caddy uncaught me and we crawled through … . Keep your hands in your pockets, Caddy said. Or they’ll get froze. You don’t want your hands froze on Christmas, do you. “It’s too cold out there.” Versh said. “You don’t want to go out doors.” (pp. 4–5)

The first shift is from the April present when Benjy is thirty-three to a December twenty-third of Benjy’s childhood, through the single association of Benjy’s getting snagged on a nail and someone unsnagging him (in the present the servant boy Luster, in the past Benjy’s sister Caddy, who also mentions the date – p. 7). The next shift, to an earlier point in the December twenty-third sequence, is prompted by the similarity of two different people talking about how cold it is (first Caddy and then another servant boy, Versh), and perhaps by the verbal similarity of the two phrases: “You don’t want .” Throughout the Benjy section the shifts are generally as arbitrary as these. In the conventions of this mimesis, Benjy’s consciousness is always a consciousness-of only one temporal strand at a time; in the extremely tight spot of his consciousness, there is no being on-stage without being centerstage. Sensation and “presentification” (Husserl’s term for recollection – Phenomenology, pp. 63–64) are equally vivid. Once a memory starts, it is experienced or run off (also Husserl’s term – pp. 48–50) with extreme vividness and fullness, displacing all present sensation. But Benjy’s memory is involuntary with a vengeance. An association within a memory may prompt another memory, and an association within that yet another, and so on, so that no running-off is ever completed in the sense that Benjy can perceive what is presentified as a “completed action” of any sort. (If we readers begin to perceive “completed actions” as we move through this section, it is only because we are making connections of the kind that Benjy does not and cannot make. And our perception of such completed actions is a large part of what makes this section “readable” for us.) Benjy’s time, then, even with memory, appears to be completely linear and without depth. His temporal condition is the paradoxical one of simultaneous

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complete flow and utter fragmentation. Benjy has no sense of continuity, or of discontinuity either. Thus it is that the literary technique of breaking up a chronological sequence into fragments and dispersing those fragments can serve as a mimesis of uninterrupted flow of consciousness, since the fragments are linked together by clear associations, but the associations are also clearly accidental or arbitrary. The Benjy section appears to paint a portrait of a consciousness completely lacking in configuratory power, entirely at the mercy of on-going “present attention” (Augustine’s phrase). But our analysis changes when we examine Benjy’s affective responses, particularly his bellowing and his crying. Why does Benjy cry? Sometimes it is because Luster teases him by manipulating his perceptions: Luster knocked the flowers over with his hand. I tried to pick up the flowers. Luster picked them up, and they went away. I began to cry. “Luster.” Dilsey said from the kitchen. The flowers came back. (pp. 54–55)

Here the sense of loss is brought about by change of perceptions within the compass of the “expansive now” or the “specious present,” a kind of broadened “now” that includes the “just now” and the “almost now.” It is Benjy’s “immediate memory” or “primary retention” (Husserl, 54) of the flowers that enables him to perceive their absence, and their perceived absence prompts his crying.4 However, Benjy’s distress is aroused in several ways that cannot be reduced to the specious present. When Benjy is caught up in a memory, sometimes he cries because the memory that he is running through (or that is running through him) contains a painful affect, so that he presentifies a previous instance of crying. But usually the affect does not “belong to” the memory. For example, early in his “day” Benjy, as we have seen, is recalling fragments of a Christmastime of his childhood. In one fragment he is going outside again with Caddy after they have just come inside, and his mother has just called him “my poor baby”: we stopped in the hall and Caddy knelt and put her arms around me and her cold bright face against mine. She smelled like trees. “You’re not a poor baby. Are you. You’ve got your Caddy. Haven’t you got your Caddy.” Cant you shut up that moaning and slobbering, Luster said. (p. 9)

Here the shift of “present attention” back to the chronological present is apparently prompted not by the kind of associations we have discussed earlier but by Benjy’s emotional reaction to the memory. The memory-content is pleasant rather than painful, yet it is evidently “motivating” Benjy’s present moaning. It can do so, however, only if it is experienced as a memory, that


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is, as a present absence, as a “presentification” of a not-present. In his adult present, Benjy does not have his Caddy, who has long since married and left home. In addition, Benjy’s present perception can also carry with it the notation of absence, which is extinguished as soon as the perception is extinguished: I got undressed and I looked at myself, and I began to cry. Hush, Luster said. Looking for them aint going to do no good. They’re gone. He put my gown on. I hushed. (pp. 73–74)5

The castrated Benjy misses his genitals, but only when he can see their absence. The conventions of the mimesis of this section allow us to argue that at this moment he has no memory of his genitals with which to make an explicit, even if subliminal, comparison of “before” and “after.” Absence is inscribed, as it sometimes is for us, in the present perception itself.6 Besides physical perceptions, even words, especially his sister’s name “Caddy” – and its golfer’s homonym “caddie” – can arouse Benjy’s affect, a situation which Luster knows and exploits. Later in the flower-snatching sequence noted above, after Benjy has begun to cry over the missing flowers, Luster says: “‘You want something to beller about. All right, then. Caddy.’ he whispered. ‘Caddy. Beller now. Caddy”’ (p. 55). And Benjy does bellow. Here Benjy is not responding to a present sensation of his sister, nor to a presentification of her in memory, but to a sound which “represents” her, or perhaps we could say “presentifies” her – but only on the symbolic level. The sound-word has become a metaphor for the real Caddy, and, just as much as any actual memory, carries with it the notation of present absence. Benjy’s affect, then, reveals a complexity to his temporality that we might otherwise miss: both past and present can be experienced as absence or as loss. Not only the flow of concrete sensation, present or presentified, but also a symbol, a word, a name, can open onto something that cuts across mere linearity and generates a more complex sense of time. Benjy’s time cannot be reduced to an on-going simple present because even for him, damaged in brain and consciousness, the present is never simple. His present attention betrays him into a distention whose affect is like the affect that Augustine displays in the quotation with which I began this paper. Not only Benjy’s affectivity but also his memory, in the sense of those past experiences available for recall – what Sigmund Freud called the “preconscious” – reveals a sense of time not merely linear. Most of Benjy’s memories are connected to or constellate around either experiences of death (of his grandmother, his father, etc.); or Caddy’s sexual maturation and leaving home; or his renaming – by which even something as personal and proper as his name is revealed to be subject to loss.

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Benjy’s earliest memory-sequence, dating back to the time he was about three years old, is of the day his grandmother (“Damuddy”) died. Fragments of this memory-sequence take up more of Benjy’s present attention than any other sequence except that of events of the present day. His second-oldest memory-sequence involves the day his name was changed from Maurice (or Maury) to Benjamin (Benjy) when Benjy was about five. Benjy had been named after his mother’s favorite brother. But as the permanence of Benjy’s mental infirmity became more and more evident, his mother insisted on renaming him. There are memory-sequences revolving around other deaths. Besides memories connected to the day his brother Quentin died and the day the old servant Roskus died, there is a sequence of memories connected to the days of his father’s death, of his father’s funeral, and of a trip to the cemetery to visit his father’s grave. Also, there are five different memory-sequences of episodes spread over four years, connected to Caddy’s sexual maturation and her becoming sexually active, culminating in her wedding day. And there is what we might call the “castration” series: a series of memory-sequences first of the girl Caddy coming through the gate on her way home from school and greeting Benjy, then after she marries and leaves home of Benjy going to the gate and crying, and finally of Benjy getting through the unlocked gate and grabbing a passing school-girl. (It was his accosting the girl that prompted his family to have him castrated.) There are only a few memory-fragments that do not fit into one of these sequences. So the passion that animates and empowers Benjy’s memory, and that filiates outward from a few central events, flows from the sense of human life as both finite (on the level of radical temporality) and transient (on the level of historicality). What quickens Benjy’s memory are those experiences which form the strongest possible contrast to his “baseline” experience of time as a smooth bright flow, an undifferentiated linearity. Within this smooth bright flow Benjy has come to expect certain regularities and repetitions. But the experiences captured by his memory mark not merely a disruption of the accustomed repetitions of the linear flow (in thirty-three years he would have had many singular experiences); even more they mark an eruption of a temporality foreign to the merely linear. It is as if Benjy is compelled to repeat these events in memory without ever being able to master them because he lacks the necessary organizational and substitutive resources – he can neither configure nor metaphorize. Generally, the only configuration he recognizes is exact repetition, and the only metaphor a proper name. Besides Benjy’s affectivity and the working of his memory, there are three other evidences of an eruption of a more complex temporality into


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Benjy’s linear time – or we could say, three other evidences of Benjy’s breakthrough, sporadic and defective as it may be, into the time of repetition and resoluteness. There is first of all his animal graveyard, which he has furnished with a bottle that he puts flowers into. He cannot operate well enough on the symbolic level to give it its name (we learn what it is from the faithful family servant Dilsey – p. 55). Nevertheless, the adult Benjy of the present day is mimicking within an appropriate context the behavior he has seen and has no doubt been a part of at the human cemetery. This imitative behavior suggests a rudimentary ability to handle the experience of death and loss through memorializing, through creating a memorial which continues into the present as a trace of the onceliving person – or animal or bird, in the case of Benjy’s memorial. As a symbolic activity, attending to the memorial can affirm in the present a kind of continuity with the past, so that it is not “merely” past, and can give a shape and perspective to mere historical sequence. Though he is completely inarticulate about it, Benjy has created his own graveyard, as a focus for his memorializing. Secondly, there is the event that led to Benjy’s castration. As a child, he had been in the habit of going out to the gate to meet Caddy when she came home from school. Early in the section Benjy remembers one such meeting: Caddy was walking. Then she was running, her book-satchel swinging and jouncing behind her. “Hello, Benjy.” Caddy said. She opened the gate and came in and stooped down. “Did you come to meet Caddy.” she said, rubbing my hands. “What is it. What are you trying to tell Caddy.” (p. 6)

After Caddy marries and leaves home, Benjy still goes down to the gate, “where the girls passed with their booksatchels” (p. 52), even though day after day Caddy does not appear. Then one day the gate is not locked: They came on. I opened the gate and they stopped, turning. I was trying to say, and I caught her, trying to say, and she screamed and I was trying to say . (p. 53)

Benjy is trying to repeat his former experience of meeting Caddy. Since Caddy said he was “trying to tell” her something, that is how he identifies his intentionality in the repetition. But now he is apparently willing that the repetition not be exact: he is willing – though with considerable anxiety – to take another school girl with book-satchel to “stand for” Caddy. In allowing such a substitution, he is attempting a symbolic or metaphorical repetition and not a literal one. Through the substitution, an earlier time would be regained, albeit symbolically. Habitually, Benjy is unable to make such substitutions, which are a characteristic of the historical level of temporality. Alas, Benjy’s attempted entry into the symbolic results in his castration.

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There is a third instance of Benjy trying to “repeat,” to operate on the historical level of temporality. His day has been filled with his present frustrations and tensions, with memories of death and loss, and perhaps with his inchoate fear of the future (during the day he has been told he is going to be “sent to Jackson” to the state mental hospital – p. 54). At the end of the day Benjy tries to deal with all this by “deliberately” turning to a more consoling past. If Benjy’s presentification of the past is so intense as to displace the present from his consciousness, we see him at the end turning this disability to his advantage, in order to bring himself peace and consolation. After a tense and argumentative supper, the family goes into the library. Being in the library prompts for Benjy one last fragment from the constellation of memory-fragments galvanized around his name-changing, a fragment from an earlier time in the library, which ends with a serene vision of Benjy’s own particular “nuclear family”: Caddy’s head was on Father’s shoulder. Her hair was like fire, and little points of fire were in her eyes, and I went and Father lifted me into the chair too, and Caddy held me. She smelled like trees. (p. 72)

But because Benjy’s memories “run through” and can be neither arrested nor voluntarily repeated, this consoling scene does not last. So Benjy goes out of his way to trigger another memory. In the past two fragments, both in the present and in memory, Benjy has been in the library. But in the new fragment, in the present, Luster finds him “hiding off in this here empty room,” holding a slipper, which he did not have in the library (p. 72). And at the beginning of this fragment is what is perhaps Benjy’s one and only “recollection” that is not a simple presentification of the past. The first words of the fragment are “She smelled like trees,” a repetition of the last words of the preceding fragment; but between the two fragments is the gap in the linear present. A shift in typeface indicates that the sentence “She smelled like trees” (in italics) does not belong to the now run-through memory of the previous fragment (in roman type), but to the present of the adult Benjy in the darkening room (in italics). However, there is no “she” to refer to in the present fragment, and in any case the three possibilities, the girl Quentin (Caddy’s daughter), the aging Mrs. Compson, and the servant Dilsey, up to this point have never been perceived by Benjy as smelling like trees. Nor is there in this fragment a tree that Benjy sees or smells to “accidentally” trigger the whole sentence. I suggest that here Benjy is recalling something about Caddy in a way common for us but for him uncharacteristic, a way in which present knowledge is a trace, and is acknowledged as a trace, of past experience.


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Why did Benjy get this slipper and come into this room, where he remembers Caddy? The slipper is an old slipper of Caddy’s. The room is the room where (apparently for the only time) all the siblings, Benjy, Caddy, Quentin, and Jason, were put to bed together in the same room at nightfall on the day of their Grandmother’s death. In between the previous fragment of Benjy’s present time and the current one, Benjy has retrieved this slipper and has gone into this room in a deliberate attempt to trigger the presentification of that earlier going to bed, which was at the end filled with consolations for him. And he succeeds; he substitutes one time for another. Very shortly Benjy’s present attention jumps to the memory of this earlier bedtime, which now takes center stage. Thus as his day ends, Benjy is not tense, alone, castrated, anticipating a future of more fearsome isolation and changes. Rather, all the children are together, he still has his original name Maury, his father puts his hand on Benjy/Maury’s head (in an archaic gesture of blessing), and Caddy promises their father that she will “take good care of Maury” (p. 75). Then after their father leaves the room: Caddy held me and I could hear us all, and the darkness, and something I could smell. And then I could see the windows, where the trees were buzzing. Then the dark began to go in smooth, bright shapes, like it always does, even when Caddy says that I have been asleep. (p. 75)

So he drifts from consciousness into sleep. In his own primitive way he has overcome the passing of time. With an intentionality deriving from the historical level working with memories registering from the radically temporal level, he has “regained” at least a fragment of his time, and this fragment brings him peace. The reader’s double vision allows us to realize the irony that even when Benjy manages to experience his remembrance as recovery and not loss, his paradise manqué is desperate indeed, riven from the start with the odor of death as the ma(r)ker of temporal finitude. For the “something” that he could smell was his grandmother’s dead body. He has the memory, and it consoles, but he has it only because it has been captured by the “magnetic field” of his vestigial radical temporality, whose sense of finitude and death, as many have noted, is usually first energized by the experience of someone else’s death. Throughout this section of the novel, to the extent that Benjy’s actions are even minimally “purposeful,” they are so in connection with the imperatives of transitoriness and finitude; he is purposeful and configurative not on the level of mundane temporality, not in his daily tasks, but in his attempts at repetition and resoluteness. Thus we have the mimesis of Benjy’s temporality. For the most part thrown into sheer meaningless linearity, into a duration “below” the level of mundane temporality, he nevertheless sporadically experiences both finitude (on the

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level of radical temporality) and the stretching-along of life (on the level of historicality). He tries to accommodate the pressures from and towards these levels and to configure his time, mainly by sheer, exact repetition, but sometimes by memorialization, by a primitive kind of metaphorical repetition, and by “remembrance.” Even Benjy, as a kind of “limit case” of human temporality, experiences the full multi-dimensionality of time. We are drawn to care about Benjy because there is a shape to his time, a configuration, which like the shape of our own time is partly an achievement, partly a compromise, and partly a suffering, a passio. University of Wisconsin-Whitewater NOTES 1

Major source-texts for the phenomenological investigation of time include Augustine’s Confessions, Husserl’s Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, Heidegger’s Being and Time, and Heidegger’s later essay “Time and Being.” In developing the following model of time I found extremely helpful Ricoeur’s own exposition and critique of the phenomenology of time, especially in “The Human Experience of Time and Narrative” and Time and Narrative I, pp. 3–87. 2 Biological time, like cosmic time and duration, is a time into which we are thrown; it could be taken as either “inside” or “outside,” depending mainly on one’s stance toward the body. Since both the philosophical sources I used in developing this model and Faulkner’s text strongly privilege consciousness (the “inside” is the inside of consciousness), for simplicity’s sake I have assimilated biological time to cosmic time, on the “outside.” 3 I am indebted to Joseph Hogan of the University of Wisconsin – Whitewater for this characterization, and also for many insightful conversations while I was developing this model of time. 4 See E. H. Gombrich’s “Moment and Movement in Art” for a helpful explanation of the expansive now. 5 This passage is italicized in the original. Since Faulkner uses italics in the Benjy section only to indicate a shift in time levels, I will drop the italics unless such a shift occurs within a passage I am quoting. 6 In his reflections on the affect connected to Augustine’s analysis of human temporality, Ricoeur notes that for Augustine “the absence of eternity is not simply a limit that is thought, but a lack that is felt at the heart of temporal experience” (Time I, p. 26). At this point, Ricoeur and Augustine are focusing on the radical level of human temporality rather than the mundane or the historical; nevertheless, Benjy’s affect at the perceived absence of his genitals puts the brain-damaged man-child in the same camp as Augustine and is one of the factors that elicits the reader’s compassion for Benjy.

