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The thematization of time in E.M. Forster's 'The Eternal Moment' and Joyce's 'The Dead.'
Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1997 by Silvana Caporaletti
Time of itself is nothing, but from thought receives its rise . . .
- Lucretius, De Rerum Natura 1.459-430
Only through time time is conquered.
- T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets, "Burnt Norton" line 90
At the beginning of our century a rather apocalyptic vision seemed to pervade Western culture, mainly as a result of the spread of evolutionary theory and, even more, of the enunciation of the second principle of thermodynamics in 1850.(1) Human life appeared to be subject to impersonal laws that are utterly indifferent to its presence, and individual existence appeared to be nothing more than a small fragment in a dizzy temporal extension that began in the nonhuman and would end in sheer nothingness. Such a vision, postulated as it was by science in an epoch that gave science unlimited credit, not only threatened to nullify all moral tensions and deprive of meaning the very values on which human society rests, but seemed to foster, and even to some extent legitimize, the predominance of a selfish and insensitive materialistic ethos.
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It is hardly surprising, then, that in the general ethical bewilderment resulting from the disappearance of divine authority and from the scientific forecast of ultimate universal annihilation, a number of authors undertook as a moral obligation to counterbalance this dangerous tendency by affirming, in their work, the unquenchable human need for ethical values that would encourage the individual to transcend selfishness and strictly personal interest. As it was no longer possible to justify values such as generosity, altruism, self-abnegation, truth,justice, charity, and love in metaphysical and religious terms, these authors sought a solution to the problem of how to provide these values with an undogmatic and convincing foundation. They had to be affirmed in human terms, and in order to do so, it was necessary to redeem human existence, at least in part, from the contingency to which the linear conception of time as an endless, destructive flux seemed to reduce it.(2) This may be the main reason for the great interest with which the theories of Henri Bergson were received in that epoch.
In Time and Free Will (first published in French in 1888), Bergson draws a distinction between two different kinds of time: the measurable, mathematical time where external events take place one after another in regular sequence, and what he calls "duree reelle," the interior, subjective domain in which psychological life enfolds, following individual, unpredictable rhythms. He calls the first kind of time "espace" because, according to him, it is not a real dimension but a conceptual artifact, generated by the arbitrary extension to time of properties that apply only to space.(3) Real time, "duree" (duration), is to him a spherical dimension where past, present, and future coexist and continually interact, shaping each other. Whereas "espace" is measurable and homogeneous, quantitative in character, duration is irregular and essentially qualitative.(4) It is like a melody in which all the notes are simultaneously present, and any change that might occur at any point of it would alter the quality of the whole.(5) Contrary to objective time, whose movement, governed as it is by physical and mathematical laws, is unidirectional and irreversible, this circular dimension, ruled by imagination and memory, allows free movement in all directions of time. In Matter and Memory (first published in French in 1896) Bergson makes another important distinction, between normal memory, a faculty purely instrumental to the act of remembrance, and "memoire reelle," a form of unconscious memory where past events are preserved in their original intensity. From this spiritual reservoir such events can suddenly emerge into the present and fuse with it, acquiring new and deeper significance. Bergson's theories, then, seemed to offer the possibility of a solution. As "duree," time ceases to be an irredeemable destructive force and becomes a preserving element, a form of continuity out of which, through "memoire reelle," the past can be called to a new life. It is possible therefore to achieve in "duree" a form of permanence that can redeem individual existence from ephemerality.
What most characterizes European literature at the beginning of our century is precisely a deep reflection on time. Proust's Recherche is deeply informed by Bergson's philosophical theories, and his concept of "memoire involontaire" seems modeled on Bergson's "memoire reelle." Like Proust, Pirandello, Dorothy Richardson, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Svevo, Joyce, and E. M. Forster pay particular attention to psychological time and tend to analyze and explore it, implicitly contrasting the possibilities of this subjective medium with the restrictions of objective time.(6) In most of their works, objective time is diminished in importance and becomes what Bakhtin calls "collateral, nonfundamental time," a mere background to external events. The events that matter, those that transform and transfigure and are the real becoming, take place in the idiosyncratic temporality of individual consciousness, where the rigid partitions of physical time are continually disintegrated.(7)
