Keats and the Cinematic Time-Image: Temporal Existence in Ode on a Grecian Urn Key Words: John Keats; Temporality; Gilles Deleuze; Film Theory; Images Abstract: The theme of time and its passage in engaged in many forms and to various ends in the poetic work of John Keats. This essay explores the way in which Keats articulates time and temporal structure through the evocation of images in his poetry, and it uses the film theory of Gilles Deleuze to carry out this exploration. Deleuze argues for the philosophical importance of cinema as an art form through which time and temporality can be investigated and articulated. His “time-image” compound theory describes the specific relationship between time and image that is created in film. This essay deconstructs the concepts at the heart of the “time-image” and sets them in the context of Keats’s poetry. Repeatedly in Keats’s work, the conjured image – whole and absolute, yet of a necessarily time-conditioned existence – is made the focus of the poetic voice’s persistent interrogation. A perfect example of this can be found in his famous Ode on a Grecian Urn, wherein the image of the urn comes to house the mysteries of the passage of time, immutable and impenetrable. It is this poem in particular that is here addressed and decoded using Deleuze’s theories. Ultimately, in setting the conventions of modern cinema up against a nineteenth century poem, an argument is made for the possibilities of cross-media and retrospective analysis in literature. This essay uses the language of film to shed new light on the work of Keats, and in doing so, sets up cinema as a tool for literary analysis in its own right. In his 1985 publication, Cinéma II: L’Image-temps, French philosopher Gilles Deleuze makes the assertion that “cinema is still at the beginning of its investigations: making visible these relationships of time which can only appear in a creation of the image” (Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image xii). Cinema is here presented as a philosophical tool; an inherently conceptual medium which, even on its most basic operational levels, engages with complex existential questions. In particular, Deleuze points to cinema’s unique capacity for the philosophical articulation of time, stating as the intention of his text, “to release [the temporal structures] that the cinematographic image has been able to grasp and reveal, and which can echo the teachings of science, what the other arts uncover for us, or what philosophy makes understandable for us, each in their respective ways” (Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image xii). In this way, Deleuze sets up cinematic theory as a potential interrogative device for the philosophical understanding of temporal structure. Cinema uses moving images – that is to say, creates the illusion of moving images – as a means of creating and engaging with temporal space. Of course, this impulse to use ‘the image’ as a site of investigation for time and temporality did not simply arise for the first time alongside the relatively young medium that is cinema. It is with this in mind that this essay proposes to take Deleuze at his word, so to speak, and harness what “the cinematographic image has been able to grasp and reveal”, in order to determine what retrospective light cinematic theory in general, and “time-image” theory in particular can shed on previous artistic explorations of time and temporality. The specific subject of these investigations will be the work of Romantic poet John Keats, and his poem Ode on a Grecian Urn (Keats 1466-1468) in particular. Of course, Keats’s poetic dealings with, and renderings of, time and the inevitability of its passage extend far beyond this one composition. Though his writing life was astonishingly short – no more than six years – his work displays ample engagement with concepts of time through the themes of the seasons and oncoming death, for example, in poems such as To Autumn, When I have Fears that I may cease to be, and Bright Star. However, it is in Grecian Urn that Keats utilises the ‘image’, and the various layers of complexity inherent to the way in which it functions as a signifier, in order to explore the at once vast and intricate terrain of the immutable phenomenon that is time and its movement. It is for this reason that this essay will focus solely on this work. In so doing, the aim is to demonstrate the ways in which Deleuze’s theory can aid an exploration of Keats’s poem, and by extension, the value of retrospective and cross-media thinking for opening up new avenues for artistic analysis. Deleuze’s theory of the “time-image” comes as a continuation of sorts of his previous work on what he called the “movement-image” (Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image), in Cinema I: L’image-mouvement. Taking up the theories of Henri Bergson, Deleuze here asserts the idea of movement, in cinema, as the central descriptive tool. That is to say that despite the fact of its technical reliance on a system of successive still images, in terms of artistic expression and philosophical actualisation it is in fact the movement on the screen, and the fact of its continuity, that constitutes cinematic expression. Cinema “does not give us a figure described in a unique moment, but the continuity of the movement which describes the figure” (Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image 5). It