REFERENCES Augustine (1963). Confessions of St. Augustine. Trans. Rex Warner. NY: Mentor-NAL. William Faulkner (1984). The Sound and the Fury. New, Corrected Edition. NY: Random House. E. H. Gombrich (1964). “Moment and Movement in Art.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 27: 293–306.



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Martin Heidegger (1962). Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. NY: Harper. Martin Heidegger (1972). “Time and Being.” On Time and Being. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. NY: Harper Torchbooks-Harper, pp. 1–24. Edmund Husserl (1964). The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness. Ed. Martin Heidegger. Trans. James S. Churchill. Bloomington: Indiana UP. Paul Ricoeur (1979). “The Human Experience of Time and Narrative.” Research in Phenomenology 9, 17–34. Paul Ricoeur (1984). Time and Narrative. Vol 1. Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: U of Chicago Press.

LEWIS LIVESAY

K A F K A ’ S T H E M E T A M O R P H O S I S: G R E G O R ’ S D A - S E I N PARALYZED BY DEBT

Readers of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis discern immediately that Gregor Samsa’s appearance has altered on the fateful morning when he awakens in his bed in the physical form of a dung-beetle. From this realization, readers have usually jumped to the conclusion that the concept of change implicit in the story’s title refers to a radical readjustment in Gregor’s entire mode of being; however, if we undertake a radical shift in perspective and read Gregor through a lens looking into what ought to be Gregor’s Da-sein,1 one observation becomes clear about the main character’s being-in-the-world: Gregor never changes. What has suddenly altered is only his visible surface. At a deeper level, what we can call Gregor’s professional intentionality remains the same; he awakens with the expectation of dressing and then packing his samples so that he can go on the road and sell his firm’s products. Even after he becomes more aware of his disabling condition, Gregor remains intent on resuming his professional life and making the trip. The key point is that, inside any type of intentionality, we expect to find Da-sein, which is characterized throughout Being and Time as self-direction that, in Martin Heidegger’s words, “belongs to itself ” (40). My thesis contends that, long before awakening on the ominous day, Gregor’s Da-sein had already petrified into a state of paralysis, and during his entire demise as an insect, Gregor’s static Da-sein remains incapable of undertaking any projects that might activate his own desires. The dung-beetle can thus be interpreted, not as an allegorical displacement of Gregor’s being into alien form, but as a symbolic disclosing of a latent condition inherent within Gregor’s habitual passivity. With a symbolic focus, Kafka’s famous story reveals the ontological predicament of one who does not belong to himself, and an examination of the contents of Gregor’s diminishing consciousness will reveal that this protagonist has not belonged to himself for some length of time. My reading of Gregor Samsa thus develops the viewpoint that The Metamorphosis can be understood as presenting the portrait of a man without Da-sein. In a certain sense, all the people around Gregor appear to change radically during the course of the story; they seem to change in how they think of 367 A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana LXXXVI, 367–393. © 2007 Springer.

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him and how they treat him. They do change, for a time, in terms of how they live their own lives. However, as I also hope to show, the family, after the insect’s death, reverts to its ongoing fundamental condition. What never changes with the parents is their form of care – or more specifically, the absence of care – offered to both of their children. That essential structure can best be described as a care-less and profit-more condition. In Grete’s case, this condition becomes revealed only in the final line of the story, and that revelation reverberates backwards with a sudden flash of insight illuminating how the parents have always already predetermined their relation to their progeny as one of capital. When Gregor was alive in his natural form, his parents did not see him or want to see him; and then, after Gregor symbolically manifests his being in insect form, his parents continue not to see him. Any superficial change in the family is based purely on an economic response. Without Gregor as their breadwinner, each of the other three in the family has to do what had been unthinkable: they get jobs. When Gregor was seen as having a normal body, everyone treated him as a function, mainly a money-making function. At the office and at home, Gregor has only existed to serve the acquisitive will of others who need his activity to generate money to allow for their material well-being. Gregor becomes a product of the will of the other; nobody sees him as a person. In fact, he has no life. Even his mother protests early on to the firm’s manager, “That boy has nothing on his mind but the business. It’s almost begun to rile me that he never goes out nights He sits there with us at the table, quietly reading the paper or studying train schedules” (8). What the mother intends as praise, we record as pathos. In this state, which Gregor calls his “real and natural” existence, he has been transformed into an automaton. He studies train schedules and then sets his alarm clock. Time for him has become entirely regulated. Gregor exists within a mechanical order. The impulse to activate his own desires has lapsed into stasis, as Gregor finds himself stuck in a tedium of burnt-out repetition. Gregor has constantly been descending into an inauthentic existence whose vapidity approaches nonexistence. No one chooses non-existence, but it occurs when one’s Da-sein succumbs to anaesthetizing routine. As an insect, Gregor initially retains his consciousness, although it is beginning to diminish. The contents of his consciousness – the memory of his expectations – are displayed throughout Part I of The Metamorphosis. Those contents reveal Gregor’s dual role as traveling salesman and family breadwinner. Each aspect of that dual role is canceled – first, when the manager flees the apartment without granting his subordinate permission to make his sales trip, and secondly, when the father drives his son back into his

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room to end Part I. From that point until extinction, Gregor is virtually locked in his room by the family. Gregor had always kept the key on the inside of the door, locking out the world, but now the family reverses the relation, by finally locking him away from the world. The room becomes the diminished world for what must be seen as this disembodied creature. As an insect, Gregor retains minimal existence, but it is not the physical form alone that constitutes this plight; instead, it is Gregor’s diminished will power that has been bringing him to the precipice of non-existence. A reader might look at Gregor as insect and be prepared to say that Gregor’s existence has been suddenly destroyed by an unexpected reversal. But herein lies the crucial aspect of the story. An examination of the contents of Gregor’s recollections reveals that Gregor’s world has not suddenly upended. His relation to others has long been structured in the mode of debt. Gregor’s dual role as salesman and breadwinner was predetermined by the familial debt to his employer. Through his family Gregor has existed for some time in a negative relation of imposed servitude to another. Debt confines Gregor’s will power as tightly as the room entraps the insect with no freedom to explore outward. In Part II of the story, the narrative surface creates the illusion that Gregor has reversed the indebtedness, with the family now having to provide for him and serve his needs. At the same time, the family has to assume payment of the debt. Such a reading only focuses on the surface of events. Such an interpretation would follow were Gregor merely incapacitated physically; however, his reduction to insect status conveys a sense of much greater degradation. In my reading, Gregor’s situation exists not so much as a reversal of relations among family members, with Gregor becoming dependent and the others becoming the breadwinners. Gregor’s predicament, rather, represents his refusal to uphold any relation to others. Gregor intuits at the sensory level that a relation purely depending on economic interaction in no way constitutes a human relation. Gregor’s new form reveals what others have done to him and how his refusal to continue the charade suddenly leaves him with no place in any human world. Of course, the others assume no responsibility for Gregor’s condition. They read the situation as bad luck; they find themselves at a loss to explain “their complete hopelessness and the thought that they had been struck by a misfortune as none of their relatives and acquaintances had ever been hit” (31). The family distances itself from Gregor. His dilemma remains beyond their involvement in his life. They feel no connection or abiding human responsibility. In Part III of the story, the family seemingly liberates itself from Gregor by finally refusing to acknowledge that the insect could possibly be a part of

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them. When Gregor is denied his name and his position in the family, when his sister finally calls him “this monster” (37), the final trace of relational connection to others is annihilated. The process that began with “troubled dreams” has been completed: Gregor exists truly alone and disconnected with no potential to activate authentic connection to others. The uncanny emerges as a feeling of infantile helplessness, as an absence of choice. Gregor has been living a pretense. His parents had long resided comfortably in “the conviction that Gregor was set for life in this firm; and furthermore, they were so preoccupied with their immediate troubles that they had lost all consideration for the future” (13). When Gregor awakens at the portentous hour, from his “unsettling dreams,” he can no longer live with his parents’ conviction. Their imposition of a destiny upon the son is rejected, but this economic fate already constitutes the only identity through which others are ready to see Gregor. In his new condition, Gregor thus becomes the insignificance from which he flees. Heidegger explains how much of existence entails a battle to hide from implicit emptiness: “In this entangled being-together-with, fleeing from uncanniness (which mostly remains covered over by latent Angst because the publicness of the they suppresses everything unfamiliar) announces itself, whether it does so explicitly or not, and whether it is understood or not” (179). The implicit emptiness comes from a failure to choose oneself. Gregor, instead of choosing himself, has made the parental debt his encompassing predilection. When Gregor can no longer travel as salesman, his flight from the uncanny comes to a halt, as he arrives at the disclosure of that which he is: the essence of human insignificance stemming from non-choice. To the others, Gregor has become, in his inutility, a “disturbance of reference” (Heidegger 70). The others finally glance at Gregor for a moment, and they see him only to recoil from him. They recoil because Gregor now exists as incapable of paying off the debt. In letting others see his implicit lack of social utility, Gregor forfeits all hope of being “integrated into human society once again” (11). No locksmith is needed to unlock Gregor’s world; there is no world to unlock. No doctor is needed to cure Gregor’s body; there is no human form to be examined. In fact, Gregor as insect feeds on rotting food. Kafka thus depicts a body deteriorating in vitality as Gregor’s will has long been doing. When Gregor is rejected by his business manager and his family, the last semblance of his attachment to the social world is severed. What this means is that, in no longer being able to maintain his predilection, Gregor has no reason to leave his room. Heidegger explains how an absence of will imprisons: “When Da-sein, so to speak, sinks down into predilection, a predilection is not just objectively present, but the complete structure of care is modified. Blinded, it


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puts all possibilities in the services of the predilection” (182). Heidegger then goes on to make the essential point that “in predilection care is always already bound” (182). Gregor had become bound to people who did not see him; they took him for granted and they returned no sustenance. With no projects of his own, Gregor has fallen into a state that lacks any authentic engagement with others. Gregor’s intentionality lacks directed desire; he literally mirrors the absence of choice found in an insect. Heidegger makes eminently clear that only humans possess Da-sein. Gregor’s world is a world in which, for a time, predilection substituted for care, but Gregor reached a point at which predilection is no longer adequate to justify his existence. When he can no longer abide his habitual predilection, Gregor is left with nothing. Thus, my reading holds to the view that The Metamorphosis depicts a man who lacks the will power within Da-sein that defines one’s humanity. In his story of Gregor, Kafka reveals the final dissolution of a consciousness that has long been contracting and withering within the structure of a strangulating debt. Kafka reveals how economic determination as the dominant condition of existence erases Da-sein. The bug in the room can be read allegorically as a metaphor for the instability of identity in a contingent social order, and this is the approach that Stanley Corngold2 takes in his brilliant reading of the story. However, the bug may also be read symbolically exposing Gregor’s vacancy, which is devoid of Da-sein. Reduced to an inhuman core, Gregor is literally left without any desires of his own. The contents of Gregor’s consciousness suggest that he had choice, but Gregor never asserted his desire over and against the indebtedness imposed upon him by others. Instead of establishing his own resoluteness, Gregor’s existence has been a constant withdrawing from others. Instead of asserting his will, Gregor vegetates within a social order that provides no outlets and ultimately leads him backwards into regression. He reverts to infantile dependency by failing to develop outward with projects of his own. Gregor simply stops caring. Without care, one’s entire existence is paralyzed. When society defines identity in economic terms of obligation, the individual who cannot produce money is “useless.” Twice in the story, Gregor thinks of his sister in this very mode. Her lack of production assigns her a diminished identity. Gregor leaves himself at the mercy of a similar condemnation. The social world, forming the horizon of this tale, dictates that Gregor as insect be judged as useless. Gregor becomes the family excess that drains the family, like interest on a debt that cannot be retired. The family must decide how to respond to this useless burden. Since the family’s being-in-theworld has always already been defined in economic terms, the family can do nothing else but eventually see Gregor as a waste. Gregor’s body – become

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an absence of embodied relations – reduces him to inutility, and in this social order that mode of existence leaves him without a function, without a place. That which fails to function within the prevailing economic order constitutes itself as the abject blight, the atrophying and wasteful residue that the family must eventually sweep aside – a chore that the charwoman is paid to do. With Being and Time, phenomenologists have come to appreciate how Heidegger develops a position more primordial than Cartesian dualism and mimetic representation. By not abstracting the concept from the situation, Heidegger focuses more fully on existence as felt immersion in others. Heidegger posits how living is rooted in the temporal as an evolving narrative. Intentionality exists not as abstraction, but as praxis. When ordinary life becomes a mechanical repetition compulsion, habit anaesthetizes us to our own experiences. Phenomenology’s position is that, by not paying strict enough attention, we can blind ourselves to what our experiences reveal. Average everydayness thus takes on the form of the already known to whose conformity humans sometimes passively submit. In turn, experience becomes commonplace, redundant, and hackneyed – it becomes conceptual. Heidegger’s term for the human subject is Da-sein, a term that radically revises what we have thought of traditionally as the self or the ego. This phenomenological term involves our way of being-in-the-world. Like a fish in water that cannot see the ubiquity of its aqueous state, Da-sein frequently exists in a mood of inattention and complacency. When this occurs, our existence can be called inauthentic. When we begin to become aware of our disconnection from experience, such awareness generates anxiety. This state inculcates Heidegger’s uncanny. Only through anxiety do we grasp how mundane, everyday passivity – what Edmund Husserl called “the natural attitude” – reveals to us our essential homelessness. Gregor Samsa, in his room at home, incarnates the essence of homelessness. Twenty-five percent of The Metamorphosis revolves around what happens from the time Gregor awakens to realize that his appearance has altered drastically until the point when he opens the door and the others finally behold what he reveals about himself. During this hour Gregor asks many questions. This entire story, in fact, is set in the interrogative mode with Gregor asking some two dozen questions. Most of these questions arise in Part 1, with Part II having eight questions, and Part III having only two. Gregor initially asks himself, “What’s happened to me?” (3) – as if the change has just occurred. The point of the entire story, however, is that this change has not just taken place. What has become manifest is the long-term condition of Gregor’s pusillanimous subsistence. As the revelation of his seemingly abrupt transformation puzzles him, Gregor is forced to take stock of his existence.


