TIME TRAVEL
Temporal Transitions in Selected Twentieth-Century Works of Fiction
Lita A. Kurth
Critical Paper & Program Bibliography
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the MFA (Master of
Fine Arts) in Creative Writing, Pacific Lutheran University, August 2009.
1
Time Travel: Temporal Transitions in Selected Twentieth-Century Works of Fiction
“A narrative line is in its deeper sense…the tracing out of a meaning, and the
real continuity of a story lies in this probing forward.”
—Eudora Welty, “Is Phoenix Jackson’s Grandson
Really Dead?”
My critical paper, I realized after several drafts, gets to the heart of some basic
goals and assumptions I have about literature and its purpose. I have always felt that the
function of art overwhelmed its form or structure, that form was so far secondary that its
only role was to get the job done. I simply didn’t care that Theodore Dreiser, Richard
Wright, Dostoyevsky or August Wilson committed formal errors. I wanted to create art
that was profound, and I had distinctly less interest in what appeared to be attractive
“packaging.”
I wonder now why I have distrusted attention to form (not in poetry or at the
sentence level, paradoxically). Some part of me considers it a necessary evil. Is it that I
want to render an experience as accurately as possible, to tell a truth to the best of my
ability, and formal considerations might distract from and impede that more important
goal? However, lately I have seen manifold evidence of novels that are both profound
and structurally playful—Jonathan Safran Foer’s work, for example.
And another question occurs to me now: what’s wrong with creating a significant
work of art whose primary concern is not solely truthful rendering but some other
valuable purpose such as adding an amusing or helpful element to lived experience and
arranging it imaginatively?
2
A familiar cliché is: “form follows function,” but I have trouble believing
it—despite evidence in front of my eyes. Form and function seem like foes; if I pay
attention to one, I lose the other. Another very real concern I’ve had is that I couldn’t
carry off any but the most rudimentary forms. I’ve long thought, If I could only write as
well as Pat Conroy, I’d be satisfied, and looked to popular novels for reassurance that
one can be a real plodder with regard to form and still reach readers. Reading the virtuosi,
I feel removed and uninitiated: Sure, they can do it, but what does it have to do with me?
But maybe this is the meaning of apprenticeship. As I observe and practice, I find a few
tools that I might be able to use.
Form has many aspects—from how long chapters are to how big the world of the
novel is and how densely populated to what manner of sentences. The particular formal
challenge we’ll look at here is the movement of characters from one time to another
(often prior) time in the novel or story. These moves are made more vexing by the many
special types of time a novel can “live” in—perhaps as many types as there are tenses in
our language and more-- times that shift and multiply. A flashback, for example, can be
treated as and become the “present” of the novel, so that it is essentially a hybrid of past
and present. Just the aspect of time alone entails so many technical matters that it can
seem as if the “content” of the story is at war with the working-out of sequence problems.
Some content has to be jettisoned to serve formal needs. What if one has to leave out a
key element because one cannot find a place for it in the narrative structure?
Theoretically, if form follows function, that shouldn’t happen, but, in my experience, it
does happen, especially during the drafting process.
3
After wrestling with this problem in my own work and observing it in the work of
others, I’ve come to believe that although I have not solved the quandary, I can perhaps
look at time and formal structure in a less limited way. Eudora Welty’s insightful essay,
“Some Notes on Time in Fiction,” helps me envision time differently. She asserts that,
rather than temporal problems fighting the novel’s subject, “…time has the closest
possible connection with the novel’s meaning, it being the chief conductor of the plot”
(165). She then gives examples of proverbs such as, “’Pride goeth before destruction….’
and ‘He that diggeth a pit shall fall into it” (164). At first, these aphorisms bewildered
me; what did they have to do with time at all? They name no season, no day, no year, no
hour. Nothing in these proverbs answers the question “when?” How then, can they be
examples of time?
They can, I came to understand, because time is not “chronology,” but
“causality,” and cause and effect must unfold in time (Welty 165). Welty elaborates:
“Why does a man do a certain thing now, what in the past has brought him to it, what in
the future will come of it, and into what sequence will he set things moving now?... Time
uncovers motive…and develops the consequences” (165). One sees here a sort of
boundary area around time. It cannot be dealt with any and every way; it needs to address
these questions or at least some of them.
