Detaining Time

Temporal Resistance in Literature from Shakespeare to McEwan

Eric P. Levy

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781350066908
• eBook ISBN: 9781474292054
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Detaining Time is the first book to investigate the representation of time in literature in terms of the project to reconceptualize time, so that its movement no longer threatens security. Focusing on the nature, consequences, and resolution of resistance to temporal passage, Eric P. Levy offers detailed and probing close readings, enriched by thorough yet engaging explication and application of prominent philosophical theories of time. Philosophy is here employed not as a rigid model to which literature is forced to conform, but instead as a lens through which elements crucial to the literary texts can be isolated and clarified, even as they concern ideas different from those expounded in philosophy. The literary texts treated include Hamlet, Hard Times, Ulysses, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, a wide range of Beckettian works, and Enduring Love – texts distinguished by their challenging, relentless, original, and dramatic depiction of the struggle with temporality. The philosophies of time covered include those of Aristotle, Kant, Bergson, John McTaggart, C.D. Broad, Edmund Husserl and Gilles Deleuze.

1

The Mimesis of Time in Hamlet

Hamlet opens with intense attention to time as the sentries “watch the minutes of this night” (1.1.30).¹ The emphasis gains thematic depth when Hamlet formulates his predicament in terms of temporal dislocation: “The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right” (1.5.196–97). The problem of time is raised to philosophical status in Polonius’s rhetoric: “Why day is day, night night, and time is time” (2.2.88). The importance of time in Hamlet has provoked numerous studies, yet none but the present one approaches the matter through recourse to the temporal analysis of John McTaggart, whose celebrated article on the unreality of time, published in 1908 and later republished in the second volume of his metaphysical work The Nature of Existence, is often regarded as a seminal treatise in the philosophy of time since the first decade of the twentieth century. Though virtually no philosophers have defended McTaggart’s claim that time is unreal, legions of them, in thousands of articles and books on the subject, have addressed some aspect of his description of the two temporal series proper to time (or, more precisely, the notion of time). These two series, easily defined, can serve as powerful lenses though which to analyze and illumine the structure of time in Hamlet. The result of our inquiry will be a new understanding of the representation of time—or, more precisely, what Gerhard Dohrn-van-Rossum terms “time-consciousness”—in the text (1996, 3 and passim). For the elements that we shall draw from McTaggart are not theoretical (in the sense of imposing ideational constructs on reality or what actually is), but descriptive, in the sense of articulating the actual conceptual content of the notion of time—what E. J. Lowe calls the “indispensable ingredients in our understanding of what time is” (1991, 43) and what L. Nathan Oaklander calls the “two ways in which we ordinarily conceive and talk about time” (1994b, 157). Despite the fact that McTaggart’s theory of the nonreality of time turned out historically to be a dead end, his succinct and penetrating analysis of what time is conceptually—what concepts are intrinsic to the very idea of time—has exercised profound and lasting influence on philosophers of time ever since he published his formulations. Ironically, though ultimately concerned with demonstrating that time is not, McTaggart’s analysis has become indispensable to many philosophers in defining what time is.

But before proceeding with this investigation, brief recapitulation of earlier approaches to the problem of time in Hamlet will contextualize discussion. A convenient introduction to such considerations concerns emphasis on the Renaissance as the period when temporal awareness broke through to a new level. Georges Poulet stresses the upsurge in the sense of transience: “It is indeed true that one felt then as always, and perhaps more keenly then ever before, the precarious and fugitive character of each lived moment” (1956, 10). David Scott Kastan elaborates on this aspect of the temporal awareness of the Renaissance man: “His world is one in which the unidirectional and irreversible flow of time brings an intensified sense of the fragility and precariousness of being” (1982, 6). Ricardo Quinones underscores this temporal insecurity by pointing to the Renaissance concern with the Saturnine quality of time, construed in terms of its “menacing and destructive” activity, analogous to that of the mythological Saturn, the god who consumed his own offspring (1972, 15). Other scholars foreground more positive aspects of Renaissance temporality by focusing on the achievement of historical perspective. Erwin Panofsky, for example, highlights the role of intense philological study of classical texts that enabled the understanding of ancient civilization “as a phenomenon complete in itself, yet belonging to the past and historically detached from the contemporary world” (1939, 27). Dohrn-van-Rossum addresses the role of nascent technology in fostering awareness of the difference between past and present: “From the beginning of the fifteenth century, at the latest, the preoccupation with inventions developed a historical perspective” (1996, 5).