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Drew Leder reminds us, “The body stands out at times of dysfunction only because its usual state is to be lost in the world – caught up in a web of organic and intentional involvements through which we form one body with other things. To say that the body is ‘absent,’ a ‘being-away,’ thus has a positive significance; it asserts that the body is in ceaseless relation to the world” (160). When Gregor is forced to look at how his paralysis can be read in his physical appearance, his stream of consciousness alternates among three laments that characterize Gregor’s life in personal, occupational, and familial terms. Gregor assumes the form of what Julia Kristeva calls the abject. In this state his personal life could only be non-existent, and this condition perpetuates what has been his experience for some time. In memory, Gregor complains about “no relationships that last or get more intimate” (4). That is a complaint without foundation. Gregor has chosen to isolate himself from others. He always withdrew from others and never got involved. Just before he dies, Gregor’s life flashes before him and two of the images in this stream include “a chambermaid in a provincial hotel – a happy fleeting memory – [and] a cashier in a millinery store, whom he had courted earnestly but too slowly – ” (31–32). This latter image, of course, contrasts with the model in the fur hat in the second paragraph. Gregor does not want to settle for one who sells hats; he wants the nameless model in the sexually suggestive fur hat. He wants an emotionless exchange with the impersonal model from the big city, rather than an involvement that bears responsibility. Gregor does not see the attachments that are there for him because he aspires to what is unattainable. He thus keeps himself isolated. When Gregor could take from others, like the provincial chambermaid, he did; but when taking entailed commitment, as with the millinery clerk, Gregor recoiled. As the images of his life blend together, Gregor thinks to himself how these people “were all inaccessible, and he was glad when they faded away” (32). Others are always “inaccessible” to Gregor because remoteness saturates his attitude toward others. Gregor’s detachment leaves him with no bonds of connection or empathy with others. Gregor has withdrawn from interactive contact with other human beings. Gregor is never at-home with an-other. Gregor’s depiction of his job as a salesman and his office environment creates an image of naturalistic imprisonment. His first thought about work is that if he relaxes for a second, the result will be that he would “be fired on the spot” (4). Gregor sees himself as entrapped in a job working to pay off his father’s debts. His father bears an obligation, which Gregor has assumed by working for the employer who holds a financial liability over the family. Gregor sees this boss as despotic and unforgiving. Gregor describes

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this boss as one who “sits on the desk and talks down from the heights to the employees” (4). In Chapter XVII of The Prince, Machiavelli poses the question of leadership as to “whether it is better to be loved than feared, or the reverse” (54). With the fear of being fired as the foundation of his professional existence, Gregor provides insight into his relation to his employer. This relation is mirrored in Gregor’s account of the messenger boy, who would have reported to the boss that Gregor had missed the early five o’clock train. Gregor describes the boy as “a tool of the boss, without brains or backbone” (5). Gregor himself unwittingly stands in the same position in relation to his employer. Gregor needs to get up each morning and embark on his dreaded sales trip out of necessity. He has to accomplish this intention not for himself, but to pay off a debt with which his father has bound him. Gregor simultaneously resents father and boss for having imposed upon him an existence that seemingly Gregor did not freely choose for himself; yet, the assumption underlying this entire line of self-justification is readily upended when we recall that Gregor’s account of his job begins with the exclamation: “Oh God what a grueling job I’ve picked” (3). People have choice. As Heidegger constantly stresses, people must choose to acknowledge that they have choice. One is only reduced to a hapless state when Da-sein becomes paralyzed. Choice may be limited, but people have it. The problem is that people relinquish choice unconsciously when they succumb blindly to habit and routine. Heidegger asserts that “the person exists only in carrying out intentional acts” (44–45). Kafka inserts clues throughout the story that repeated failures to make choices – and not circumstances beyond control – have determined Gregor’s plight. The structure of Gregor’s consciousness superficially urges the notion that he is ensnared, but this impression comes across because Gregor erases all vestiges of choice and desire. Gregor works at a job that he resents, telling himself relentlessly that he has no other option. He does the same with his personal life in his refusal to commit to the millinery clerk, opting instead to complain about an absence of rapport with others. Gregor repeatedly denies every opportunity available to him for Mitda-sein: “Da-sein in itself is essentially being-with” (Heidegger 113). In isolating himself from others, Gregor refuses every offer of “being-with.” Gregor defers his existence to some indefinite future. His romantic interests are invested in the model in the magazine photo that he has framed and hung on the wall of his room. This unattainable ideal represents an illusion that he keeps alive within himself; however, because he remains saddled with the burden of working to free a family that Gregor envisions as entirely dependent on him, romance must wait. Freeing himself from the prison-house of his job must also wait as Gregor comforts himself by fantasizing about


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some day telling off his boss “without fail” in no uncertain terms: “Well, I haven’t given up hope completely; once I’ve gotten the money together to pay off my parents’ debt [to the boss] – that will probably take another five or six years – I’m going to do it without fail. Then I’m going to make the big break” (4). The opportunity for love or for freedom depends on choice, but Gregor finds himself congenitally incapable of choosing for himself. His desires become erased by putting himself in the service of others. John Russon, in Human Experience, has written perceptively about how identity involves “interpersonal struggles to have one’s importance recognized by the other” (59). Russon goes on to explain how “in the very fact of needing and relying on this other’s confirmation of my claim, my behavior has tacitly acknowledged that my sense of self-worth is contingent on that other’s act of valuing; in other words, I reveal that the real thing that matters in the world is what is important to the other, not what is important to me” (59). The only way that Gregor has ever been able to get others to notice him has been by relinquishing his free will to become a sacrificial lamb for their monetary gain. The one photo of Gregor in the Samsa household reveals how Gregor has lived his entire life: “On the wall directly opposite hung a photograph of Gregor from his army days, in a lieutenant’s uniform, his hand on his sword, a carefree smile on his lips, demanding respect for his bearing and his rank” (12). Gregor radiates a “carefree smile” only when he feels comfortable that others depend upon him. As a soldier, Gregor protects others, as he allows people in his society to go about their business freely. Gregor’s identity becomes predicated upon the appearance of service and protection, namely his uniform. This is a condition that he accepts with a smile. The only other reference to Gregor smiling comes at the beginning of the story when Gregor realizes that he might not be able to get out of bed without help. The possibility of depending upon others runs through his mind: “ should he really call for help? In spite of all his miseries, he could not repress a smile at this thought” (7). Gregor almost smiles at what for him seems an absurdity – namely, the idea that he might stoop to have others assist him. For someone who so feels that he has become unfairly enmeshed in the debt of others, Gregor adamantly refuses any reciprocity on the personal, the occupational, or the familial levels of his existence. Being cut off from others, Gregor initially sees no other option but stubbornly to get himself out of bed with the goal of embarking on his sales trip. At this point in the story, the office manager arrives at the Samsa residence, and this entire episode reveals how deeply Gregor is entangled in what Heidegger calls the they world: “This being-with-one-another dissolves one’s

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own Da-sein completely into the kind of being of ‘the others’ in such a way that the others, as distinguishable and explicit, disappear more and more. In this inconspicuousness and unassertainability, the they unfolds its true dictatorship The they is everywhere, but in such a way that it has always already stolen away when Da-sein presses for a decision” (119). Gregor does not have a relation to his own being because he cannot activate any projects based on his own desires. He exists inauthentically in the they world. The average everydayness of Da-sein, confined to its inauthentic existence in the they world, eventually starts to feel at-home. For most people, a healthy dose of robust angst recalls them back to their own possibilities. This reawakening should call for a self-assessment; disruptive introspection “fetches Da-sein back out of its entangled absorption in the ‘world.’ Everyday familiarity collapses. Da-sein is individuated, but as being-in-the-world. Being-in enters the existential ‘mode’ of not-being-at-home [in the they world]. The talk about ‘uncanniness’ means nothing other than this” (176). Gregor has taken up residence in the they world wherein his predilection defines him. Making sales and studying train schedules has become his world. Just as Gregor can no longer be at-home with another, Gregor has moved beyond being at-home with himself. Gregor is a man who can no longer question his “unsettling dreams”; he has become a stranger to himself. Noëlle MacAfee sees this process as a removal, an exiled condition, remote from one’s own possibilities: “Uncanniness, a sensation both Heidegger and Freud have explored, is the telling sign of this radical strangeness” (118). For Freud, the uncanny brings us back to a time before individuation; it reminds us that the formation of the ego consists of influences in which we participated. In “The Uncanny,” Freud points out how self-denial can eventually make a person feel removed from oneself: “ this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression” (241). Gregor once had reciprocal relations with his family members, but these relations have become entrenched within the blindness of what psychoanalysis has specified as “repetition compulsion.” Gregor’s predilection stems from an indebtedness to serve his parents blindly in a way that leaves him no space to belong to himself. The moment in the story where Gregor can best be seen withdrawing into his “lostness” – his estrangement – occurs when he opens the door to his room. He makes a wager with himself. If the office manager and his parents can accept his appearance, in the mode of the abject, he will agree to continue his mechanical existence and make the trip; however, if the manager and parents recoil from what they see, then Gregor acknowledges that he


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can finally free himself from his “responsibility” as indebtedness. Therefore, the most crucial line in the story, dramatizing his dependency on others for affirmation, expresses this telling wager: “He actually intended to open the door, actually present himself and speak to the manager; he was eager to find out what the others, who were now so anxious to see him, would say at the sight of him. If they were shocked, then Gregor had no further responsibility and could be calm” (10). His intentionality is no longer conceived on the level of speech. Speech gives way to the more primordial level of image. The others have to see him, and Gregor has already anticipated their recoil. Their rejection will justify his psychotic withdrawal from everyday averageness in the they world into subsistence in the insect world. This moment signifies Gregor’s last opportunity to activate Da-sein, but Gregor leaves all choice in the hands of others: they will accept or reject him. In this exchange, Gregor expects no ethical interaction with the other. He is lapsing into detachment. Michel Haar explains, “The threat of an ‘existential solipsism’ weighs on the Heideggerian ethic. Conscience calls to nothing, if not to one’s ownmost self. ‘Hearing the call’ for Dasein merely means understanding the existential necessity of choice subjected to the sole imperative of having in any case to ‘choose oneself ’ ” (22). Through resoluteness, Haar will argue, the subject can attain a security within itself that allows this individual to approach an-other in openness. In other words, Heidegger should be seen as defending Da-sein’s preoccupation with assuming responsibility to fortify its own mineness so that we can appreciate what is possible when Da-sein “has gathered itself into itself and is no longer half-melted into the other” (Haar 28). The basis for dialogic parity depends upon each person having a strong voice. Only then can the condition exist for what Frederick A. Olafson calls “reciprocal recognition” (99). Olafson’s work seeks to keep Mitda-sein in the mode of ethics; he declares that “an ethical relation is one that carries an assignable responsibility with it; and for that to be the case it would seem that the parties to that relation must at least be able to justify to one another what they do” (37). A hierarchical relationship does not allow for mutual exchange. If one’s Da-sein is suppressed by a dominant other, then the imbalance eliminates the possibility of mutual interaction. Because the fundamental condition of Gregor’s world is economic self-interest, with no ethical accord, alterity consumes Gregor. Gregor leaves himself at the mercy of the other’s response, and the other treats him as it has always done, by recoiling. In Gregor’s wager, if the others will only acknowledge his abhorrent appearance, he will continue to live in the they world. In averageness, a person can become lost in the they. Inauthenticity, however, is not the only possibility, unless one has relinquished

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choice. Heidegger urges, “This lostness can be summoned by one’s own Da-sein, the summons can be understood in the mode of resoluteness. But authentic disclosedness then modifies equiprimordially the discoveredness of ‘world’ grounded in it and the disclosedness of being-with with others” (274). Gregor’s Da-sein has become completely paralyzed because his connection to others depends solely on his economic function as they project it. If they will allow him to perform his role as salesman in the form of a dung-beetle, he will feel confirmed in doing his part; however, this option for continuing to live as a salesman will not be granted to Gregor, simply because a salesman’s ability to perform depends upon his appearance. This point is emphasized in force at the end of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman when one of the characters describes the modus operandi for a salesman: “He’s a man out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back – that’s an earthquake. And then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you’re finished” (111). Gregor’s selfimposed isolation, made manifest as a dung-beetle, conveys a loss of economic utility more appalling than a stain on one’s hat. Gregor has assumed the phenomenality of stain itself – in his appearance as the abject. Gregor has all but surrendered his Da-sein. Shaun Gallagher asserts, “ where Dasein is there is no death, and where there is death Dasein is not” (172). Gregor has descended into a fallenness – a fallenness into the they world – from which there is no return. This condition of irreversible fallenness occurs when Da-sein detaches itself from any connection to one’s own possibility. William Richardson, S.J., defines fallenness as “referentially dependent on and dragged toward other beings” (87). The fallen person, who is imprisoned in a state of abnegation, can only await confirmation of one’s existence by receiving what Russon identified as recognition of one’s existence from another. By contrast, François Raffoul urges that “Dasein has no predicates, because in each case it is its potentiality-for-Being” (247). Da-sein does not depend on recognition from others to assert its authentic being. With Gregor, Kafka presents us with a character who ultimately leaves it to others to define him as being a salesman or not a salesman. He remains ready to sell if others will confirm a functionality for him. This condition evinces no capacity for selfactualization. Because Gregor’s pusillanimous squalor constitutes an inability to assume the appearance of a salesman, the others will never acknowledge Gregor’s implicit request to allow him to continue as an automaton in the social order. Gregor has staked his entire wager on terms that will never garner recognition from others. The world only discloses itself as truth when our projects, structured ontologically as concern, attain temporal fulfillment through resolute


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engagement — or what Heidegger simply calls “care.” Da-sein exceeds the ego that is structured in opposition to otherness. Da-sein extends out, in finite transcendence, as an embracing care, to reach others as resolute interaction with others. The “being-there” of Da-sein is much more a going to, as opposed to a self-centered taking-from. The taking-from is how the people around Gregor treat him. Gregor’s withdrawal from them may be a defense, but at the same time, it severs his potential connection to the world. When the ego becomes locked within its own routine, an inauthentic perspective can often fail to recognize the inevitable loss of contact with others. About this condition Abraham Mansbach provides a helpful reminder when he stresses that “Dasein is transcendence; it goes beyond its own borders” (8). Locked in his room, as an insect, suspended from the ceiling, Gregor becomes the radical antithesis of transcendence. The heralded opening sentence of The Metamorphosis presents Gregor awakening from “unsettling dreams.” Many readers have bemused the apparent fact that we never learn the precise cause of Gregor’s being unsettled – that is, we never learn the nature of Gregor’s dreams. One of the most frequently asked questions in response to the story is: What was Gregor dreaming? Instead, we may be doing better if we ask: Where does Gregor awake? The obvious answer should be to consciousness so that Gregor can resume a conscious activation of his Da-sein. But clearly Gregor does not emerge from un-settling dreams to his typically normal condition. Conscious control of his body is lost. And then Gregor realizes that he is late for work – that, in effect, time has been lost. In the first paragraph, much has been annulled. Freud would certainly link the “un” in “unsettling” to that force which erases the norm. The “un” always partakes of the uncanny – the not athome. Gregor awakens into a phenomenon much like dreaming a nightmare, in which he is not at-home. All that Gregor can be sure of is that he awakes in an isolate room because he has taken “the precaution he had adopted from his business trips, of locking all the doors during the night even at home” (5). The locked door bars access to outside. At-home or not at-home is not the issue. In fact, traveling salesmen awaken in strange places all the time and have to orient themselves to where they are. The issue, from the beginning of the story, is that Gregor’s receptivity to otherness is radically blocked. The bedroom door, which Gregor locks whether he sleeps at home or on the road, symbolizes how he habitually isolates himself from others. The locked door stands as the bar between exterior and interior. Gregor hides his interior condition. In taking the place of the father as head, as breadwinner in the family, Gregor assumes the appearance of paternal authority with the attendant power to extend his will into the social field. What Gregor does

