The thematization of time in E.M. Forster's 'The Eternal Moment' and Joyce's 'The Dead.'

Contrary to Feo, Gabriel then is able to break out of a stagnant present that alienates him from himself and from others and is reintegrated in a temporal dimension which, reconciling past and present, allows him to enter the world of "otherness." At the end of his descent into the secret space of his inner self, Gabriel's external and inner time coincide, and in his new present, charged with Gretta's and his own past, he can find an axiological center around which to reorganize his life. In his essential loneliness, when he abandons himself to a "swoon" that many interpret as symbolic of spiritual death, Gabriel experiences a mysterious sense of communion not only with "the vast hosts of the dead" (223), the indistinct shadows that silently come to fill his room, but also with the living: his final westward choice, though pointing toward the setting of the sun, and metaphorically of human life, is also a choice for the West of Gretta. Thus, in the pervasive oppression that hovers over Dubliners, "The Dead" sounds an unexpected note of hope.

At the end of Joyce's story, in the closing image of the snow that softly falls "through the universe . . . upon all the living and the dead" (223), as in Forster's narrative, space and time dissolve and dilate into a cosmic vision that encompasses eternity. Yet the final silences that seal the two stories are charged with a totally different suggestion: Where "The Eternal Moment" conveys a sense of incommunicability and isolation, "The Dead" suggests a sense of reconciliation and communion. Joyce's short story avoids the schematism and the didactic intention clearly perceptible in Forster's. While the latter depicts a completed and irreversible process that crystallizes Vorta into a warning, Joyce delineates a process in fieri, in its becoming, that still leaves room for hope. As a consequence, the fictional world of Forster appears unproblematic and clear, while the world of Joyce, so full of nuances and overtones, retains an essential ambiguity; this might be the reason why "The Eternal Moment" transmits a clear message to its readers, whereas "The Dead" communicates a subtle emotion. Beyond such differences, though, the dualistic rendering of time, its metaphorical significance, and the particular narrative function that it explicates, so strikingly analogous in the two short stories, seem to attest to a very similar conceptual and emotional response to Bergson's time theories on the part of their authors.

NOTES

1 Darwinian theory shook the theological-metaphysical conception of human existence by replacing the reassuring myth of a divine origin with the scientific hypothesis of an undifferentiated magma as the only origin of life on our planet. The second law of thermodynamics, in prefiguring the death by cold of the entire universe as the final event in the irreversible chain of causality that governs physical phenomena, projected a nihilistic vision that seriously challenged all claims to an axiological foundation of human life.