Scholars dealing directly with the treatment of time in Hamlet deploy a range of approaches. Wylie Sypher claims to detect in Hamlet a notion of “punctiform” time that, supposedly anticipating post-Renaissance temporal notions, is “discontinuous” and “mechanical,” thereby privileging the instant, liberated from past and future (1976, 67–68). Paul Yachnin interprets the opening of Hamlet in terms of historical déjà vu, wherein the military vigilance regarding possible invasion reenacts that in July and August, 1599, pertaining to false rumours of a return of the dreaded Spanish Armada that England defeated in 1588 (2002). Maurice Hunt explores the prominence of “regression” and “reversion to the past” (2004, 382, 383). Numerous scholars construe the representation of time in the play in terms of binary oppositions. Frank Kermode applies the terms chronos and kairos, defining chronos as “ ‘passing time’ or ‘waiting time’ ” and kairos as “the season, a point in time filled with significance, charged with a meaning derived from its relation to the end” (1967, 47). James S. Baumlin revisited these contraries (2002). In contrast, James Calderwood foregrounds synchronic and diachronic polarity (1983, 189). Elsewhere I have investigated the conflict in Hamlet between two temporal dispensations: reiterative time versus teleological time (2008, 150–66). Indeed, the range of opinion on time in Hamlet does appear to marginalize Bernard Grebanier’s claim that “[t]‌he time element is of no consequence in the play” (1960, 177).

All of these investigations of time in Hamlet focus on ways in which time is constructed, interpreted, or experienced in the world of the play. None bases its inquiry on the conceptual complexity of time itself—the nexus of concepts constituting the very notion of time. The present study undertakes such enterprise, with the aim of uncovering thematic implications never before noted or discussed.

With this background, let us turn now to McTaggart’s signal contribution to the understanding of time. According to McTaggart, two kinds of temporal fact are essential to the very notion of time. The first of these (termed the A-series) pertains to the transition of tenses from future to present to past. The second (termed the B-series) involves the unchanging relations of earlier than, simultaneous with, and later than:

I shall give the name of the A series to that series of positions which runs from the far past through the near past to the present, and then from the present through the near future to the far future or conversely. The series of positions which runs from earlier to later, or conversely, I shall call the B series. (1927, 11)

In the A-series, time is dynamic: moments and events continually change position (either nearer or father) in relation to the present, which, in turn, is continually shifting its own position in the temporal stream. In the B-series, time is static: the relations among events, in terms of precedence or simultaneity, do not change. For example, the fact that the Fall of Second Triumvirate precedes the Fall of the Third Reich and succeeds the Fall of the First Athenian Empire can never change, no matter how many other events occur. Robin Le Poidevin encapsulates the distinction between the B-series, which excludes change, and the A-series, which presupposes change: “[I]‌f it is true at one time that event x is earlier than event y, then it is true at all times that x is earlier than y. Positions in the A-series, in contrast, do change; what is now present was once future and will be past” (1991, 14). Oaklander elaborates:

On the one hand, we think of time and events in time as moving, or passing, from the far future to the near future, from the near future to the present, and then from the present receding into the more and more distant past. Events in a series of terms which are either past, present, or future are said to be located in an A-series. On the other hand, we speak and think of moments or events as being earlier than, later than, and simultaneous with other events, and we believe that these relations are unchanging, permanent and fixed. (1994b, 157–58)

These two temporal series, fundamental to the notion of time as McTaggart defines it, figure prominently in Hamlet, where their role can be introduced through reference to the dual mimetic project in the play: the representation of both nature and art. Hamlet, of course, cites the first of these: “the purpose of playing … was and is to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature” (3.2.20–22). He unwittingly intimates the second—the play’s portrayal of itself as a play or work of literary art—when describing his entrapment in a drama written by his own adversaries: “Or I could make a prologue to my brains, / They had begun the play” (5.2.30–31). In its representation of “nature”—that is, the world of experience, subject to continuous flux and change—Hamlet foregrounds the A-series. In contrast, in its representation of “art”—that is, the notion of drama as a text already written, comprising a fixed sequence of events—Hamlet foregrounds the B-series.