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instead of connecting with others is to prohibit his Da-sein from making connections to others. Gregor’s inability to desire outside the family paralyzes his outward-seeking Da-sein. His only concern for an-other is incestuously displaced, at the end of the story, toward his sister, the one with whom he wishes to achieve a symbiotic Eden. Gregor never evolves outside the family into embodied consciousness. And so Gregor awakes literally at-home, but figuratively not at-home within his own potential for being-in-the-world. He locks himself away from activities and projects that could activate Da-sein. Being isolated and imprisoned within himself, by his family, Gregor’s embodiment diminishes until it reaches the level of insectile subsistence. Being the anti-Da-sein, Gregor can only assume insect form, as he withdraws further and further from the world of otherness. The family’s resilience in surviving the loss of its breadwinner reveals that Gregor’s Da-sein was not extinguished with his final dissolution, but rather it was extinguished long before when he blindly submits to the demands of sacrificing his freedom of choice in order to support a family that was perfectly capable of supporting itself. Trapped in a series of demands that he never resolutely questions and that thus become his habituated predilection, Gregor condemns himself to the ‘they’ world of inauthentic possibilities. Stanley Corngold reads the story as an allegory. In an allegory one signifier displaces another. What is meant by the original signifier of Gregor is a normal body that combines the functions at home, of son, and in the office, of salesman. It is this signifier — normal Gregor — that is displaced by the nameless insect. As insect, Gregor now signifies non-functionality and embarrassment tied to his inability to perform his function of making money. In insect form, Gregor has no chance to present his line and hope to close a deal. His functionality canceled, Gregor has become an insect. In the allegorical reading, fate prevails. The transformation to insect can be read as absurd because it is unmotivated; the bug-like condition befalls Gregor. The story then becomes about how the family copes with this unexpected situation. Allegory ultimately presupposes contingency. In Walter Benjamin’s trenchant phrase, allegory depends upon an unsettling belief: “Knowledge of evil therefore has no object” (233). By contrast, a symbolic reading of The Metamorphosis takes Gregor’s condition as insect to be a hidden latency within his history. What is shocking about the story is the immediacy with which Kafka’s opening sentence reveals the immanent. The interpretive point to grasp is that this condition did not just occur. Gregor’s fall has been a gradual decline in process over years. In my reading, the insect state is not a sudden superimposition upon Gregor; it is what becomes manifest when layers of habitual conventions and viewpoints


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are peeled away to expose the inner core of Gregor’s annulled embodiment. Gregor’s being-in-the-world divulges a lack of will power, a fundamental anomie, that entraps him within his own stasis. Da-sein, by definition, always presupposes choice. What is unique about Gregor’s repulsive condition is the way his choice has progressively been suspended and his will power has subsequently disintegrated to the point that his choice becomes an automated redundancy — or simply a non-choice. Da-sein paralyzed symbolizes existence as the stasis of non-choice. Life happens to Gregor, rather than Gregor asserting his desires and imposing his will on the world about him. Gregor succumbs to the habitual routine inherent within an enervating monotony. He exists under the unappreciative gaze of parents and business superiors. The foundation of Gregor’s consciousness has become oppression. His only outlet from this condition takes flight in illusions: his attraction to the model in the magazine photo that he has framed and hung on the wall of his room. Gregor makes frames, with a fretsaw, and this activity forms his only hobby. He frames his principal illusion. His other abiding illusion is that his sister can play the violin with an ability that is at concert level. However, when she performs for the lodgers, they recoil in disapproval from what they hear. If Grete cannot entertain three typical lodgers, how can she ever have any chance of gaining entry into the leading musical academy in the city? Her lack of talent leaves her as remote from a career in music as Gregor’s appearance leaves him removed from a career as a salesman. Grete’s basic laziness assures that she could never activate the discipline to sustain a musical career. By Part III of the story, we see how quickly her desire to take care of her brother has all but evaporated. What began as an apparently care-full responsibility quickly turns into a self-centered resentment. In being cut out of the family, Gregor reverts to what a Freudian reading would identify as reversion to oedipal castration. Part II of the story ends with Gregor’s questioning “was this still his father?” (27). The primordial attempt to reconnect with the family through the sister reveals how fundamentally lost Gregor has become. In Heideggerian terms, Gregor shows himself as the essence of insignificance: “ the groundlessness of inauthentic being in the they constantly tears understanding away from projecting authentic possibilities ” (167). Gregor reveals himself as an isolate creature detached from any possibility of activating an authentic project to which he can commit himself. In his allegorical reading of The Metamorphosis, Stanley Corngold commits himself to the reconstituted Cartesian dualism that typifies the postmodern metaphysics found first in Walter Benjamin and later in Paul de Man.

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In Complex Pleasure, Corngold reasserts his commitment to “Benjamin’s valorization of allegory over symbol” (44). Corngold assumes that linguistically based consciousness exists as our primary mode of being and that this realm remains detached from material existence as thought remains forever incapable of achieving its presumed ideal of presenting a unified picture of the empirical order. Complex Pleasure subscribes to a belief in what de Man calls the “hyperawareness of recursiveness projected into literature as its basic character” (20). This position ultimately maintains that literature exists in a mode of dissociation as the “allegory of its unintelligibility” (20). By contrast with allegory, symbolism would then be seen as blindly ideological in asserting a coherent picture of organic interconnections. Corngold’s interpretation of The Metamorphosis, first put forth in Franz Kafka: The Necessity of Form, exhibits the basic dualistic underpinnings of the allegorical approach: “In shifting incessantly the relation of Gregor’s mind and body, Kafka shatters the suppositious unity of ideal tenor and bodily vehicle within the metaphor” (56). According to this line of thought, Kafka has so pressured the literal sense of the material vehicle that he ultimately exposes its inability to contain figural significance. Corngold’s dualism leads him to stress how “Gregor’s opaque body occludes his awareness of self ” (76). Corngold sees Kafka as insisting that attention to the things themselves overloads them with a significance that they cannot inherently reveal. In one sentence, Corngold’s thesis insists, “The intent to literalize a metaphor produces a being wholly divorced from empirical reality” (68). With this position, we can see how Corngold presupposes a chasm between the mental world of thought and the biological world of material objects. In a distinction between presentation and presented, the emphasis here on the presented suggests how the underlying terms of this order are constituted within a subject and object division so that never the twain shall meet. From this perspective, the idea of Gregor as dung beetle involves what John Locke would call a mental object that does not function adequately as a material analogue for a state of mind. The result is that the vehicle breaks down because it cannot correspond with the intimation of human existence objectified as insect. In my view, if we insist on reading the insect as a metaphor, we should be considering this extreme metaphor as an instance of transumptive analepsis, not as a typical metaphor. Nevertheless, Corngold contends that allegory activates playfulness over significance in its “radical disjunction separating Gregor Samsa from the vermin” (85). This interpretation depends relentlessly on the premise that linguistic description always exceeds and never captures the objectified thing through which it is presented. The postmodern allegorical reading promotes the claim that the subject and object can never cohere as one because, as Ferdinand de Saussure


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pointed out, the linguistic term is grounded in non-presence rather than a referential reactivation of the thing itself. Words create meaning in relational interaction with other words, not in literal correspondence with an empirical order. From this position, allegorical postmodernism debunks symbolism for its presumed sense of immersion. Corngold writes, “At every point the symbolic interpretation bespeaks the contrary of the allegorical: it invests the self with continuity, meaningfulness, expansiveness, and the prospect of reconciliation” (88). In opposition to the symbolic, Corngold proclaims that Kafka’s story powerfully attests to “the root separateness” of material experience and signifying consciousness (87). Allegorical dualism presupposes an innate skepticism about identity as a first principle. In one of the best known sections of the Treatise (“Of Personal Identity” — Book I, Part IV, Section VI), David Hume defines identity as a principle of solid unity. When he applies this criterion to human personality in an effort to define human identity, the concept breaks down, because a subject exists in a temporal flow and is forever changing. Our understanding of another, according to Hume, constitutes at best a bundle of impressions that are unstable and can never capture the other’s mutability. In allowing for this absurd flux, we attempt nevertheless to abstract identity on some other level: “In order to justify to ourselves this absurdity, we often feign some new and unintelligible principle, that connects the objects together, and prevents their interruption or variation. Thus we feign the continu’d existence of the perceptions of our senses, to remove the interruption; and run into the notion of a soul, and self, and substance, to disguise the variation” (254). In one of the Treatise’s more dramatic moves, which underscores his skepticism, Hume concludes that human identity exists merely as a fiction. This strategy reappears in postmodernism. The fictionality of all consciousness, in its being separate from the so-called world of natural science, proves to be the prevailing metaphysical outlook of postmodernism. To phenomenologists, the story of Husserl’s dissolution of the mind-body division — the subject and object problematic — is well-known. Suffice it to say that Husserl’s concept of intentionality develops a discipline to read existence as transcendent. Hierarchical levels of sacred and profane, or human and animal, are shown to contain elements of the one present within the other. Where the symbolist discovers connection among levels of experience aspiring toward monism, the allegorist maintains an aporetic incompatability sustaining dualism. The modern allegorical theorist reads the symbol as an hypostatization of the concept into substantive form. In her account of allegory in Benjamin and de Man, Doris Sommer describes how “allegory is the recurrent waking from an endless dream of absolute presence” (70).

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Committed to such “unsettling” disruptions, Corngold can only conclude that Gregor awakens at the beginning of the story into “nonpresence — that is to say, the nonnaturalistically experienceable character – of what is signified” (85). Corngold sees Kafka’s project as part of Expressionism that reacts against the tradition of organic monism featured in German idealism. A symbolic reading operates from another metaphysical perspective than the allegorical way of thinking. The symbolist is motivated by a sense of how the self is always already implicated within otherness. Heidegger advances this implication through embodiment. From this view, what is significant about Gregor is not so much his physical form as his connection or disconnection in relation to others. Maurice Natanson observes that the body forever extends outward: “Left with language that cannot communicate, Gregor’s bridge to the world is his body, its movement, its whereabouts” (108). The realization that an uncaring society blocks this bridge to otherness by treating others as functions rather than humans, reveals a critique of the insensitivity at the core of social interaction in the they world. In my approach to the story, society reduces Gregor to his latent insectile condition; at the same time, I trust that I have made clear my attendant view that Gregor bears responsibility for having passively submitted to this process of inauthentic reduction by never having activated authentic possibilities from within himself. Just as Corngold can bolster his allegorical position by association with theorists like Benjamin and de Man, so too the symbolic reading has its theoretical support. I would align my claim that Gregor’s insectile condition reveals his inherently inauthentic consciousness with reference to two complimentary theories. First would be Julia Kristeva’s the abject. In Powers of Horror, Kristeva undertakes a reading of how exclusion from human connection, in the form of abjection, “disturbs identity, system, order” (4). Kristeva, of course, casts the abject within a psychoanalytical model. The abject then becomes “the ‘object’ of primal repression” (12). This failure to extend out into the world stems from, what Juliet Flower MacCannell sees as “the repression of the maternal, [the failure] of separating the child from the mother” (72). Kristeva typically insists on an interchange between a subject and the world with fluid interactions that she refers to as liminal — similar in sense to what Heidegger means with his term transcendent. While primal repression is “the ability of the speaking being, always already haunted by the Other, to divide, reject, and repeat” (12), the abject descends into static paralysis blocking authentic engagement with the other. Gregor has no authentic engagement with others, and thus there are no flows of interaction to and from his organism. A subject must extend outward into the social order and not regress backwards, as Gregor does, into familial incorporation.


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Kristeva explains that “the abject appears in order to uphold ‘I’ within the Other” (15). When that intimation cannot be developed, the abject deteriorates into the repulsive and uncanny residue associated with defilement. The abject invades and overflows barriers such as paternal authority and social regulation that attempt to stabilize subjective formations within a cultural order. When the abject overwhelms, the object world breaks down. Sara Beardsworth describes this phenomenon in the following terms: “There is no object world because objects have no significance. Thus the correlation of the desiring ego and the object of desire is lacking” (83). The abject thus contests the superego, which functions to drive desire outward and away from the family. By ignoring the exogamous force of the superego, a subject resists authority and flaunts the social order through opting for that which is taboo — that which is abject. Resentment of paternal authority can override conscience and turn one toward the socially perverse. Under these conditions of severance, Kristeva proclaims that “the abject is the violence of mourning for an ‘object’ that has always already been lost” (15). In this psychoanalytic vein, Deleuze and Guattari will read Gregor’s demise as reversion back toward re-assimilation into the forbidden and lost maternal: “Given over to his becoming-animal, Gregor finds himself re-Oedipalized by his family and goes to his death” (39). What psychoanalysis reads as re-oedipalization, phenomenology sees as a submission to inauthenticity. The Metamorphosis is rich in abject imagery. One such image that deserves to be foregrounded involves the crucial moment when Gregor finally decides to open the door, the narrative explains how “he actually got the key moving and paid no attention to the fact that he was undoubtedly hurting himself in some way, for a brown liquid came out of his mouth, flowed over the key, and dripped on the floor” (11). Gregor’s key, which is on the inside in his room, becomes covered by an overflowing stain from within Gregor. This is the moment when Gregor realizes that he does not need a locksmith. He has unlocked not just the door, but the waste that is within himself. What remains to be done is to interpret this stain that has been brought forth. The second theory that I would call upon to promote a symbolic reading of the story looks toward The Symbolism of Evil, in which Paul Ricoeur argues that “the stain” constitutes the most primordial of opaque symbols. Ricoeur says that the literal meaning of stain operates analogically as allegory, because it points to an external context of defilement. However, Ricoeur insists that exploring the kernel that haunts situations of defilement reveals the stain as guilt over a failure to assume responsibility for one’s plight: “ defilement becomes a pure symbol when it no longer suggests a real stain at all, but only

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signifies the servile will” (154–55). Inhering Gregor as abject or Gregor as defilement, I find the “servile will” — that pusillanimous surrender that has trapped Gregor inside an endless debt to others. In Don Ihde’s study of Ricoeur, he develops the important point about how Ricoeur sees the symbolic stain as both a pervasive force that colors an entire world and an integrative force synthesizing several powerful meanings. For instance, Ihde proclaims that “despair is not only the consciousness of being enslaved; it is the consciousness of sin without promise” (112). Richard Kearney concurs when he explains Ricoeur’s theory of symbolism as showing how “a symbol works by enigmatic suggestion or evocation — it designates a surplus of meaning which exceeds the obvious one” (45). In the context of authenticity, the servile will is unthinkable; by contrast, repeated submission to the exigencies of the they world results in what Ricoeur calls “a freedom that enslaves itself, affects itself, and infects itself by its own [refusal of] choice” (152). To thematize the stain, in the light of Ricoeur’s analysis of what inheres within defilement, suggests that Gregor’s corruption comes from internalized guilt. With Da-sein displaced from the center of Gregor’s existence, guilt, despair, and anomie saturate the inner core of Gregor’s being. In Kevin Sweeney’s “Competing Theories of Identity in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis,” we can see how this complex story inspires a range of conflicting readings. Sweeney turns this very point into his thesis by saying that the story can be understood as presenting an instance of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of polysemy. Sweeney writes, “The first section presents a dualist conception of the person: Gregor is a consciousness disembodied from his original body and locked into an alien organism. In the second section, behaviorist and materialist views challenge the earlier theory. Finally, in the third section, both theories are countered by a social-constructionist theory of the self and personal identity” (140–41). In an ambitious undertaking, Sweeney attempts to read these three perspectives as being in dialogue with each other. The first part of the story presents what Sweeney sees as “Kafka exploring a Lockean–Cartesian theory of self and personal identity” (141). As Gregor begins to lose his decision-making capacity, the second part of the story shifts into another perspective. This reductive perspective, as Sweeney develops it, entails a naturalist mode. In naturalism, whether by way of Emile Zola or Frank Norris, people revert to an incipient animalism when social amenities no longer sustain the veneer of civility. Kafka’s story contains a pattern of references that support this reading. The pattern begins with the manager outside Gregor’s bedroom door saying, “That was the voice of an animal” (10). The pattern culminates with Gregor’s penultimate question to himself, “Was he an animal, that music could move him so?” (36). But the music


