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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
The essentially different nature of the revelations in the two short stories is a clear indication of the difference between the artistic conceptions that underlie them. In Forster, the moment of sharpened vision restores Miss Raby to a full awareness of her inner worthiness and redeems her from an obsessive sense of guilt. At the same time, though, it also discloses to her the spiritual shallowness of the people around her, so that, in withdrawing from it, the woman isolates herself from the others. In "The Dead," in contrast, when the passionate intensity of Gretta's recollection forces Gabriel to recognize his own emotional limitations and shallowness, he also perceives the essential humanity that unites him to the others. The overall movement of the narratives, then, appears inverted: from a present that initially seems to promise her union and solidarity, Forster's Miss Raby moves toward a future of separation and existential loneliness, whereas Joyce's Gabriel, who at the beginning appears isolated in a present of selfishness and hypocrisy, and is initially projected toward the East in a symbolic rejection of his personal and national past, turns in the end toward the West, yielding to the sense of universal communion that, beyond human limits, unites the living and the dead. "The Eternal Moment" thus expresses a more pessimistic vision than "The Dead." It emanates a sense of closure and ultimate incommunicability, rather unusual in Forster, who, with the "only connect" of his novels, seems rather to indicate a possible remedy for progressive materialism and spiritual withering. There is a sense of opening out to others, an intimation, even though only a slight one, of moral regeneration and hope in the last story of Dubliners, which renders it anomalous in the general paralysis that characterizes the entire collection.
The conflict between two moral worlds that, in his other works, Forster exemplifies in terms of spatial opposition (London and Monteriano, Sawston and Cambridge, England and Italy or India), is expressed in this story, as I said, in terms of temporal opposition, through the dialectic contrast that is established between the present Vorta and the Vorta of 20 years before. As the custodian of memory, Miss Raby is the temporal consciousness in the tale: She continually superimposes the village of her youth upon the present one, whose beauty, though apparently unchanged with the passing of years, is revealed by comparison as deeply corroded and corrupt. In the fictional world of Forster, the dichotomy between a present charged with negativity and a past rich in positive values is very pronounced: Once an idyllic little village, Vorta is now defaced by coarse neon lights and invaded by tourists whose intolerance has suffocated the natural joyfulness of people and enforced silence on the church bells. Material affluence has irremediably deteriorated, almost destroyed, all human values. Greed for money and personal interest, disloyalty and selfishness seem to preside over all human relations.