Brief explication will clarify this basic distinction. As noted in the first sentence of this discussion, the sentries on the “platform” of Elsinore are acutely aware of the passage of time (1.2.214). More specifically, through fear of “the omen coming on,” they are acutely concerned with the approach of future events toward the present and, through concern with the Ghost, with the recession of past events from the present (1.1.126). This predicament epitomizes the A-series—the notion of time as the flux or passage of tenses. Yet, construed as a dramatic text whose parts are fixed in a continuum stretching “before and after” (4.4.37), Hamlet constitutes a B-series, comprising events and moments ordered according to the two-place predicates: earlier than, simultaneous with, and later than. Considered in this context, all the moments and events in the play are disposed in an inviolable sequence, independent of considerations of future, present, or past. That is, to interpolate an apt formula of Quentin Smith, they coexist tenselessly—always sustaining the same unchanging “relations to each other of simultaneity, earlier than, or later than” (1994, 38). In an alternate formulation, as a dramatic text, the play comprises a series of successive moments and events simultaneously participating in the same totality. Thus construed, the moments and events comprising Hamlet are “spread out in actual juxtaposition,” thereby constituting a “permanent order of succession” or “tenseless array,” exactly like the moments and events comprising the B-series aspect of time (to quote phrases respectively from Philip Turetzky and Delmas Kiernan-Lewis regarding B-time).²

This distinction between A-time and B-time (time as formulated as an A-series and time formulated as a B-series) can be epitomized in the following manner: think of Hamlet from within (as experienced by the characters) and without (as a text comprising a fixed and unvarying series of events). In the former (from within), time unfolds as an A-series; in the latter (from without), time unfolds as a B-series. Probing the implications of the A-series and the B-series in the play will disclose a heretofore “undiscover’d” dimension of meaning (3.1.79). To this point, we have indicated only its terms of reference. Now our task is to examine how A-series and B-series constructions of time—with their corresponding tensed and tenseless formulations of reality—illumine Hamlet in general and Hamlet’s own rectification of the problem of time in particular.

A-series time in Hamlet

Time passes on the platform of Elsinore. The sentries watch the minutes of this night, hear the clock striking one, and note the changing position of the stars. The Ghost senses the approach of dawn, and the moment when his allotted time on the platform expires and his allotted time in purgatorial fire resumes. On this level, the crucial event in the play is the passage of time. Indeed, it is the “argument” of the play, just as, as we shall see, it is the argument of The Murder of Gonzago—the play within the play (3.2.27). But how is this temporal passage constructed and construed? In McTaggart’s paradigm, the passage of time (as an A-series) entails the continuous approach of the future toward the present and continuous recession into the past of that which was present. George Schlesinger elaborates: “Temporal points from the future, together with the events that occur at those points, keep approaching the NOW and, after momentarily coinciding with it, recede further and further into the past” (1994, 214). There is no danger, in this paradigm, that time will ever run out. It passes as a continuous flux of succession, without beginning or end. Moreover, though temporal passage, as D. H. Mellor indicates, is defined as “the dimension of changing tense” from future to present to past, passage itself does not occupy a temporal position (1993, 49). Instead, it is tenseless—that is, its unchanging continuity is not susceptible to distinctions of future, present, and past. Consider, for example, Polonius’s construction of time as the continuous succession of night and day: “Why day is day, night night, and time is time” (2.2.88). Although, from the standpoint of a given moment, one particular day or one particular night is susceptible to distinction in terms of futurity, presence, or pastness, the continuous passage of night and day does not itself migrate from future to present to past. Rather its tenseless continuity is presupposed by the continuous transition from the future to the present to the past of any given moment (or day or night) it contains.

But for “[t]‌he single and peculiar life” in Hamlet, time is not inexhaustible (3.3.11). Instead, it is limited and finite, for human life is “mortal and unsure”—unsure, that is, of how much more time has been allotted to it (4.4.51). From this point of view, time is understood in terms not of continuity, but of expiration. As such, the passage of time is itself a source of threat, apart from whatever events its passage might bring into the present.³ Regardless of suspected or expected content, the fundamental threat posed by the future to the present concerns elapse. This construction of temporal passage gives rise t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1  The Mimesis of Time in Hamlet
• 2  Dickens’s Pathology of Time in Hard Times
• 3  Time and Metempsychosis in Ulysses
• 4  “the horror of the moment”: Fear and Acceptance of Time in Mrs. Dalloway
• 5  The Phenomenology of Temporal Trauma in To the Lighthouse
• 6  The Beckettian Mimesis of Post-Temporal Time
• 7  Postlapsarian Will and the Problem of Time in Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love
• 8  Further Perspectives: Explication of Gilles Deleuze’s Temporal Theory
• 9  Further Perspectives: Application of Gilles Deleuze’s Temporal Theory
• Epilogue: Time and Agency
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Copyright