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merely moves him toward incest, and so the sister’s view that “this animal persecutes us” actually proves more perspicacious than she could ever realize (38). Sweeney concludes that Part II evolves into a behaviorism. In my view, Sweeney’s analysis appears more to justify the term naturalism — especially since the story involves no attempt to condition Gregor toward a productive role. Behaviorist assumptions have much in common with naturalism, but behaviorism implies productivity through positive conditioning. My reading sees Gregor as neither receiving from others nor activating within himself any positive directions for his life. The notion behind behaviorism is that controlled modifications can impose a positive structure upon animal energies. This same presupposition operates, as I see it, in Sweeney’s third perspective, which urges the perspective that social constructivism reinforces identity. The supposed monism that Sweeney isolates for analysis in Parts II and III appears to me as a very instinctive set of impulses related to survival — what Freud called drives and what Jacques Lacan called needs. In Sweeney’s analysis I detect a bifurcation, since choice here is deferred to an external imposition upon the biological form. Whether by way of behavioral scientist or social engineer, choice is supplied to the subject from an external source. Therefore, the perspectives that Sweeney presents in Parts II and III ultimately differ from a phenomenological account of Da-sein. All three of Sweeney’s perspectives, in the end, appear to me to issue from different forms of dualism. The Heideggerian concept of Da-sein implies two points: first, Da-sein is a form of being, as thing, capable of showing itself in activity; and secondly, Da-sein is a form of being, as consciousness, simultaneously capable of showing itself to itself. This latter point posits that consciousness exerts reflexive control over what is shown. However, the interrogative mode at the core of Gregor’s consciousness suggests that, long ago, Gregor abdicated the taking of responsibility to show himself to himself. All the questions that Gregor asks of himself reveal either a disposition to allow others to make his decisions for him, or a deferral of responsibility to a future time when Gregor will presumably take control of his life. In the story, Gregor exposes to others his absence of choice. In this refusal Gregor lacks authenticity; therefore, I conclude, that the they world of inauthentic identity, what Sweeney calls social construction, has taken control of Gregor’s existence. The one common thread through Sweeney’s three perspectives is that he aligns his interpretation with Corngold in seeing Gregor as a character lacking in choice. I agree that when Gregor exposes himself to others, he has become the essence of insignificance; nevertheless, the tragic element of the story is how Gregor has allowed himself to reach this point. His Da-sein is diminished because Gregor has relinquished choice. My reading differs from Corngold and Sweeney in

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pressing the claim that Gregor bears culpability for his plight by allowing his Da-sein to fall dormant. Gregor Samsa has lived a life of blind service to others: service to country, service to family, and service to firm. He has internalized this service as a debt. In now living to work off his parents’ debt, Gregor shows how he has yet to free himself from the familial order. His neurosis is to repeat an endless obligation that enchains him. When Gregor reveals himself as the insect, we see eventually that his parents and sister were always already capable of working. Not only can the family support itself, but his father reveals that he has stashed away capital that could have been put toward freeing Gregor from some of the onus that he has undertaken on behalf of the family. When the others put their labor and capital to work, Gregor’s assumed identity is disclosed as vain. He had imagined himself as the center of the family, yet the family gets along just fine without him. In the world of the family, Gregor had been just as much a function as he had been in the world of business. This final intuition of inutility leaves Gregor with the “conviction that he would have to disappear” (39). In this social order that which has no utility simply attains no identity and is therefore disposable. After Gregor’s corpse is removed, the family feels liberated in being free of a useless burden. They all quit their jobs, and they go away on holiday. In the final image of the story, Grete stands up “and stretched her young body” (42). At this moment, the parents become aware of their daughter’s budding sensuality and realize that they can now “find her a good husband” (42). What that means is that the parents are deciding not to go back to work because they realize that this “good-looking, shapely girl” will fetch a nice dowry (42). In this final scene Kafka dramatizes how the children in this family simply exist as commodities. The parents will trade on the labor or desirability of their children in order to ensure that they can live off this capital without themselves having to exert much effort. This intention constitutes Kafka’s dark depiction of human relation in a world that I had described at the outset as one of care-less and profit-more. Parental self-interest engenders a debt that diminishes the child to a point of insectile insignificance. If the child grows up and assumes this debt in the vainglorious belief that he can save those about him, he will never realize that he is sacrificing himself for the salvation of people who ultimately do not deserve to be saved. By committing to that debt, Gregor never finds and activates his own desire. He too relents into an “indifference to everything [that] was much too deep” (35). Gregor’s vision becomes too familiar; this is the significance of his ever deteriorating eyesight. In creating characters like Gregor Samsa, Kafka has revolutionized literature. The traditional program for literature began with the Greek dramatists


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and their creation of protagonists who evolved through a serious of internal dilemmas and external conflicts in opposition to antagonists, finally reaching a heightened stage of self-illumination. In his Poetics, Aristotle refers to this final stage as the hero’s anagnorisis. For centuries literature proceeded on the presupposition that the heroic figure could always attain this destined representation of himself as some idealized truth that transcended his mortal form. Kafka, of course, is highly suspicious of this august claim and endeavors to write stories that will demythologize literature’s inherent program. Kafka writes stories to show men trapped in personal, familial, and occupational quagmires that cannot be so easily transformed into Longinian flights of transport toward some uplifting ideal of self-knowledge. Gregor Samsa is so entrapped within his daily existence that he cannot realize any liberating perspective to free himself from his own deep immersion in habits and influences that are paralyzing him. And so Kafka has, in effect, inverted the classical paradigm. Kafka presents characters blocked by their own inability to assert their own choices. Rather than offering us an ideal outside of ourselves for which we should aim, Kafka is attempting to move us to look more closely at our mundane order and question the strangulating spider web of our commitments that we so readily take-for-granted. Kafka sees traditional literature as participating in a flight from self that keeps humans blindly entangled in compulsive routines of which they are little aware. This awareness may very well explain why the form that best fits Kafka is generally the short story or novella. Longer narratives are much more inclined to lose their readers if they do not provide some sublime redemption. To write the text in which anagnorisis proves unattainable counters the expectations built into the traditional literary experience. By sustaining the Sisyphean ordeal of forever attempting to break out of a compulsion and never getting beyond, Kafka places inordinate strains on the reader living through this experience. As I see it, these strains involve a compression into a more succinct form than the expanse of a novel. If Kafka has any literary avatar, it would be Socrates, the gadfly. Kafka believes that the question, rather than any ideal, is the beginning of genuine experience. To understand Kafka’s aesthetic, we need to grasp this distinction between the program in classical mimetic literature with its inherent pedagogical influence persuading the reader to emulate an ideal and the program with a ground in phenomenological concerns urging the reader to question his or her unique experience. This shift from a mimetic paradigm to an interrogative mode is captured in a sentence from Louis Menand: “The traditional defense of literature as a special way of knowing has been displaced in our time by its defense as a subverter of established forms of knowledge, a kind of writing that,

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without imposing a new normative structure on us, disrupts conventional habits of perception and the ideological assumptions those habits are understood to enforce” (7). As subversive gadfly, Kafka lays the foundation for theoretical developments like the one that Heidegger would develop in Being and Time. To understand the context for the world that Kafka’s protagonists inhabit, one can do no better than to study Chapter Four of Division One in Being and Time. It is here that Heidegger provides the most sustained account of how inauthenticity can trap a hapless person in blinding repetition. Only when Da-sein accepts its inherent imbeddedness and incompletion, and then aims to be more than itself, can one relocate oneself on a path toward authenticity. As focused empathy, Da-sein seeks to extend itself. In the inauthentic mode, the things of the world present themselves to us as appearance and semblance. Intersubjectivity presents itself as a set of regulations in that this they world of tradition elicits from us preprogrammed responses that conform to conventionalized expectations. Individual “mine-ness” becomes overwritten by “they-ness.” In this condition, Da-sein is covered by inauthenticity, but we must never forget that “Da-sein is a being which I myself am, its being is in each case mine” (108). Within inauthenticity, by contrast, the self operates mechanically in a mode in which it could and eventually does care less. This anaesthetized condition within quotidian time conditions one to repetition. In a novel, when a character becomes trapped in a redundant cycle, the author will frequently jump ahead. A chapter might open with the phrase “years passed.” We know that the character has remained locked in an inauthentic world of redundancy, and that the author is fast-forwarding to the trauma that will disrupt the paradigm of inauthentic repetition. Narratologists calls the mindless, daily reduplication, day after day, of inauthentic existence — “iterative” time. This predictable array of activities and responses — a robotic cause–effect set of sequences — reduces the human to the sub-Da-sein level of instinct. Kafka has taken us inside the drives that impel iterative time. Hawks or panthers behave according to pre-determined imperatives coded within their automatic capacities; they mimetically activate innate codes as part of a vast ecological system encompassing checks and balances. For these creatures, not to behave redundantly as genetically conditioned would be impossible, but animal and insectile creatures simply are not part of what Heidegger means by his term “innerworldly beings.” Animals and insects operate in a homeostatic system that demands their prearranged responses to external conditions. This system can be dissected, like a clock can be taken apart to examine its ticking, but no part of this system will ever bespeak a mineness engendering inherent possibilities toward becoming more than itself.


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In the inauthentic mode, where care has been desensitized, rivalries come to the fore. Heidegger intimates that the they world contains its own form of cannibalistic predation: “Being with one another in the they is not at all a selfcontained, indifferent side-by-sideness, but a tense, ambiguous keeping track of each other, a secretive, reciprocal listening-in. Under the mask of the forone-another, the against-one-another is at play” (163). Rivalry negates care so that projects no longer emanate from within but rather in reaction to the other projected as antagonist, slave, pawn, scapegoat, or some other demeaning erasure of the other’s right to his or her Da-sein. This is the world that Kafka has so ably depicted in his stories. An analysis of this turmoil underscores Heidegger’s point about how “the groundlessness of inauthentic being in the they constantly tears understanding away from projecting authentic possibilities ” (167). Inauthentic structures, such as the master–slave dialectic, inherently convince a blinded subject that he or she does not have to care about the other, and thus Da-sein’s capacity for extending itself by taking responsibility for others gets shut down. A human being’s typical everyday existence remains, unreflexively, engrossed within a blinding inauthenticity: “This indifference of the everydayness of Da-sein is not nothing; but rather, a positive phenomenal characteristic. All existing is how it is out of this kind of being, and back into it. We call this everyday indifference of Da-sein averageness” (41). Kafka’s art is the revelation of the average in which we become ensconced when we do not connect with each other through genuinely shared concern. Remaining in this average mode for extended periods can reduce a person to an insectile level in which one would ultimately have no hope of reactivating Da-sein. Kafka’s art pushes averageness beyond itself. For Gregor his life becomes too predictably regulated by others. Kafka expresses how that most common of structures — the family — can weigh a person down with its imposition of averageness. In the twentieth century context, the average becomes increasingly determined by economic conditions that have people seeking to take advantage of one another by imposing indebtedness. Kafka’s The Metamorphosis reveals to us how an unthinking acceptance of inherited identity, structured as familial debt, transforms Gregor Samsa into a dung beetle — into a man without Da-sein. Saint Peter’s College NOTES 1 I have relied upon the Stambaugh translation of Zeit und Zein in preparing this paper. In Professor Stambaugh’s rendering of the German text, she has complied with Heidegger’s stated wish that “Da-sein” should be hyphenated in order to convey the sense of how existence is not so readily present. I too feel comfortable with this intimation of “thrownness” that adheres within the

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hyphenated version of the term that Heidegger has taken from Kant and Hegel and reworked to suit his version of phenomenology. 2 I have relied upon the Corngold translation of Die Verwandlung for my Kafka quotations in English. After comparing five translations, I found that Corngold’s careful rendering of phrasing and nuance provides a version in English that comes very close to the German. I find it intriguing that several of the notes, accompanying the translation, readily illustrate differences between the phenomenological and deconstructive positions. For instance, in his footnote explaining Kafka’s thinking for shifting from herauskommen to hinauskommen in the manuscript for what is now the first sentence of the eighth paragraph, Corngold explains that the revision objectifies point of view and shifts understanding outside the body: “Gregor suffers his situation passively and at the same time appears to give a report on it: hence, he is already at some remove from himself” (43). What Corngold reads as a distancing from “the speaker’s body,” the phenomenologist would read as reflexivity. Drew Leder explains how we only look at our bodies and, in a sense, respond to what is always taken-for-granted in moments of dysfunction. Such attention, for the phenomenologist, is engaged, not removed to a distance. Therefore, different interpretations illustrate how readily one’s starting point determines what one can see in the text. Obviously, Professor Corngold’s interpretation stands ably on its own, as he is regarded by many as our leading interpreter of Kafka. His most recent book, Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka reconfirms as much. My position, by way of phenomenology, looks to provide an alternative approach to the story. It differs from Corngold’s starting point, which presupposes the mind-body problem as inherently insurmountable. Corngold is therefore quite comfortable with the deconstructive program that mirrors the mind– body split in signifier-signified incompatibility. By contrast, I adhere to the critique of Cartesian dualism that Heidegger presents in Section Six of Being and Time. Heidegger implies that any interpretive method that already sees itself as other than experience is an epistemology detached from experience. Heidegger urges us to open ourselves to grasp how otherness reveals itself as already indwelling. To approach being and interrogate being demands not distance but receptivity. Heidegger thus presents phenomenology as a mode of apprehension, rather than comprehension. Corngold, in accord with Benjamin and de Man, holds to another set of metaphysical premises. Because of our oppositions, criticism exists in a healthy state, and we should all be encouraged to continue developing each one’s perspective to the fullest of one’s abilities.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Beardsworth, Sara. Julia Kristeva: Psychoanalysis and Modernity. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1963), John Osborne (trans.). London: Verso, 1998. Corngold, Stanley. Complex Pleasure: Forms of Feeling in German Literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. —. “The Metamorphosis: Metamorphosis of the Metaphor.” In Franz Kafka: The Necessity of Form. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975), Dana Polan (trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny” (1919), James Strachey (ed. and trans.). In Standard Edition 17. London: Hogarth, rpt. 1955. Gallagher, Shaun. The Inordinance of Time. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998.



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Haar, Michel. Heidegger and the Essence of Man. William McNeil (trans.). Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time (1927), Joan Stambaugh (trans.). Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), second ed., L.A. Selby-Bigge and P.H. Nidditch (eds.). Oxford: Clarendon, 1978. Ihde, Don. “Hermeneutic Phenomenology: The Symbolism of Evil.” In Hermeneutic Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971. Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis (1915). In The Metamorphosis: Translation, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism, Stanley Corngold (trans. and ed.). New York: Norton, 1996. Kearney, Richard. “Between Imagination and Language.” In On Paul Ricoeur: The Owl of Minerva. Aldershot, Great Britain: Ashgate, 2004. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Leon S. Roudiez (trans.). New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Leder, Drew. The Absent Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. MacCannell, Juliet Flower. “Kristeva’s Horror.” In The Kristeva Critical Reader, John Lechte and Mary Zournazi (eds.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003. Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince (1516), George Bull (trans.), rev. ed. New York: Penguin, 2003. Mansbach, Abraham. Beyond Subjectivism: Heidegger on Language and the Human Being. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 2002. McAfee, Noëlle. “Abject Strangers: Toward an Ethics of Respect.” In Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva’s Writing, Kelly Oliver (ed.). New York: Routledge, 1993. Menand, Louis. Discovering Modernism: T. S. Eliot and His Context. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem (1949). New York: Penguin, 1998. Natanson, Maurice. “The Metamorphosis.” In The Erotic Bird: Phenomenology in Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Olafson, Frederick A. Heidegger and the Ground of Ethics: A Study of Mitsein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Raffoul, François. Heidegger and the Subject, David Pettigrew and Gregory Recco (trans.). Amherst, New York: Humanity, 1998. Richardson, S.J., William J. Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, fourth ed. New York: Fordham University Press, 2003. Ricoeur, Paul. The Symbolism of Evil (1960), Emerson Buchanan (trans.). Boston: Beacon, 1969. Russon, John. Human Experience: Philosophy, Neurosis, and the Elements of Everyday Life. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. Sommer, Doris. “Allegory and Dialectics: A Match Made in Romance.” boundary 2 18 (1991): 60–82. Sweeney, Kevin W. “Competing Theories of Identity in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.” Mosaic 23 (Fall 1990): 23–35; rpt. in The Metamorphosis: Translation, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism, Stanley Corngold (trans. and ed.). New York: Norton, 1996.

RAYMOND J. WILSON III

TIME IN POST-MODERN FICTION: TIME’S ARROW, T H E F R E N C H L I E U T E N A N T ’ S W O M A N, AND “THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET”

Theorists sometimes define post-modern fiction as a mode of narrative that departs from realism.1 However, a study of the implications of time manipulation by post-modern authors in the partial context of Paul Ricoeur’s threevolume Time and Narrative indicates that post-modern fiction’s supposed break with realism consists of an apparent, surface fissure. Some fiction writers experience a drive to express aspects of reality that, while not readily apparent, are nonetheless real. Their seeming departure from realism results, ironically, from this very drive for realism. Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow is the first case in point. The novel begins with the narrator coming out of darkness surrounded by doctors. He blacks out again, finds himself lying down in his garden, throws himself erect, and begins pruning roses. Two things puzzle him: his body doesn’t obey his will and he finds himself walking backwards. His first conversation occurs after he takes a bottle of hair lotion to a store and gives it to a lady at the counter. They speak: “Dug. Dug.,” says the lady in the pharmacy. “Dug,” I join in. “Oo y’rrah?” “Aid ut y’rrah?” (7).