is the disruption of this unity of image and movement, in the aftermath of the Second World War that Deleuze explores in Cinema 2. He asserts that “the movement-image of the so-called classical era gave way, in the post-war period, to a direct time-image” (Deleuze, Cinema 2: The TimeImage xi). The psychological trauma caused by the war finds expression in a disturbance of the cohesion that characterised the films of the time before. Looking at the revolutionary new cinematic techniques of the French New Wave and Italian Neorealism in particular, such as “false continuity and irrational cuts”, Deleuze highlights how “[t]ime ceases to be derived from the movement, it appears in itself and itself gives rise to false movements” (Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image xi). In this sense, it is no longer movement which constitutes the essence of cinematic expression, but rather, time which “rises to the surface of the screen” (Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image xi). From here, Deleuze embarks on an exploration of the different forms in which the “time-image” can be found, and what, in terms of philosophy, this new articulation of time, through image, can tell us. It is the latter that is the principal concern of this essay. Deleuze’s exploration takes as its base-point, so to speak, the assertion that “[t]he image itself is the system of the relationships of time from which the variable present only flows” (Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image xii). From here, he unfurls a detailed analysis of the many layers of time and temporal existence that constitute the infinite present that the ‘image’ presents. As a rigorous account of the minute inter-workings of temporality and semiotics, there is much that even a basic application of the text’s main theses could offer any work. John Keats’s poem, Ode on a Grecian Urn, is a suitable candidate for the application of Deleuze’s cinematic theory because, this essay would propose, it follows a similar thread in relation to the way in which it conceives of and articulates the passage of time. In a way, it presents its own “time-image”, its own articulation of a moment of expectant awareness within the forward trajectory of narrative art. A fully realised, self-aware stillness. The poem consists of a single voice, musing on the still silence of the loaded historian that a Grecian urn constitutes: Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of silence and slow time, Sylvan historian, The poetic voice addresses the urn, relentlessly questioning, but to no avail. It is an altercation between the poetic voice and inscribed marble. There is no response, the voice and its inquisition are all that can be heard. However, this marble urn, inscribed as it is with the four distinct images described by the poem, is not entirely without expression. At the point where the poetic voice encounters these still images, something further is conjured: an imaginary activation of each of the four scenes as they are brought to life in an enclosed, circuitous, temporal existence. The images represent an eternal present. They are a happening that does not quite happen, a single unit of time, retrieved from its original place in time’s relentless forward movement, and condensed into the only utterance that can really express something that is at once so solid and so fleeting; an image. This is the “time-image” that is here produced. In the sense that Deleuze’s “time-image” arises as the result of the dislocation of time from continuous, cohesive movement in film, it here arises from a similar act of temporal disruption. In both cases, there is a sense of multiplicity and layering in the expression of time that is brought to the fore. Deleuze states that: what we call temporal structure, or direct time-image, clearly goes beyond the purely empirical succession of time – past-present-future. It is, for example, a coexistence of distinct durations, or of levels of duration; a single event can belong to several levels: sheets of past coexist in a non-chronological order. (Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image xii) This assertion provides an interesting articulation of not only the sense of time that emerges from Keats’s frozen-in-time images, but also of the way in which they resonate with and give meaning to their bearer, the urn itself. As an object – a literal vessel - filled with the past, which was absorbed as the present, as it passed in its time, and will accordingly be carried forward into the future, it constitutes a dense figure in any discussion of time. More detailed elucidation of this will emerge from more precise applications of Deleuze’s theories, which are to follow. An important part of Deleuze’s “time-image” is the dislocation between visual and audio that it effects. He states that “[t]he relations and disjunctions between visual and sound, between what is seen and what is said, revitalize the problem and endow cinema with new powers for capturing time and the image” (Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image xiii). This refers, of course, to the ways in which cinema can separate sound from image, causing the emergence of a “direct time-image” from the disjointed space in-between. However, there is evidence of Keats engaging in a similar process in Ode on a Grecian Urn. The first of the four images depicted on the side of