Time problems may be seen more clearly through the lens of causality but that
does not render them easy. What, after all, are all the causes of someone’s actions and
attitudes? Where do we begin? How do we decide which scenes to render? How do we
get the past into the present without confusing the reader or derailing the plot? And how
4
do we know when we’re finished? To me, these are terrifying questions because I do not
know the answers.
A beginning novelist might hope that her novel could be arranged via simple
chronology as one relates “what happened” in telling a friend about a party or a movie.
But chronology only answers the question of one kind of order. Even after (or while) a
sequence of events or span of time is laid out, the novelist still has to answer these
questions: How should time feel to the character? Which events need to unravel slowly,
minutely? Which will happen quickly, in summary, or be skipped over, and which will
linger? In an ensemble-cast novel, whose actions, feelings, words, and thoughts will
dominate a particular time? The novel’s time does have a relationship to calendar time
and clock time, but the two are not the same because, as Welty tells us, “time is, of
course, subjective” (167). This is a great truth but more of a globe than a roadmap.
E.M. Forster makes a similar point in his foundational work of theory, Aspects of
the Novel. First he points out that “…the backbone of a novel has to be a story….It is the
highest factor common to all the very complicated organisms known as novels” (27-8).
Then he alerts us to a problem: “We think one event occurs after or before
another…much of our talk and action proceeds on the assumption” (28). However,
Forster tells us, we often overlook a key phenomenon:
…there seems something else in life besides time, something which may
conveniently be called “value,” something which is measured not by minutes or
hours but by intensity, so that when we look at our past, it does not stretch back
evenly but piles up into a few notable pinnacles, and when we look at the future, it
seems sometimes a wall, sometimes a cloud, sometimes a sun, but never a
5
chronological chart….So daily life…is composed of two lives—the life in time
and the life by values--…What the story does is to narrate the life in time. And
what the entire novel does… is to include the life by values as well. (28)
That is so neatly said and likely the kind of thing one says after completing a novel.
Taking perhaps a more pedestrian, craft viewpoint, Lan Samantha Chang
discusses two types of time travel-- flashback and prolepsis-- in her essay, “Time and
Order: The Art of Sequencing,” pointing out that,
A well-placed flashback is ‘launched’ from the present time by a significant and
related event…Ideally, the image or episode in the flashback will then launch
itself back into the present story, adding drama and weight to the narrative. In
other words, the story and the back story should speak to each other, answering
each other’s narrative questions and posing new ones. (139)
Time travel can never be arbitrary, it seems, but must promote the novel’s deepest
meanings. And yet I hear the sound of the stage crew in the above sentences, moving
furniture around. Perhaps I had hoped a novel could be written without thinking much
about them.
Regarding the flash-forward, Chang says:
It can provide us with a startling and revealing vision of the characters’ futures as
their present conflicts unfold…It can invest the narrative with a weighty sense of
significance and destiny…Or…it can call attention to the narrator’s maturation; it
can emphasize what he has learned in the interval….(140).
6
These are certainly valuable heuristics. One sees prolepsis at work in many novels that
begin at or near the end (William Trevor’s My House in Umbria, for example).
However, not all time travel fits the categories of flashback or prolepsis/ flash-forward.
Some moves appear murkier. Methods of moving among times in order to highlight
values appear to be legion, some breathtakingly ingenious, sophisticated, and even
unlikely to succeed. Forster mentions Proust, Emily Bronte, and Sterne as each dealing
with time in unique ways, trying to hide it, turning it upside down, making two things
happen to the same person at once (30). One might add as another example, Alice
Munro’s two-stranded story, “The Albanian Virgin,” which weaves through time in two
women’s lives until they converge in the end.
To summarize our discussion about time transitions so far, we’ve seen causality,
value, and a sense of inner communication as the motives for movements from one time
to another. All of these relationships between form and function and techniques for
achieving such goals, even mundane techniques, interest me. I’m impressed and
astonished by original approaches. I enjoy seeing how eminent writers handle time and
causality to avoid pitfalls such as derailing the plot and losing reader interest, while
enhancing a story’s meaning, deepening the experience, and making it truer to subjective
reality.
Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse: Time Transitions and Purpose
One oft-cited example is Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, a work that has
occupied critics of every type from the aesthetic to the feminist and has occasioned much
technical discussion of “stream of consciousness,” “interior monologue,” and “free-
7
indirect discourse” (Goldman par. 1). On a practical level, if the techniques in the
chapter “Time Passes” were suggested as a solution to the problem of moving from one
time to another, without readers having seen it in action, it’s hard to imagine an
instructor, certainly not Writer’s Digest, approving it. Woolf’s approach seems to go
against all we’ve been warned to avoid: failure to dramatize important events, lingering
in thought and philosophy. For example, in “Time Passes,” Woolf places in brackets all
the important events of perhaps ten years, e.g., “[Prue Ramsay died that summer in some
illness connected to childbirth…]” (199), “[Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in
France, among them Andrew Ramsay….]” (201), and “[Mr. Carmichael brought out a
volume of poems that year which had an unexpected success….]” (202). Shouldn’t these
events be the core of the chapter, even, in fact, of the whole book? Why should a mere
excursion to a lighthouse form the narrative core? Is it important enough? I imagine
instructors and classmates asking these questions.
The most important events, as one usually thinks of them, are most decidedly not
dramatized in Woolf’s book or at least not in the usual way. The lack of detail about them
is stunning. Clearly, the question of moving between times is intertangled with an
author’s larger aims or, as Forster might say, with her sense of value. I ask myself why I
read this chapter with a fair amount of interest all the same. Why did it work for me even
though I was aware at the time that it was not at all a traditional approach? “How did she
get away with this?” I found myself asking. How does Woolf’s structure fit her apparent
meaning or values?
Except for the cleaning woman who prepares the house for habitation again, a
character who has not been central in earlier chapters, the subjects of most paragraphs in
8
“Time Passes” are nothing more substantial than personified forces of nature: “darkness”
(189), “some random light” (190), “Loveliness and stillness” (195), “night…trifling airs,
clumsy breaths” (206), “imaginations” (198), “wind” (199). On the surface, “Time
Passes” accomplishes a practical goal; it brings the earlier, now-diminished cast of
characters forward to resume life a decade later. Woolf herself called the chapter “a
corridor,” joining “two blocks” (Dick qtd. in Goldman par.1). But why are readers left
out of the big events and brought into quotidian life instead, into, of all things, the
condition of a house and later housecleaning? To what does Woolf want to call our
attention? Something significant is happening in “Time Passes,” and it is not “action”.
Where does the chapter take us chronologically, emotionally, and spatially?
Perhaps some subtle kind of growth or movement is suggested in the subjects of
Woolf’s sentences, “darkness” and “light” near the beginning which are forces of
eternity, and “airs” and “breaths” towards the end which are more earthbound and
ephemeral. We might theorize that the story of larger forces rather than particular lives
preoccupies Woolf, and that she wants us to see, in “Time Passes”, a panorama, not a
close-up, an artist’s concept of the war’s impact combined with the personal tragedy of a
mother’s death. One could say To the Lighthouse is to traditional novels what Guernica is
to photo-realism. Everyone, the Ramsey family and all their friends and hirelings, to
some extent at least, partook of a common history—the war. What happened to them
happened to millions of others. In a sense this is always true, but we often write as though
only the individual and her private matters exist. We’ve all read novels chockfull of
individual action but low on connection to the big picture. Woolf’s depiction is the
9
opposite. The aim of capturing the long view, a sort of decade-long ache, the attempt of a
whole society to begin again after loss and failure could justify this unusual approach.
One method Woolf uses to keep us invested in the big picture in spite of an
unusual form is to infuse abstract forces with tremendous poignancy. For many readers,
she succeeds in conveying that sense of life in values more than in time, a concept that
Forster discusses. Woolf constantly ties the unusual “protagonists” of her middle chapter- “wind,” “airs,” “darkness,” “light”--to concrete images and exquisite language, and her
verbs are often highly dramatic. In fact, upon reflection, wind, air, darkness, and light are
not as abstract as love, justice, war, peace, life and death. They are already sensory,
which makes a surprisingly big difference.