As he walks away backward, the narrator realizes what was said: “How’re you, today?” “Good. How’re you?” “Good. Good.”

Amis’s reader gets the point: time, in this novel, flows backward. Backward time flow has consequences: for one, the narrator experiences his life as being a passenger in his body, since he cannot change what has already happened; and this has grammatical consequences for the narration. The narrator sometimes refers in the third person to the body in which he resides; he calls the main character by his name: Tod2 does this; Tod does 395 A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana LXXXVI, 395–413. © 2007 Springer.

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that, etc. On occasion the narrator uses “we” to describe the entity he travels within. At other times he says “I,” accepting an identity with Tod. The narrator says that it’s not hard to adapt one’s ear to the backward sounds and know what is being said, but for convenience he’ll record the actual letters forward and only put the words and sentences in reverse order. While the surrounding narration is in normal speech, each conversation begins at the bottom of the page and moves up with the words arranged right to left, sentence by sentence. One thinks of reading from bottom to top, right to left in order to understand, but, remarkably, this proves unnecessary. The reader easily understands the conversations by moving his or her eyes in the usual order and thus encountering the last sentence first and reading the last word of each sentence first and proceeding in reverse order. This fits with an insight by Paul Ricoeur, who says, “Frustration cannot be the last word” (II, 25). Ricoeur posits a contract between writer and reader: “I will distort this work,” Ricoeur imagines the author saying to the reader, “you give it shape – to your advantage” (II, 25). “If this contract is itself not to be a deception, the author,” Ricoeur continues, “has to introduce new conventions” derived from the old forms “by means of irony, parody, or derision” (II, 25). A reader may come away from the post-modern experience of reading Time’s Arrow bemused by a sense of an odd, eccentric literary quirk, even an exercise in fantasy. Thus, it comes as a shock to realize that the best science of the era when Amis wrote the book endorsed the concept of reversing time’s arrow. Stephen W. Hawking in A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes, published in 1988, three years before Amis’s novel, says that we find ourselves in a bewildering world. We want to make sense of what we see around us. That is what humans are trying to do when they pursue science. Although Hawking does not specifically use the term post-modern, it is a mark of the post-modern when the results of scientific exploration prove even more bewildering than the phenomena that the scientists were trying to understand. Hawking explains that the laws of science do not distinguish between the forward and backward directions of time. He asks us to suppose “that God decided that the universe should finish up in a state of high order but that it didn’t matter what state it started in.” He thinks that at “early times the universe would probably be in a disordered state. This would mean that disorder would decrease with time” (146, Hawking’s italics). He describes backwards events just as Amis’s narrator does. Hawking says, “You would see broken cups gathering themselves together and jumping back onto the table” (146). One of many examples in Amis’s Time’s Arrow is the insight that “Tennis is a pretty dumb game the fuzzy ball jumps out of the net,

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or out of the chicken wire at the back of the court, and the four of us bat it around until it is pocketed – quite arbitrarily, it seems to me – by the server” (13). The universe is expanding, and Hawking wondered what would happen “if and when the universe stopped expanding and began to contract” (149). “At first, I believed,” says Hawking, guided by his solution to a set of equations, that people “in the contracting phase would live their lives backward: they would die before they were born and get younger as the universe contracted” (150). He argues that human beings in such a universe “would have a psychological arrow of time that was backward. They would remember events in the future, and not remember events in the past” (146). This is the exact situation depicted by Amis. Hawking later realized that he “had made a mistake” (150). Even so, what seemed to be Amis’s strange literary experiment is actually a fictional expression of the latest scientific insight. This proves to be a disorienting contribution to our post-modern condition of uncertainty. The depiction of the real proves to be the prime element of continuity between modernism and post-modernism. Paul Ricoeur chose three novels for an examination of the “fictive experience of time”: “Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, Der Zauberberg [The Magic Mountain] by Thomas Mann, and A la recherche du temps perdu [Remembrance of Things Past] by Marcel Proust.” These works are famous for being examples of modernism. In addition to these being “tales of time” and “tales about time,” Ricoeur picked them partly because each explores “the lived experience [of time] of the characters.” He feels that they fit the special definition of mimesis that he developed in the first volume of Time and Narrative; mimesis is the term for an attempt to represent reality. The novels embody “varieties of temporal experience that only fiction can explore” (II, 101). We ask a question here. If the time-forward depictions of “ordinary temporality” in these modernist novels present a perfect congruence with Ricoeur’s advanced and nuanced definition of mimesis, the literary imitation of reality, what are the phenomenological implications of the reversed directions of the arrow of time? Perhaps they still express a mode of imitating reality, but one that embodies “extraordinary temporality.” One implication has to do with the issues of moral consciousness and the internal sense of responsibility. We see a clue in a comment Amis makes in his “Afterword.” Amis tells us that he was inspired, in part, by “a certain paragraph – a famous one – by Kurt Vonnegut” (168). In Slaughter-House Five, another novel that breaks from the time conventions of realistic fiction, Kurt Vonnegut writes of his character Billy Pilgrim; as Billy watches a movie about World War II on television, “He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the movie backwards” (73):

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American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation. The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new. When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again. The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn’t in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. (74–75)

We might see Amis’s entire novel as a transposed extrapolation from this passage to explore its ethical dimension. If we ask for the point of Vonnegut’s backward movie, we might say that the wonderful outcome of the backward action dramatizes the moral wrongness of the forward action. Vonnegut, as a prisoner of war, saw the effect of the Dresden fire raid by the U.S. Army Air Force on a beautiful, undefended city, which had no war industries. He gives his character the same front-row seat on the receiving end of the bombing. The main thrust of the book is to make the point that something was morally wrong with this act. In the novel, Vonnegut allows an Air Force General to express the contrary view; the officer explains that the raid was kept secret from the American people for twenty-three years, although, of course, the Germans knew about it: “Why would they keep it a secret so long?” asked the general’s girlfriend. “For fear that a lot of bleeding hearts might not think it was such a wonderful thing to do” replied the general (191). Obviously the general is no “bleeding heart” for, later, the general tells Billy that the destruction of Dresden “had to be done” (198, Vonnegut’s italics). Billy agrees, and in this agreement that the raid was inevitable and thus morally unchallengeable, we detect a clue to one motive for the time-distortion move to the post-modern in fiction, the reader reverses the moral implication, because the reader re-orders the events into forward time. This reader involvement dramatizes the ethical point. Vonnegut speaks in his introductory chapter of his plans for a conventional novel to depict his war experience; it was to be an anti-war novel. His


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preparations for writing included a vast chart of all the characters and actions, but he couldn’t get the book itself written. Eventually his wife told him that if he did finish, it would be made into a movie: “you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra” and his war buddy by “John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them” (14). When he’d tell people he was writing a war novel, people would often ask if it was an anti-war book, and Vonnegut would say, “I guess” (3). Then one friend said, “Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead?” (3, Vonnegut’s italics). The futility of writing an anti-war war novel in the conventional mode provokes the writing of the post-modern book in which the character moves about in time: Vonnegut’s Slaughter-House Five. The departure from time-convention breaks the book out of the sense of inevitability, conditioned by realistic narrative; and the unconventional treatment of time primarily constitutes the book’s leap into the post-modern to highlight the issue of the Dresden fire raid’s immorality. The reversed arrow of time highlights a moral issue in Amis’s Time’s Arrow, as well. The narrator arrives, one day, at Auschwitz. He supervises the creation of a race from fire: “The patients, still dead, were delivered” from the ovens, “on a stretcherlike apparatus,” and “stacked carefully” in “the Chamber” (120). Gas from the bodies fills the chamber but gets sucked through vents and is concentrated in pellets. The narrator “personally removed the pellets of Zyklon B and entrusted them to the pharmacist in his white coat” (121). The narrator does not say what happens to the pellets, but we can extrapolate the way Billy did in Vonnegut’s time-reverse section. Like the American bombs, the pellets would be taken to factories where their dangerous components would be separated and these taken to remote areas where specialists would bury them deep in the Earth where they would never hurt anyone again. The moral point of time reversal is highlighted with several statements: “to prevent needless suffering, the dental work was usually completed while the patients were not yet alive” (121). Note the subtle, but powerful impact of the word “usually” in connection with the moral point made by the time reversal. “Most of the gold we used, of course, came direct from the Reichsbank. But every German present, even the humblest, gave willingly of his own store,” including the narrator. “I knew my gold had a sacred efficacy. All those years I amassed it, and polished it with my mind: for the Jew’s teeth” (121, Amis’s italics). Amis’s entire novel, we see upon reflection, has been building toward this scene. The narrator seems to have forgotten that time is running backward, despite earlier indications that he knows it is. However, the reader doesn’t forget that time is flowing backward, and the narrator’s smug self praise condemns his actions in the reader’s mind

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more powerfully, perhaps, than would happen if the reader saw the actions in forward motion.3 “Horror is inverted veneration,” says Paul Ricoeur (III, 188). In reaction to the veneration that Tod expresses in this passage, Amis’s readers not only reorder the events in their minds, but then invert the ethical implications of the reordered events. This also supports Ricoeur’s claim that even “the most audacious blows to our paradigmatic expectations do not get beyond the interplay of ‘rule-governed deformations’ by means of which innovation has always been the reply to sedimentation” (II, 25). Amis may be trying to express the inexpressible. It is a truism that the holocaust is incomprehensible. The reverse narration provokes readers into a thought process that enables them to grasp its horror. Amis apparently did the same thing in his non-fiction book Koba the Dread, but this time to present the horror of Stalin rather than the Nazis. The cover bears a quote from Financial Times, saying that “Amis uses all the tricks of his well-mastered trade to make readable what is almost unreadable, indeed hardly bearable.” In the book, Amis quotes Robert Conquest as saying, “the reality of Stalin’s activities was often disbelieved because they seemed to be unbelievable. His whole style consisted of doing what had previously been thought morally or physically inconceivable” (Amis, Koba, 262). Perhaps history cannot do justice to the truly horrifying subjects, and if the subjects are important, then it is up to literature to step up and tackle those subjects. Ricoeur specifically commends the role that fiction can play in helping humanity heed “the Biblical watchword (from Deuteronomy) Zakhor, Remember!” (III, 187). History, with its fascination for “great men,” often “legitimizes domination.” It tends to be “the history of the conquerors” (III, 187). Mankind has a hard time even grasping events of true “horror” such as “Auschwitz,” and does not want to remember them. However, horror “attaches to events that must never be forgotten” (III, 187). While history is written by the victors, literature can be “the history of victims,” a phrase he prefers to “history of the vanquished” because the vanquished might well be those who tried to dominate, but merely “failed.” “The victims of Auschwitz,” he says, “are, par excellence, the representatives in our memory of all history’s victims” (III, 187). It is “fiction’s capacity for provoking an illusion of presence, but one controlled by critical distance,” he claims, that allows fiction to tell a story; and story-telling is better than “historical explanation” which must conform “to rules of singular causal imputation,” and thus becomes “difficult (if not impossible) to write” (III, 188). But, under these premises, would not realistic literature encounter the same problem as history in depicting the horrible? To a large extent, I would claim, the conventions of time-depiction in realistic narrative embody a similar conformity to


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a principle of “singular causal imputation” that structures historical writing. For Amis, it is by means of his break with realistic conventions of depicting the temporal that Time’s Arrow fulfills Ricoeur’s idea of literature communicating the reality of horrible events to the reader in a way that historical narrative and conventionally realistic narrative often fail to achieve. The second ethical implication of the reversed time arrow revolves around the issue of free will. When time is flowing backward, the events which occur are the exact ones that have already happened. This instantly creates a narrative issue that Amis handles by having his narrator be a sort of passenger in the mind of his main character with access to the character’s sensations, dreams, and emotions, but not his thoughts and thus not his memories. Has the main character died, and is the described experience some sort of purgatory in which the character must relive his deeds backward and thus undo the bad ones? Is the main character insane, making the entire narrative a hallucination? We have heard that people about to die relive their entire lives in a flash. Is this what is happening to the main character, with the events relived in reverse for some unexplained reason? The reader cannot determine, and the reader’s uncertainty adds to the sense of uncertainty that underlines the post-modern. In a time reversal, what happens must happen, since the only things that can happen are those that have already happened. This creates a relentless dramatic irony by which the text clarifies for the reader that in forward time, human beings do influence what happens and thus must share responsibility for what happens. This is an important issue because so many Germans declined responsibility for the events of the holocaust. The infamous phrase comes to mind from the Nuremberg trials: “I was only following orders.” Amis provides a preview of the theme of responsibility early in Time’s Arrow when the narrator says, “If you ever close a deal with the devil, and he wants to take something from you in return – don’t let him take your mirror” (9). This, perhaps, alludes to the cliché concerning taking responsibility for your actions, the one about being able to look yourself in the face every morning. Amis’s narrator continues: “The devil has something to be said for him: he acts on his own initiative, and isn’t just following orders” (9). This provokes the following narrative issue: what if traditional plots encourage readers to deny responsibility for their actions by creating an arc of events that imply an inevitable outcome? Again, what if in reality, different actions lead to different outcomes, and people are free to choose their actions? Then, if traditional plots imply the opposite, that actions and outcomes are inevitable, is a traditional plot true to reality? Grace Paley deals with that issue in one of her stories. The narrator of Grace Paley’s “A Conversation with My Father,” a story writer, reports a request from her dying father, “I would like you to write a

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simple story Just recognizable people and then write down what happened to them next” (1153). The father wants a time-forward narration, the exact opposite from the time flow of Amis’s Time’s Arrow. In other words, the narrator’s father does not want a post-modern story.4 The narrator despises a plot that is “the absolute line between two points,” not “for literary reasons, but because it takes all hope away”; because everyone “real or invented, deserves an open destiny in life”5 (1153). However, since she wants to please her father, she produces this story: Once in my time there was a woman and she had a son. They lived nicely, in a small apartment in Manhattan. This boy at about fifteen became a junkie, which is not unusual in our neighborhood. In order to maintain her close friendship with him, she became a junkie too. She said it was part of the youth culture, with which she felt very much at home. After a while, for a number of reasons, the boy gave it all up and left the city and his mother in disgust. Hopeless and alone, she grieved. We all visit her. (1153)

The narrator’s father insists she flesh out this skeleton into a real story, and the narrator does so. The father then pronounces judgment on the woman in the story: “to be born in a time of fools, to live among fools” (1156). “The end,” says the father, “You were right to put that down. The end” (1156). Clearly, the father sees the outcome as having been inevitable. Then the narrator insists on changing the story. The woman got clean and now works as a receptionist at a storefront community clinic. “The head doctor has said to her, ‘If we only had three people in this clinic with your experiences ”’ (1156). Insisting on “Truth first” (that is, insisting on realism, conventionally understood), the father objects to the change, but the story-writing narrator stands firm (1157). In her refusal, we see one of the motives from which the post-modern arises. Despite their seeming realism, stories that are structured by the “whathappened-next” principle, such as the father demands, are actually untrue to reality. Such stories imply an inevitable outcome; they create an arc of actions that apparently must return to earth at a designated point. Stories so structured ban free choice; and, in the words of Grace Paley’s narrator, they “take all hope away” (1153). If we are to affirm the possibility of free choice we must believe that reality is different from what a conventional arc of plot implies, or, at least that is what Paley’s narrator suggests. Instead, she insists that people can change; the woman in the story “could change” (1156). The father says, “No,” and closes his eyes to signal that the argument is over. Even more, he says the narrator’s refusal to face reality, to “look it in the face” is not only her “main trouble” as “a writer,” it also causes the narrator’s problems in her personal life (1156). Because the father had a serious heart condition, the narrator “had promised the family to always let him have the last word when arguing” (1156).