the urn that he focuses on is that of a piper. He is portrayed to be in the middle of playing a tune on his pipe, and so Keats muses on the fact that he and his music, caught in the eternal present of the image, will exist in that state forever: Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare; More importantly, however, this state of preserved silence renders him separate from the music that he makes, which cannot be carried forward with his image. While he is a piper in the midst of a tune, the tune is absent, or rather, elsewhere. The first four lines of the second stanza testify to this: Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d, Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: The unheard melody that the piper plays is a sort of paradox, a discontinuity which allows for a glimpse of time to emerge. From the space where the past is distilled as a present, between an action and its consequence, comes a “time-image”. This idea takes even more productive forms in the third and fourth stanzas. While the piper is “[f]or ever piping songs for ever new;” the young lovers in the next image, poised in the act of being about to kiss, are “[f]or ever panting and for ever young”. Their actions are given not just an aural effect but one that is connected with their breathing, and accordingly, with their very ‘being’. Sound is here connected with the ultimate act of continuous, uninterrupted living. Indeed, this very mechanism is referred to explicitly in the next line: “All breathing human passion far above”. Breathing is something that happens within time, in that it is a continuous act. It is also the very thing that constitutes life. However, their “panting”, or “breathing” cannot be heard here; it is interrupted, caught and preserved before it even happens. This is perhaps what is ultimately expressed by this sense of a preserved present; rather than a death, it constitutes a lack of life. The following image, at the beginning of the fourth stanza, exemplifies this. A “heifer lowing at the skies” is being led to its death at a ceremony of sacrifice. Yet, though on the brink of death, it will never quite get there, the scene having been preserved en-route. Caught between life and death, never moving closer to either one, nor fully realising its own position – in that the heifer’s “lowing” is unsounded, like the lovers’ “panting” – this image, like all the images described by Keats, constitutes a sort of “time-image” in the way that it appears as a fragment of temporal existence. The complexities of Ode on a Grecian Urn are based primarily in the intricate conception of time that it presents, but these complexities in turn generate further lines of enquiry for an analysis of the poem. Deleuze’s theory offers more than simply an explanation of where the “timeimage” can be found. There is a definite sense of the active life of the image, its distinction from the “time-image” which it facilitates and of the working relationship between the two. He states that: What is specific to the image, as soon as it is creative, is to make perceptible, to make visible, relationships of time which cannot be seen in the represented object and do not allow themselves to be reduced to the present. (Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image xii) This assertion makes two particular inferences: firstly, that the basic image has an active, “creative” role in the production of a “time-image”. This is important in the sense that it sets the two at a distance from each other, while at the same time establishing that the latter is indeed dependent of the former. Secondly, the above statement infers that the “time-image” - that is to say the “mak[ing] visible” of the “relationships of time which cannot be seen” – is dependent on the act of representation that the image constitutes. Inasmuch as the subject that the image displays contributes to the “timeimage” that is produced, so too does the very fact of its display, perhaps even more so. There is a deliberation in the act of representation that gives a meaning to the image that the original object does not have. That this, in essence, constitutes a split between an original and its representative, is relevant to this discussion in that is serves as a pre-cursor to another assertion of splitting later in Deleuze’s text. He states that, as part of the development of a “time-image” from an image “[t]here is a formation of an image with two sides, actual and virtual” (Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image 68). These two acts of splitting, between original and image, and then between image and “time-image” create what Deleuze later refers to as a “circuit” of reality, memory and thought, wherein the image “both absorbs and creates its own object” (Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image 68). This idea of a “circuit” of existence relates in an interesting way to the depiction of the urn that Keats’s poem offers. Returning once again to the object itself “on” which the ode was composed, there are several things which are important to note. Firstly, the urn which Keats describes does not actually exist. While it is known that Keats visited the Elgin Marbles at the British Museum, and it is generally assumed that it was this experience, which poet and critic Edward Hirsch describes as having been “an overpowering encounter”, which inspired his ode, it is understood that