We know, upon reading this serious chapter, that Woolf is not just bizarrely
experimenting for the fun of turning things upside down and showing off her virtuosity
under deliberately adverse circumstances. She is trying to capture meaning, perhaps the
meaning of war, of a group of people in relationship, of a lifetime, of the creative urge.
This meaning, like the visual art her character Lily Briscoe pursues, is elusive, partially
conveyed in abstractions, yet abstractions that possess physical qualities like the
“triangular purple shape” in Lily’s painting that represents Mrs. Ramsey reading to her
son (Woolf 81). How does one pay tribute to a family, a time, a place? Lily protests that
one can pay “tribute” by “reducing” an object of veneration, a mother and child, to a
shadow “without irreverence” (81). This seems to be what Woolf has done in her novel.
It doesn’t look like conscious photographic reality exactly, but one feels the reverence. It
is a work of art with formal requirements such as a balance of light and shadow. Why?
Lily says she “felt the need” for those elements (81). One wonders how much Woolf
10
allowed the unconscious to guide her structural decisions. Note the painting-like or
rather, motion picture-like sense of the following:
Nothing, it seemed, could survive the flood, the profusion of darkness which,
creeping in at keyholes and crevices, stole round window blinds, came into
bedrooms, swallowed up here a jug and basin, there a bowl of red and yellow
dahlias, there the sharp edges and firm bulk of a chest of drawers. (Woolf 189-90)
The verbs here are so animate: “survive,” “creep,” “stole,” “swallow.” Yet seeing
someone write this way is not the same as doing it. The danger exists that readers might
say, “Oh, that’s too poetic; I’m bored.” But then, perhaps every form has its detractors.
Woolf’s solution to moving characters through time may be an example of one writer
creating the mysterious means by which her content, her meaning, guided by the
unconscious, can be relayed. Once it has been done, others can follow, but it is surely a
difficult and treacherous path to tread for the first time.
Woolf’s technique has at least one other important merit. It consistently carries
forward Woolf’s theme: life’s meaning evades us as we live and grasp for it. In this
homage to a family and its relations, Woolf sets them on a palpable earth. She pays
attention to the wind and the light, the almost-eternal entities of that earth, and thus
broadens the scope so that the reader can say, “Aren’t we all here on earth, looking at its
waters, its skies, its plants while we live our daily lives? We all have our big events and
die. Houses and gardens deteriorate. What does it mean?” She doesn’t want to boil it
down to an obvious moral or conclusion, it seems, any more than Fanfare for the
Common Man or Guernica boils down to an obvious moral or conclusion.
11
It might be interesting to see whether, without her helpful chapter title, “Time
Passes,” (could one get a title like that past a creative writing class?) one could detect the
time transition solely by reading the ending and beginning words of ”Time Passes,” and
the first and last words of the preceding and succeeding chapters respectively. What we
find is that, although it might seem abrupt, the switch in time is really rather subtle and
lengthy. “Time Passes” does not begin with a sharp cut-off a decade later. It continues the
end of the day related in the previous section (possibly too big to call a chapter), “The
Window.”
One tool Woolf uses is the simple separation of the chapter into seven sections,
each with a Roman numeral. Thus, “II” signals change after a few opening lines of
dialogue that continue the previous chapter’s business and turn out to be, at least in part,
ironically germane: “’Well, we must wait for the future to show,’” says Mr. Bankes, and
one assumes he means wait to see if it’s a nice enough day to go to the lighthouse in the
morning (Woolf 189). But on a philosophical level, we can’t know enough about life to
predict the future; we have to await it.
Ending and beginning sentences call attention to themselves. This sentence, at the
end of section “I,” carries more weight than it would in mid-paragraph. And it does seem
significant, for in that one sentence Woolf provides both time (characters doing
something at a specific point) and value (her philosophy, her truth). Woolf muses about
the big questions in artistic, not standard philosophical terms, however. When everyone is
asleep, she tells us, “certain airs” nose around, asking questions, and her questions lead us
into eternity and out of conscious rational life: “…would it [the wallpaper] hang much
longer, when would it fall…How long would they endure?” (190-91).