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Perhaps, this is why she merely changed the ending and defended the new ending by saying “No, Pa, it could really happen that way, it’s a funny world nowadays” (1156).6 She does not insist on a move to the post-modern, for example by presenting both endings as John Fowles does in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Fowles manipulates time to achieve alternate endings, and an investigation earlier in the novel tells us why he does so: to break the sense of inevitability that conventional narrative implies. In Chapter 13 of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Fowles makes a statement that he is in pursuit of realism. A necessary component of realism is that the characters seem real to the reader. However, “only” when the author’s “characters and events begin to disobey” the author do they “begin to live.” “I ordered him,” says Fowles, of Charles, his primary male character, “to walk straight back to Lyme Regis. But he did not; he gratuitously turned and went down to the Dairy” (81). Fowles’s narrator allows his imagined reader to question him on this post-modern claim: Oh, but you say, come on – what I really mean is that the idea crossed my mind as I wrote that it might be more clever to have him stop and drink milk and meet Sarah again. That is certainly one explanation of what happened; but I can only report – and I am the most reliable witness – that the idea seemed to me to come clearly from Charles, not myself. It is not only that he has begun to gain an autonomy; I must respect it, and disrespect all my quasi-divine plans for him, if I wish him to be real. (81–82, Fowles’s ellipsis, italics added)

These words continue the irony expressed earlier in this paper: the ostensible break with realism is motivated by the drive for realism. Does telling us within the text of the novel that the characters are now acting independently of the author break the sense of inevitability about which Grace Paley complained? Fowles could have silently experienced his characters as acting independent of his will as author. He could have respected his characters’ autonomy because he noticed such characters seem real to the reader. But he didn’t keep quiet about it. By including these remarks in his text, he launched The French Lieutenant’s Woman into the post-modern mode. If Fowles wished to let readers know about this insight, he could have revealed it in an interview or an essay published separately from the novel. He might even have used an introductory chapter like Vonnegut’s or an “Afterword” like Amis’s to reveal what he was thinking as he wrote the novel. What does he gain by including within the text his claim that the characters are now acting independently of his control? I would suggest that this move breaks the implication of inevitability provoked by authors who write as if they were gods in “the Victorian image, omniscient and decreeing”; in creating characters and respecting their autonomy, Fowles sees authors like himself (post-modern

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authors, perhaps) as gods but as gods “in the new theological image, with freedom our first principle” (82). Further support for the view that Fowles breaks the conventions of realism to free his book of the implication of inevitability comes later in the novel, when, claiming that “Fiction usually pretends to conform to the reality,” he puts his concept into a boxing metaphor: “the writer puts the conflicting wants in the ring and then describes the fight – but in fact fixes the fight, letting that want he himself favors win.” Fowles believes that readers “judge writers of fiction,” partly “by the skill they show in fixing the fights (in other words, in persuading us that they were not fixed)” (317). The novel’s main female character, Sarah, has disappeared. Charles, riding on a train to London, is about to engage in a fight – to find and win Sarah. In keeping with his stated principle, Fowles wishes to avoid fixing Charles’s fight, but if he abides by the standard rules of the realistic mode, he cannot avoid fixing the fight. By those rules, if the author describes Charles finding Sarah, the author must either describe them as reconciling or parting. Placing himself, the author, in Charles’s first-class compartment, Fowles says, “as we near London, I think I see a solution; that is, I see the dilemma is false. The only way I can take no part in the fight is to show two versions of it” (318). He fears that the momentum of expectations from reading many novels creates a “tyranny of the last chapter,” which is “so strong” that the version he places last will inevitably strike the reader as the “final, the ‘real’ version” (318). To overcome this problem, Fowles narrates himself flipping a coin to decide the placement of the two versions.7 When Charles finds Sarah after two years of searching, he discovers that she does not wish to be found, that she had seen his advertisements and chosen not to answer them. This angers him and deciding that she “looked guilty,” “marched toward the door” (356). But Sarah “stepped swiftly past him to the door. He found his exit blocked.” Sarah said, “I cannot let you go believing that” (356). He can’t leave for the moment, and when Sarah says she will bring a lady who can explain things to him and disappears down the corridor, he feels trapped. A maid returns with a baby, who turns out to be Charles’s daughter with Sarah. We see how conventional narrative creates a sense of inevitability; for after a few minutes Charles is kissing Sarah while holding their baby daughter. Sarah even says, “It had to be so” (360). A reader may conclude that Charles and Sarah will marry and raise their daughter together; if so that reader has assumed without taking into account Fowles’s ability, as author, to manipulate time. At the moment of Charles and Sarah’s kiss, Fowles puts himself back into the narrative; referring to himself in the third person, he relates how he “takes out his watch makes a small adjustment to the time” (362). As the sequence


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starts to repeat itself, instead of seeing Sarah block the door, Charles “felt her hand on his arm” from behind him (363). Charles suspects that by her hand’s “pressure on his arm,” Sarah is “saying, look, can you not see, a solution exists?” (364). Even so, he walks through the door, seeing a maid carrying a baby as he exits the house, but he never suspects that the baby is his child. Created by time manipulation, the doubling of the scenes apparently defies the logic of narrative realism, but it generates two implications. The first is that very small causes can have huge consequences in our lives. The second is the more radical post-modern implication that both events happened. The first strains our sense of literary realism; the second completely contradicts it. This goes beyond even what Ricoeur identifies as a basic move of the modern novel, that of “frustrating” the reader’s “expectation of an immediately intelligible configuration and in placing on the reader’s shoulders the burden of configuring the work” (III, 168). Ironically, both implications of Fowles’s post-modern time manipulation have analogues in contemporary science. In science, the idea that very small variations in far away causes can produce huge variations in consequences is called the butterfly effect. Fowles published The French Lieutenant’s Woman in 1969. Edward Lorenz discovered the scientific principle in 1961, although it took a little longer for the phenomenon to be named. Lorenz was a mathematical meteorologist at M.I.T. who ran computer simulations of global weather. Lorenz would run a year’s simulated weather and then re-run it. One day, Lorenz decided to take a shortcut. “Instead of starting the whole run over, he started midway through. To give the machine its initial conditions,” as James Gleick explains, Lorenz, “typed the numbers straight from the earlier printout” (16). The resulting simulation, which should have been identical to the earlier one began deviating and soon showed no relation to the earlier one. Lorenz discovered the reason: “In the computer’s memory, six decimal places were stored.” However, “On the printout, to save space, just three appeared” (16). In modern science terms, this should not have made a difference. Three decimal places take you out to a thousandth of a unit – in this case, a thousandth of a degree of temperature, a thousandth of a millimeter of pressure, a thousandth of a percent of humidity, and a thousandth of a mile per hour of wind. The next three decimal places take you to a ten thousandth, a hundred thousandth, and a millionth of each unit. Scientists of the time could rarely measure accurately even to the thousandths of a degree of temperature. Lorenz’s discovery meant that variations occurred in the outer three decimal positions, far smaller than humans could measure, that completely changed global weather. A wind of a ten thousandth of a mile-per hour is the force produced by a butterfly’s wing flapping. The name “butterfly effect” comes from the insight that the flapping

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of a butterfly’s wing in Brazil might cause a hurricane to change course and smash into the Florida coast, rather than spinning itself out harmlessly in mid-Atlantic. Gleick says that Lorenz felt a jolt when he recognized the implications of his results; and some readers feel a similar jolt when they recognize the implication of Fowles’s double ending. In both endings, Sarah makes the same attempt to supply Charles further information. The difference between stepping past him to stand in the door while she had her say and placing her hand on his sleeve from behind seems tiny when the outcome means they either spend the rest of their lives together or never see each other again; it means that the butterfly effect applies to human lives as well as to weather and perhaps other physical systems. Thus, Fowles’s butterfly effect reverses Sarah’s statement that the outcome was inevitable. This is the benefit of Fowles’s time manipulation. Awareness that one may be unknowingly dealing with a butterfly-effect situation at any given time has made scientists recognize that there is much more uncertainty in natural phenomena than they had previously assumed; and that same uncertainty makes The French Lieutenant’s Woman a post-modern novel. This suggests that the uncertainty introduced into the history of the novel form by the emergence of post-modern narrative strategies simply models the uncertainty that contributes to our society being in a post-modern condition. While the above conclusion seems to me a valid one, it is interesting to note that the butterfly-effect implication of the double ending actually constitutes the tamer of the two possible implications from Fowles’s time-manipulation. What if Fowles did not mean the reader to choose between two alternate endings, but meant it literally when he says that both happen? This result of his time manipulation is a more radical undermining of conventional fiction’s sense of the inevitable than the idea that variations too small to measure may cause outcomes almost too large to contemplate. It justifies even more strongly the designation of The French Lieutenant’s Woman as a post-modern novel. This implication also seems a more decisive departure from realist assumptions. Thus it comes as a shock to understand that the idea that both outcomes actually happen is also supported by contemporary science. According to Nick Herbert, Hugh Everett invented “The many – worlds interpretation” (172) of reality to account for oddities in quantum measurement in 1957, twelve years before Fowles published The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Everything that can happen, does happen; each outcome “occupies its own parallel universe” (173, Herbert’s italics). The theory “describes the world as a continually proliferating jungle of conflicting possibilities” (173). In Everett’s concept, reality is a “continually branching tree of possibilities in which everything


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that can happen actually does happen,” explains Herbert. “Each individual’s experience, (lived out in mere reality, not super reality) is a tiny portion of a single branch on that lush and perpetually flowering tree” (173–174). Everett’s many-worlds interpretation, “despite its extravagant assumption of numerous unobservable parallel worlds, is a favorite model of many theoretical physicists” (174). John Fowles claims that his multiple-ending narrative choice does not depart from reality; instead, it represents his best effort to express reality. The credibility of this claim receives a jolting support by the realization that scientists have made an almost identical move.8 Amis and Fowles make moves to the post-modern that create dramatic parallels to moves made by scientists in their pursuit of the real. This implies support for the thesis that post-modern fiction cannot be defined as a break from the real, but is generated by an effort to express aspects of reality. The authors felt that conventional realism distorts these aspects. However, Amis and Fowles were probably not initially inspired by science. Lawrence Durrell was inspired by a scientific theory in “The Alexandria Quartet,” published from 1957 to 1960, but set from the late 1930s into the early years of World War II. In his “Note” prior to Balthazar, the second novel of the quartet, Durrell reveals how a scientific time concept played a major role in the construction of his quartet; he was inspired by Albert Einstein’s concept of the space-time continuum: Modern literature offers us no Unities, so I have turned to science and am trying to complete a four-decker novel whose form is based on the relativity proposition. Three sides of space and one of time constitute the soup-mix recipe of a continuum. The four novels follow this pattern. The three first parts, however, are to be deployed spatially (hence the use of “sibling” not “sequel”) and are not linked in a serial form. They interlap, interweave, in a purely spatial relation. Time is stayed. The fourth part alone will represent time and be a true sequel. (9)

In the opening novel, an unnamed narrator, sitting on a Greek island, tries to understand events that occurred in Alexandria the previous year. Of the many things that he can’t understand, two things puzzle him more than any others: (1) why did his lover Justine suddenly disappear? and (2) why did a friend named Pursewarden commit suicide? In Justine, Durrell’s narrator writes about the work that novelists do “with brain and heart” – “only there,” he says, “can reality be reordered, reworked and made to show its significant side. Our common actions in reality are simply the sackcloth covering which hides the cloth-of-gold – the meaning of the pattern” (17). This is the key to the whole “Alexandria Quartet.” The entire sequence of four novels tests the truth of the narrator’s claim.

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In Justine, the narrator comes up with plausible explanations for both major questions. Justine had been raped as a child by an unknown assailant; she had based her entire life in Alexandria around a neurosis caused by the rape. She discovered the rapist was a man named Capidostria; when this man was murdered, Justine’s neurosis was cured and nothing in Alexandria had any meaning for her. That is why she suddenly left the narrator. As for question number two, Pursewarden had pursued fame; and, in the process, compromised his art as a fiction writer. Knowing this, and being a true artist at heart, he could take no pleasure in his fame. The more he was praised the more cynical and ironic he regarded his life, until he finally ended it. The second novel, Balthazar, begins when the same narrator from Justine, now identified as Darley, receives a visit from the title character to whom he has sent the manuscript of the novel we have just read: Justine. Balthazar has written all over the manuscript until Darley jokingly refers to it as “The Great Interlinear.” Balthazar writes that Justine did not love Darley. “She ‘loved’, if anyone, Pursewarden.” Justine, Balthazar insists, “was forced to use you as a decoy in order to protect him from the jealousy of Nessim, whom she had married” (22). Interestingly, Darley did not have any facts wrong in Justine; Balthazar simply adds many facts about which Darley had not known when he wrote Justine. “And so, slowly, reluctantly” says Darley, “I have been driven back to my starting-point, like a man who at the end of a tremendous journey is told that he has been sleepwalking” (23). Darley reads in the “Interlinear” that a character had been murdered while impersonating Justine, meaning that someone was trying to kill her. In his rewrite, Darley decides that Justine left Alexandria to safeguard herself. Since her true love Pursewarden was dead and she was left with the decoy, Darley, she had nothing to keep her in Alexandria. The best Darley can do to re-explain Pursewarden’s suicide is to ask, “Was it consciousness of tragedy irremediable contained – not in the external world which we all blame – but in ourselves, in the human condition, which finally dictated his unexpected suicide in that musty hotel room? I like to think it was” (141). The third novel, Mountolive, is an authoritative third-person narrative that reveals that Nessim and Justine had been in a plot to supply arms to Zionists in Palestine, a British protectorate at the time. Justine slept with Darley because Darley’s mistress Melissa had previously been the mistress of a co-conspirator of theirs, and they suspected that Melissa might know something of the conspiracy and might tell Darley. They wanted to know if Darley knew anything, and wanted him on their side if he did. Justine slept with Pursewarden because he had a high position in the British administration in Egypt, and they feared they would need his help and influence; they wanted, as well,


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any information he might provide. Pursewarden did, in fact, protect Justine and Nessim when the intelligence officer had produced a report raising suspicions against them. The intelligence officer’s suggestion was that the British should inform the Egyptians, who would probably assassinate the pair just as a matter of routine. When Pursewarden learned the truth, he wrote an official report revealing the truth, informed Justine and Nessim that he had reported them, and killed himself. Thus, Justine left the country to flee the consequences of the plot’s discovery. Therefore, the interpretation of Mountolive is that Justine left Darley because she had never loved him and he was now no longer of use; she had to flee the authorities who knew of her espionage work for Nessim; she loved Nessim and slept with the others to further his plans. Pursewarden killed himself because he discovered that he’d unwittingly betrayed his country; he had helped people provide arms that would be used against British soldiers. The fourth novel, Clea, begins when Darley returns to Alexandria during the war, presumably because his Greek island is threatened by German occupation. In this novel, the reason given for Justine’s departure remains unchanged, but we discover that Pursewarden had had an on-and-off affair with his sister, Liza, since their early teens. Their inability to free themselves from their incestuous love had ruined Pursewarden’s marriage and caused him sadness his entire life. We learn that he got a letter from his sister the very day he discovered that Justine and Nessim had been deceiving him. She informed him that she was coming to Egypt to marry a man with whom she had fallen in love. Despair over never being happy, himself, combined with his desire to prevent their incestuous love from ruining her chance for happiness added to the political intrigue to give an acceptable explanation for Pursewarden’s suicide. The insight to be drawn from this review is that Durrell depicts Darley’s drive for truth, an underlying assumption of realism. In the first two novels, Darley retells the events of the past, hoping that his creative imagination will intuitively construct a pattern from which he can derive the meaning of the events. In both, Darley believes he has succeeded, and carries the reader a long way toward agreeing with him, only to be later told that he was totally mistaken. This undermines our confidence, not only of Darley as a narrator, but of the validity of the claim that realistic fiction relies upon – that the author’s creative imagination intuitively creates patterns from which the reader can derive the meaning of the events. The third-person, authoritative text of Mountolive appears to do better, but then we discover that this mode does not reveal the full truth, either. In the “Note” prior to Balthazar, Durrell revealed his notion of how the novel Mountolive would fit into the Einsteinian space-time concept of the “Alexandria Quartet”:

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The subject-object relation is so important to relativity that I have tried to turn the novel through both subjective and objective modes. The third part, MOUNTOLIVE, is a straight naturalistic novel in which the narrator of JUSTINE and BALTHASAR becomes an object, i.e. a character. (9)