there is no known “Grecian Urn” which fits Keats’s description (Hirsch xxiii). And so, the figure of the urn presents a circuit of existence the beginning of which is imaginary. The images which Keats describes have been conjured completely by him, and in this way the poem itself, and not just the urn it presents, “both absorbs and creates its own image”. In sum, the relationship between the poem, the urn, the images that it depicts and the “time-image” that they produce is presented as a layered circuit of shadowy existence, or even not-quite-existence. They “continually follow[ed] each other, running behind each other and referring back to each other around a point of indiscernibility” (Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image 68). This idea finds expression in the poem itself, in the way in which Keats relentlessly questions the urn, asking “[w]hat leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape”, and receiving no answer. Perhaps this is because what the urn houses is exactly that; a haunting indiscernibility, and nothing more, or at least, nothing more penetrable. Teased “out of thought” by the impenetrable circuit of creation in representation that the poem perpetuates, Keats concludes with a similar, logically circular riddle: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. Not only does the heart of the poem remain somewhat indiscernible, but there is a sense that the poem’s heart, or centre, is not the point; that it is the circuits of images in their various temporal and existential states that constitute the poem’s true subject matter. Having thus exemplified the ways in which Deleuze’s theory of the cinematic image seems to echo mechanisms that were used by Keats in his poetry more than a century before, and having followed the arising suggestions for understanding one of his poems, this discussion will now take a step back from the theoretical application itself. The idea that Keats seems to have pre-figured certain elements of modern, cinematic philosophy is worth some pursuit in its own right. While the notion, thus stated, may seem like a tenuous one, it does, when viewed in the wider, historical framework of intellectual currents, seem a good deal more plausible. In the preface to their English translation of Deleuze’s text, Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta tap into this notion somewhat, stating that: Modern cinema recreates the concepts of modern philosophy, but in a new way. In particular, the cinematic reversal of the subordination of time to movement repeats a philosophical revolution which took place over several centuries. Deleuze [begins his analysis with] the break up of the classical notion of the image which was defined in relation to external world and self-aware subject. (Tomlinson and Galeta xvi) It is interesting to consider these sentiments in the context of Keats’s own poetic theory of “Negative Capability”, which, as he himself explains in a letter to his brothers, refers to a situation in which “man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (Keats 1404-1405). This essentially amounts to a wilful loss of the self, a complete negation of ego, in the course of artistic pursuit. It is this that Keats strove for in his poetry; for the lines to blur between poet and subject, and for him to be able to embody his subject rather than consider it from a distance. There is certainly a parallel between this newly asserted way of envisioning the relationship between artist and subject, and Deleuze’s identification of a new relationship between image as subject, and the external world. Further to this, it is worth pointing out that both theories emerged from landmark period of upheaval in the western world. As a poet of the Romantic era, Keats was writing in the aftermath of the French and American revolutions, and all of the political strife that accompanied them in England. Similarly, Deleuze, pinpoints the emergence of the “time-image” in the aftermath of the Second World War. However, it is not the business of this discussion to draw speculative conclusions from the fact that these parallels exist, but rather to contextualise the comparisons that this essay has proposed in some sort of historical and theoretical framework. Indeed, it has not been the object of this essay to establish an exclusive and inexplicable link between Keats’s poetry and modern film theory. It is the shared threads of philosophical thought and expression that have emerged between the two, regardless of historical context or artistic medium, that are worth identifying and warrent recognition. That Deleuze’s “time-image” theory can offer a framework through which the complexities of Keats’s rendering of time and the ‘image’ in Ode on a Grecian Urn can be articulated, proves that this is the case. Bibliography Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. —. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Hirsch, Edward. "Introduction." Keats, John. The Complete Poems and selected letters of John Keats. Random House LLC, 2009. Keats, John. "Letter from John Keats to George and Tom Keats, 21 December 1817 (extract)." ed. Wu, Duncan. Romanticism: An Anthology Fourth Edition. WileyBlackwell, 2012. 1404-1405. Tomlinson, Hugh and Robert Galeta. "Translator's Introduction." Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. xv-xviii.
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