12
The airs circulate full of thought during that one night, a stated period that ties us
concretely to chronology. Perhaps Woolf, like many of us, couldn’t stand the way
philosophy and criticism can spin so far away from real life. (Certainly the way she
describes Mr. Ramsay’s intellectual ambition as an insistence on getting beyond “Q”
suggests something less than admiration.) In any event, she helps us follow the story by
providing another signpost, a section “III” and the question, “But what after all, is one
night?” (192). That enormous unanswered question is followed by a description of
autumn trees. Since autumn was just beginning at the book’s start, we note and feel the
passage of a season, which helps us keep track of passing time.
Within a paragraph, without realizing it, we enter continuous time, a time with no
discernible measuring points: “The nights now are full of wind and destruction” (Woolf
193). How many nights? When is this “now”? It is not the day after the events in the first
section/chapter. An unknown amount of time has passed, and we find that a momentous
event (told with extreme brevity in brackets) has occurred: “…Mrs. Ramsay having died
rather suddenly the night before…” (194). All we know is that the time is “one dark
morning” (194) but how long after the day of the first section, we must guess. Is it
Woolf’s tone that ties all these movements together? Is it the emotional impact of her
questions about life (which surely must be what Forster meant by “value”)? They seem at
times wistful, anxious, and resigned. These movements may seem confusing when one
describes them, but I did not have a feeling of confusion while I was reading, or at least
not enough to interrupt my reading or annoy me.
Section “IV” alerts the reader to a later time when the house has been uninhabited
for a further unknown amount of time. Again, the questions appear, “Will you fade? Will
13
you perish?” (Woolf 195). Are these the questions of the war-weary, the death-weary
who cannot trust and settle into daily life again? The only rational answer to the questions
is “yes, we will all fade and perish as will all the material around us,” but the continual
questioning suggests an almost obsessive pondering.
Section “V” brings into view the cleaning woman, Mrs. McNab. Another
unknown amount of time has passed, and yet we appear to remain in a similar eternity,
for Mrs. McNab is asking the same questions the wind asked, “how long shall it endure?”
and that repetition ties the several times together (Woolf 197). We are not truly, solidly in
the present even now, for we get an impressionistic drawing of Mrs. McNab’s life by
means of a very interesting conditional tense, “There must have been…,” repeated twice
in one page. This keeps us half in, half out of Mrs. McNab’s consciousness, half in, half
out of that day’s events. Is Woolf suggesting that as much of our knowledge comes from
imagining as from actually knowing?
“The spring” is the first subject under the section “VI” heading, followed by “As
summer neared…”(Woolf 197). The word “summer” appears three times on one page, a
tactic which really keeps us on the track of passing time and ties us to the concrete world.
The semi-abstract questions continue, however, binding the book together under one
mood and purpose: to question the very meaning of life, but to do so with reference to
specific places and objects.
Under section “VII,” we find a subtle, muffled depiction of wartime, “night and
day, month and year ran shapelessly together” (Woolf 203). Perhaps this is a key to our
understanding of the chapter. Most writers would direct our attention to marches and
rationing, bloodshed and coffins, even what some British citizens called “the best years
14
of our lives,” referring to a sense of common purpose and national solidarity. Woolf’s
approach to those events is oblique, perhaps suggesting she cannot look directly at what
she herself found to be anything but good, or perhaps for her, those were not the things
that mattered.
Section “VIII” brings us Mrs. McNab again who lets us know that “what with the
war…they had never come all these years” (Woolf 204-5). But how many were “all these
years”? My best guess is a decade. It doesn’t matter because Mrs. McNab stands for
everyone, “robbed of meaning” (196) whose lives consist of “…one long sorrow and
trouble…getting up and going to bed again…bringing things out and putting them
away…” the tedium of everyday life (197).
With the coming of peace in the novel’s chronology also comes an answer to
life’s meaning, though not well-heard: “the beauty of the world” (Woolf 213). And the
final philosophical comment of the chapter might also be a comment on the novel as a
work of art: “why not accept this, be content with this, acquiesce and resign?”(214).
Perhaps we need a large section of time in order to ask questions about life’s meaning. Is
that why To the Lighthouse covers such a long span of years? (And yet to me, it also
seems possible to suggest life’s meaning in a flash if that flash is vivid enough.)