Expressing the object position in the scheme, it also takes the overhead view, as in one seeing a city square from the top of a nearby cathedral tower. One sees someone, perhaps, standing at the point where a small side street enters the square, looking into the square. This is the view of Darley acquired by Balthazar’s reader. How does this ethic play out in the time structure of the novels? Because the first two novels express the subject position of Einstein’s relativity proposition, this has major consequences for the time structure of these two novels. Darley says in Justine, “What I most need to do is to record experiences, not in the order in which they took place – for that is history – but in the order in which they first became significant for me” (115). This results in a radical departure from chronological narration. In the Einsteinian continuum of three sides of space and one of time, the first two novels are like looking into a large city square filled with many people and complex, view-blocking objects, first from a small street that enters the square and then from another street on a different side of the square. The third novel, though far less overtly chaotic in time structure than the first two, does contain flashbacks and other time deviations. The fourth novel returns us to Darley’s narration, but now he sticks to strict chronology. This is the novel that Durrell said in the “Note” preceding Balthazar, as already quoted, would represent the dimension of time. In Clea, Darley falls in love with an artist named Clea; she notices that he has stopped writing and worries that something in their relationship must be the cause. He reassures her that it is because he has lost faith in his ability as a literary artist. This is, perhaps, understandable after the resounding failure, in his own terms, to achieve the goal of understanding the pattern in his first two novels. When he says he is thinking of writing a book of criticism, Clea punches him in the mouth hard enough to draw blood. Their love affair does not work out but the existence of the novel Clea, which Darley narrates, entails his having returned to the toil of the literary artist, but this time using what he had previously deemed the historical time principle of chronological narration. If the crucial element in the notion of the post-modern is uncertainty, and, after many false starts, we do, supposedly receive the “real” explanation in “The Alexandria Quartet,” then perhaps this work, or set of works, should not be deemed post-modern. However, the first three novels also gave us the sense that “now we know the meaning of the events,” only to disabuse us of our confidence, and thus we hesitate to accept the supposedly final verdict given by Clea, the fourth novel. This is especially so, considering that Darley


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narrates Clea, using a time-structuring principle he had specifically denounced in Justine. If we learned anything from Justine and Balthazar, it might be that we should doubt Darley’s judgments about the meaning of events. In fact, the “Quartet” throws doubt on the founding premise of realism, and if it does not radicalize itself, ultimately, into the post-modern mode, the doubt it throws on our ability to understand our lives gives us insights into the motive that produces novels in this mode. Amis, Fowles, and Durrell each seek to use fiction to explicate reality. Each find the traditional time structures inadequate and begin making unusual time-related narrative moves. These very time-moves, because they depart from the conventions of realism, constitute, in large measure, the reasons critics have deemed the novels of these authors to be post-modern. The claim that they made their time-moves in search of ways to depict aspects of reality that conventional realism misses receives support from the striking parallels to similar scientific moves of each author’s era. Durrell informs us that he started from Einstein; Amis and Fowles do not say that contemporary scientific insights influenced them, but the analogy between their fictional moves and the scientific moves of Stephen Hawking, Chaos Theory, and ideas of quantum reality support the view that these authors, too, made their leap to the post-modern not as a retreat from reality, but in search of knowledge about reality. Loras College, Dubuque, IA NOTES 1

Irving Howe, for example, says that some authors began turning away from the “realistic portraiture” of modernism toward “fable, picaresque, prophecy, and nostalgia.” Novels by these writers Howe believes “constitute what I would class ‘post-modern fiction.’ ” (137). In Postmodernist Fiction, Brian McHale states the case even more strongly: “Postmodernist fiction, if critics such as John Gardner, Gerald Graff, and Charles Newman are to believed, is morally bad art, and tends to corrupt its readers. It does so by denying external, objective reality” (219). McHale cites Gardner’s On Moral Fiction (1978), Graff’s Literature Against Itself (1979), and a 1984 journal article in Salmagundi by Newman. 2 The character’s name is Tod Friendly. “Tod” in German, means “death.” 3 Using time reverse narration to provoke the reader to judge the ethical implications of timeforward action might be parallel to a situation noticed by Ricoeur: “That The Magic Mountain is a novel about time,” says Ricoeur, “is too obvious for me to have to insist upon the fact.” However, the novel draws attention to time issues by its “effacing of chronological time”: “abolishing the sense of measurement of time is the major feature of the way the guests at the Berghof, the Davos sanatorium, exist and live” (II, 112). 4 Of course the father’s request would also rule out some modernist stories. Would the father consider interior monologue to make the character unrecognizable? Deviating from strict

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chronology is also a favorite modernist tactic, but the father’s attitude suggests that it is the post-modern that most alienates him. 5 This plot may be the simple one that Paul Ricoeur uses as his point of departure, a plot consisting of “circumstances, goals, means, interactions, and intended or unintended results” (II, 8). 6 Paley’s narrator could perhaps have defended a break from the “what-happened-next” principle of time depiction by Ricoeur’s argument that even when an author has “overturned, disarticulated, reversed, telescoped, or reduplicated the temporal modalities the conventional paradigms” of time depiction in novels, such a novel “cannot help but be configured in terms of new norms of temporal organization that are still perceived as temporal by the reader” (II, 25). 7 A comment of Paul Ricoeur’s contrasts the problems of nineteenth and twentieth century fiction writers when they tried to end their novels. In the past, “the security of realistic representation concealed the insecurity of novelistic composition.” Today, “the realization that reality is chaotic,” fights “against the very idea of an orderly composition,” and thus makes writing the ending difficult (II, 166). 8 Malcolm Bradbury wrote a story with three parallel endings, called “Composition,” which appeared in Who Do You Think You Are? (1974). A beginning college teacher has sex with two of his students. Before accepting their advances he hesitates, based on professional scruples. He has not turned in his grade sheet. However, since both women have already legitimately earned an A in the course and all work has been completed, he goes ahead, rationalizing that all-but-technically, the student–teacher relationship is over. The next morning he receives an ambiguous letter that could be read as blackmail. A third student of his had taken his picture during sex. This third student has a D in the class. In one ending, the teacher changes the D to an A (we assume). In the second ending, he grades the letter, correcting its grammatical errors, gives it an F, and sends it to the student who wrote it. In the third ending, he burns his grade sheet and writes an ironic letter accepting the woman’s veiled invitation for more sex. Among Bradbury’s points may be the idea that the multiple-possibilities concept is not limited to just two parallel universes.

REFERENCES Martin Amis (1992) Time’s Arrow (1991). New York: Vintage. Martin Amis (2003) Koba the Dread (2002). London: Vintage. Malcolm Bradbury (1974) “Composition.” From Who Do You Think Are? Reprinted in The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories (1987), ed. Malcolm Bradbury. New York: Penguin, 1988, pp. 286–308. Lawrence Durrell (1961) Balthazar (1958) in “The Alexandria Quartet.” New York: Dutton. Lawrence Durrell (1961) Clea (1960) in “The Alexandria Quartet.” New York: Dutton. Lawrence Durrell (1961) Justine (1957) in “The Alexandria Quartet.” New York: Dutton. Lawrence Durrell (1961) Mountolive (1958) in “The Alexandria Quartet.” New York: Dutton. John Fowles (1970) The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969). New York: New American Library. John Gardner (1978) On Moral Fiction. New York: Basic Books. James Gleick (1987) Chaos: The Making of a New Science. New York: Viking Penguin. Gerald Graff (1979) Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stephen Hawking (1988) A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes. New York: Bantam.



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Nick Herbert (1985) Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics. Garden City, NJ: Anchor. Irving Howe (1959) “Mass Society and Post-Modern Fiction.” Partisan Review (Summer): 420–436. Reprinted in Marcus Klein, The American Novel Since World War Two. New York: Fawcett, 1969, pp. 124–141. Brian McHale (1987) Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen. Charles Newman (1984) “The Post-Modern Aura: The Act of Fiction in an Age of Inflation,” Salmagundi 63–64 (Spring–Summer), 3–199. Grace Paley (1998) “A Conversation with My Father” from Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974). Reprinted in Fiction 100: An Anthology of Short Stories, 8th Edition. Ed. James H. Pickering. Upper Saddle River, NJ.: Prentice Hall, pp. 1153–1157. Paul Ricoeur (1985) Time and Narrative, Vol. II (1984). Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Paul Ricoeur (1988) Time and Narrative, Vol. III (1985). Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kurt Jr. Vonnegut (1969) Slaughter-House Five (1969). New York: Dell.

NAME INDEX

Abrahams, Peter, 37, 41, 42, 44, 45 Abrams, M. H, 62 Achebe, Chinua, 115, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 126, 128 Achilles, Mbembe, 34 Afejuku, Tony E., 37, 42 Amis, Martin, 395, 396, 397, 398, 399, 400, 401, 402, 403, 407, 411 Armstrong, Paul B., 61 Arnold, Mathew, 15, 17, 237 Auge, Marc, 342 Austin, Warren, 151 Banville, John, 210 Barker, Pat, 210, 214 Barthes, Roland, 20, 337, 343, 348, 349 Bassnett, Susan, 236, 237 Baudrillard, Jean, 333, 334, 335, 336, 337, 338, 343, 348, 349 Baum, Paul F., 65, 76 Benjamin, Walter, 124, 333, 360, 380, 381, 382, 383, 384 Bergson, Henri, 135, 140, 155, 165, 173, 174, 180, 183, 185, 259, 264, 312, 342 Bodei, Remo, 286, 287 Bourdieu, Pierre, 332, 345 Bowlby, R., 165 Bradbury, Dominic, 24 Bradbury, Malcolm, 412 Bradley, A.C., 65, 76 Braudel, Fernand, 338, 343 Brewin, Chris R., 209, 210, 212 Brison, Susan J., 212, 213, 214, 218 Buckley, J.H., 77, 78 Buckley, Jerome Hamilton, 77, 78 Caduc, Eveline, 96 Camus, Albert, 115, 272 Carpentier, Alejo, 3, 5, 7, 9

Carroll, Joseph, 216 Caruth, Cathy, 212, 213 Chambers, Ross, 211, 212 Coetzee, David, 151 Cole, Robert Wellesley, 38, 41, 42 Cooper, Brenda, 25 Corngold, Stanley, 371, 380–384, 387 Cox, Ailsa, 179, 180 Deleuze, Gilles, 23, 26, 27, 29, 180, 312, 317, 323, 385 Derrida, Jacques, 9, 88, 96, 302, 342 Dick, S., 162 Diski, Jenny, 211 Doležel, Lubomir, 26 Durrell, Lawrence, 407, 409, 410, 411 Eco, Umberto, 12, 236, 238 Eliot, Thomas Sterns, 21, 132, 148, 261, 267, 268, 269 Ellison, Ralph, 115, 119, 124, 128 Emerson, Ralph, 115, 119, 122, 123 Falk, Eugene H., 336 Faulkner, William, 139, 262, 265, 266, 355, 356, 364 Ferring, Dieter, 215 Filipp, Sigrum-Heide, 215 Flower, Juliet, 384 Foucault, Victor Hugo Michael, 237, 343, 344, 348 Fowles, John, 403–407, 411 Frankel, Victor, 336, 346 Freud, Sigmund, 4, 135, 145, 206, 214, 218, 219, 287, 359, 376, 379, 381, 387 Fussell, Paul, 65, 76 Gadamer, Hans Georg, 12, 234, 235 Galilee, Éditions, 8

415

416

NAME INDEX

Gallagher, Shaun, 378 Garfinkel, Harold, 346, 347 Gass, William, 215, 216, 217 Gerald Rivas, Victor, 39 Gleick, James, 405, 406 Graff, Gerald, 39 Greiner T, 96 Guattari, Félix, 26, 27, 29, 385 Guignon, Cf. Charles B., 112 Gusdorf, Georges, 43 Hamilton, Ian, 146 Harper, H., 162, 165 Hawking, Stephen, 33, 396, 397, 411 Heidegger, Martin, 55, 95, 96, 244, 271, 272, 273, 275, 276, 277, 289, 290, 294, 296, 314, 336, 340, 344, 355, 367, 370, 371, 372, 374, 376, 377, 378, 379, 381, 384, 387, 390, 391, 392 Herbert, Nick, 406, 407 Holroyd, Stuart, 25, 32 Horowitz, Gregg, 210 Hurston, Zora Neale, 115, 119, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128 Husserl, Edmund, 85, 355, 364, 372 Ingarden, Roman, 85, 86, 87, 88, 90, 91, 92, 93, 129, 335, 336, 342 Janoff-Bulman, R., 212 Jung, Carl G., 145, 146, 191, 331, 337, 349 Kafka, Franz, 367, 382 Keane, Molly, 143 Kearney, Richard, 386 Kilmartin, Terence, 311, 323 Knodel, A., 107 Kristeva, Julia, 3, 155, 373, 384, 385 Kristof, Agota, 286, 294, 295, 296, 304, 305, 308 Kubler, George, 347 Kundera, Milan, 129 Lacan, Jacques, 145, 342, 387 Lang, Andrew, 76

Larkin, Philip, 143, 145, 146, 147, 148, 150, 151, 152 Lawrence, D.H, 20 Laye, Camara, 37, 41, 42, 43, 44 Leder, Drew, 373, 392 Lefèbvre, Henri, 338 Lefevere, Andre, 236 Leitch, C., 33 Levillain, H., 96, 103 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 4, 245, 248, 249, 271, 279, 280, 286, 289, 290, 291, 292, 293, 294, 304 Levitt, Heidi, 215 Macann, Christopher, 48, 61 MacCannell, Juliet Flower, 384 McHale, Brian, 411 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 136, 374 Mandel, Barret John, 37, 43 Mansbach, Abraham, 379 Martins, Herminio, 348 Mathieu, Vittorio, 309 Meares, Russell, 346 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 47, 48, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 59, 60, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 230, 338, 351 Meyerhoff, Hans, 95 Michaels, Anne, 210 Michéle, Aquien, 96, 97, 103, 112, 113 Mill, John Stuart, 76 Miller, Alice, 211, 218 Miller, Arthur, 288, 301, 378 Motion, Andrew, 147 Mphahlele, Ezekiel, 37, 40, 41 Mulligan, Kevin, 138 Munro, Alice, 173, 174, 175, 179, 180, 181, 183, 184, 185 Murakami, Yasuhito, 305 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 8, 311, 322 Neimeyer, Rober, 215, 216 Newman, Charles, 411 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 95, 115, 117, 118, 119, 127, 128, 193, 267, 268 Okri, Ben, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34 Olafson, Frederick A., 377

NAME INDEX Paley, Grace, 401, 403 Perse, Saint-John, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 102, 103, 105, 106, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111 Pike, Burton, 43, 44 Plato, 6, 33, 147, 190, 268, 269, 293, 320 Pound, Ezra, 47, 48, 49, 50–61, 148 Quayson, Ato, 25 René Lesage, Alain, 294 René, Wellek, 151 Renza, Louis A., 37 Richards, Bernard, 18, 19, 302 Ricoeur, Paul, 355, 356, 385, 386, 395, 396, 397, 400, 405 Roe, S., 165 Roger, Duchêne, 96 Rosenzweig, Franz, 241, 242, 243, 244, 246, 247, 248, 249 Ryals, Clyde de L., 65, 77 Sacks, Oliver, 211 Sacotte, Mireille, 103 Samuelson, Norbert M., 241 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 6, 144, 382

417

Scarry, Elaine, 211 Schrag, Calvin O., 304 Shepard, Sam, 89 Sommer, Doris, 383 Sontag, Susan, 330 Sorokin, Pitrim, 336, 343, 348 Soyinka, Wole, 23, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42 St Augustine, 122, 264, 355, 356, 358, 359, 364 Stalnaker Robert, 26 Stambolian G., 161 Stange, Robert G., 76 Steiner, George, 238, 240, 241, 337 Stich, Stephen, 305 Sweeney, Kevin W., 386, 387 Tennyson, Alfred, 16, 17, 18, 65–81 Terr, Lenore, 213 Terrell, Carroll F., 57, 62 Thomas, Bernhard, 285, 286, 294, 295, 296, 297, 299, 304 Thomas, Chantal, 305 Trilling, Lionel, 15 Welsch, Wolfgang, 238, 239 Whitehead, Anne, 221

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