Featured White Papers
- PCI DSS therapy for the smaller retailer (McAfee)
- Enterprise PBX comparison guide (VoIP-News)
- Hosted CRM buyer's guide (Inside CRM)
Content provided in partnership with
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
The very limited, almost stifling space in which the plots of the two short stories are developed seems intentionally conceived to throw into relief the temporal extension of the narratives. Time is an extraordinarily strong, pervasive presence in both texts, but more than being the organizing principle of the plots, a mere structural element, it assumes a subtler narrative function. It is thematized; and in its accentuated dichotomy of "espace" as posed to "duree," it becomes a metaphorical ingredient, a vehicle of significance. Objective time, a fleeting present whose repetitive and pressing rhythm regulates everyday life, is associated with separation and absence, death and spiritual paralysis. Subjective time, which impregnates private life with its irregular, secret drives and in whose circularity present, past, and future simultaneously coexist, is in contrast associated with spiritual vitality and values of human communion and understanding.
Though very different in style and artistic conception, "The Eternal Moment" and "The Dead" are thematically similar. Both stem from the same ethical preoccupation: to denounce the dangerous emotional bluntness that the continuous flowing of time inevitably induces in people, and to shake them out of their spiritual numbness. The contrast between "living" and "dead in life" is expressed in both stories through a surprisingly analogous temporal movement involving a sudden shift from objective time to "duree": The initially sharp distinction between past and present is transcended at the narrative climax in an epiphanic moment of temporal simultaneity and dissolves, at the end, in a unifying cosmic vision. In both stories memory occupies a central position, as the evocation of the past seems to be a vivifying, mysteriously thaumaturgic energy. The repository of memory is, in both cases, a woman whose spiritual vitality, still intact notwithstanding the passing of time, is vividly contrasted with the insensibility and materialism of the other characters. Miss Raby in "The Eternal Moment" and Gretta in "The Dead" both live in "duree" and are able to recapture an intense moment of their past, reliving it with the same emotion as before. Their power of recollection is a reviving spiritual force. In "The Eternal Moment," Miss Raby feels that the awakening of memory would be the only possible antidote to the spiritual desolation of Feo Ginori, the man who fell passionately in love with her 20 years before. In "The Dead," Gretta's painful recollection of her dead lover is the catalytic agent of Gabriel's regenerating epiphany, a moment of insight that allows him a mysteriously synchronic vision of his own past and present.
The time span covered by the two plots is very limited in the external chronology of the stories - three days in "The Eternal Moment" and only a few hours in "The Dead" - but it is expanded by flashbacks and flashforwards so as to include almost the entire existence of the protagonists. The narrative present describes a public event, apparently of little significance in its banality: in "The Eternal Moment," the return to Vorta of Miss Raby, a middle-aged writer who, by setting her famous novel in the little mountain village, has turned it into a fashionable holiday resort, and in "The Dead," the condescending participation of Gabriel Conroy and his wife Gretta in the ritual Christmas party of his old aunts. In both stories, the relevant event, that which produces a change both in the sensibility and the lives of the protagonists, is of a private nature, so subjective and intimate that its importance is hardly perceived by the other characters and can easily be overlooked by the less attentive reader. It resides, in fact, in a fleeting moment of vision that allows Miss Raby and Gabriel a deep insight into their true selves. Their epiphanic experience is generated by a sudden intersecting of present and past that, projecting them above time, allows them a perspective from which they can contemplate their whole existence at a glance and evaluate themselves. This essential moment of self-knowledge is what imparts a new orientation to their lives: Although both texts remain open-ended and unresolved, it is possible to discern with sufficient clarity that the lives of the two protagonists will take a new course.(8)