We learn through a dozen or more physical details that the house is deteriorating
to an extreme degree: toads, mold, fallen plaster, rats, moths, rust, exposure to rain , and
still “they never sent, they never came” (Woolf 206). How long is this “never”? We have
to guess by the marriage and the war and Mrs. Ramsay being dead for “years.”And then
“that moment” arrives, slightly intruding on eternity, to show us definite activity in the
house, much cleaning and preparation on particular days (208). Section “IX” ends with
15
the new time finally at hand, announced in parentheses: “(Lily Briscoe had her bags
carried up...late one evening in September)” (213). Even at this very specific time, the
human cast of the book does not take center stage again. It is not the arrival of the people
at the house that is announced front and center, but “peace” (213).
A disembodied voice asks questions about what it all means again, and the section
ends with a clear (comparatively) vision of the house clean again and occupied by Lily,
Mr. Carmichael, and a new person, Mrs. Beckwith, who are sleeping as guests in the
rooms (Woolf 214).
On the technical level, Woolf’s transitional tools (“had”, “would”, and “might,”
respectively the past perfect tense, the conditional mood, and a verb conveying
uncertainty) move her characters to and from their current “present” in the plot to a
memory or an abstract thought, and from there, a transition to the past is fairly easy.
Sometimes, in the narrator’s relating of someone’s memory-- Lily Briscoe’s for
example-- the past feels present even though Woolf does not take the further step of using
the simple past, but alternates between “would” or “might” and simple past: “…the voice
might resume…she clutched at her blankets” (214). A possibility begins the sentence;
something definite ends it.
It’s very hard to separate Woolf’s choice of time transitions from the whole work
because her form and function need one another. Her novel’s world, though often not
nailed to one time, is so embodied, so personified that she always gives us an experience
of art, not of rational philosophy. Like a painting, her novel can inhabit numerous times.
Interior monologue, free-indirect discourse, and stream of consciousness would be odd
choices for an action novel, but they are good ones for her values. I wonder how it would
16
have changed the novel if the big events had been dramatized. Perhaps those intense
seconds and minutes would have completely overwhelmed the long view, made it
disappear, but including both the “Time Passes” chapter and interspersals of big events
might have been a success. Historic literature tends to become sacred; suggesting any
change is tantamount to questioning Holy Scripture. This raises an interesting question
about how many different forms a particular content could fit. Is there just one right
form? Probably not. Is there only one form a particular author could wrest from her
material and be satisfied with? That seems likely.
Returning to the question of how time (as one aspect of form) works in a
particular novel, one can imagine a whole array of drastically different novels arising
from changing the focus from one time to another with regard to the same set of events.
The time choices are not infinite, however. Many novels cover only a day, some less than
that, but few span seven generations. Is that because a novel has to fully dramatize events
in the lives of a limited number of characters in order to have its central “you are there”
effect and to remain coherent? Is there a point at which readers lose track and no longer
know the central story or characters? There must be, and yet writers have pushed the
boundaries.1
To recapitulate, in the novels explored so far, we’ve seen causality, values, and
the inner experience of outer events as motives for transitions, and we’ve seen certain
verb tenses and speculation used to guide the passage from one time to another. Certain
long-term topics, such as natural forces or philosophies can also serve as bridges from
one time to another. As we turn to Durrell, we’ll see some of the same tools, for example,
the use of conditional and other verb tenses, but we’ll also see a rapid series of back and
17
forth movement among characters, places, and times in a short space. Durrell will also
use the ideas that characters are reading or writing about and linked memories as bridges
between one time and another.
Lawrence Durrell’s Movement Among Times, Places, and Characters in Justine
The actions in To the Lighthouse are anchored to a particular house and
neighborhood for the most part. Lawrence Durrell’s Justine, on the other hand, shifts
among numerous times and places and offers a big cast, but is nonetheless easy to follow.
In several spots, without using white space or significant punctuation, Durrell leaps
between times, places, and characters, going back and forth multiple times in the course
of only a few pages. How does he keep the reader from falling off the motorcycle, so to
speak?
To accomplish some of these leaps and for other purposes, Durrell employs a
novelistic method I had not seen before: the narrator, a writer and former lover of
Justine, the title character, reads excerpts from her previous writer-lover’s book in which
that writer, too, mentions Justine (among more philosophical ponderings). To read about
one’s lover in a book written by her former lover is an interesting plot element. But the
excerpts also serve a technical function in moving the action from one time to another.
Note, for example, how in the following quotations, Durrell uses the lover’s diary to take
us from Alexandria (where the most important events of Justine take place) back to the
obscure island village where the story begins—after all the important events are over.
In the excerpt from the former lover’s book, we see an intellectual idea: “‘For the
writer people as psychologies are finished. The contemporary psyche has exploded like a
18
soap-bubble under the investigations of the mystagogues. What now remains to the
writer?’” (Durrell 110).Note how that idea becomes the transition back to the narrator’s
concrete time and place: “Perhaps it was the realization of this which made me select this
empty place in which to live” (110).
Maybe because the writer-lover’s words are musings, abstractions-- “the writer,”
“the contemporary psyche,” “psychologies”-- they occur no-place or any-place, the
mystery-place where thoughts circulate in the mind. Philosophy requires no fixed time
and place, unlike other actions or more concrete thoughts about events that just took
place. Thus, they can more easily form a bridge between events in Alexandria and events
on the island, the past and the future.
Also, because both the narrator and Justine’s former lover have Justine in
common, this passage serves as an example of Chang’s “significant and related event,” if
a relationship or philosophy fits the definition of “event.” I think there’s another element
here. Woolf’s musings in To the Lighthouse are more poetically philosophical, Durrell’s
more intellectually philosophical, but they both seem to move us out of the present with
its concrete reality and into a continual time which allows a little sleight of hand, so that
when the philosophical investigation has ended, we find we have moved, without
noticing it, to another time and place. So this kind of topic allows structural choices that
might otherwise be more difficult.
Time is interestingly warped or layered in Justine. First, we have the time of the
book’s beginning with the narrator washed up (metaphorically) on an island. He has a
baby with him but every important event in the book is already over. Second, we have the
19
time of those events unfolding—a sort of past-present that mostly feels present to the
reader. Finally, we have the various times of character’s memories.2
Justine offers transitions that are quite different from Woolf’s. In a very small
number of pages, Durrell accomplishes a set of multiple transitions back and forth
between two events and places. In the first, Justine’s husband, Nessim, is driving with
Melissa, a cabaret dancer, who has also been the narrator’s lover. (The drive takes place
at some earlier time than the novel’s “present.”) In the second time, which is the novel’s
present (for the moment), the narrator interacts with Justine in a room in the city. There,
he and Justine try to decide whether or not to attend her suspicious husband Nessim’s
“shooting party.” In the driving scene, Justine’s husband Nessim speeds along with
Melissa at his side to his summer home. Melissa has just told him that his wife is
unfaithful. (This sounds a lot cheesier than it really is!) Durrell keeps us hopping back
and forth between these two couples and does so with minimal cues.
Below, the Nessim-and-Melissa sections appear in red because, although the
transitions are not hard to follow in the novel, they are hideously complicated to describe.
Materials in bold and brackets are my summaries and comments.
The car gathered momentum again.[Nessim, the husband, looks at the cabaret
dancer and thinks about her beauty. Now here comes a really skillful
transition. I’ve italicized what I thought were important choices.] The glances
he snatched at her enabled him to study her and to study me in her. Her loveliness
must have disarmed and disturbed him as it had me. It was a beauty that filled one
with a terrible premonition that it had been born to be a target for the forces of
20
destruction. Perhaps he remembered an anecdote…[about a writer who felt he
would fall in love with her but kept himself away so he could finish his
book—on love. Then he married, divorced, and later wrote.]…now alone I
have only myself to displease. Joy!” (Durrell 203-4).
Justine was still standing over me watching my face as I composed these
scorching scenes in my mind. ‘You will make some excuse,’ she repeated
hoarsely, ‘you will not go.’
‘How can I refuse?’ I asked, “How can you?’
They had driven across that warm, tideless, desert night, Nessim and Melissa,
consumed by a sudden sympathy for each other, yet speechless….(This is
followed by paragraphs of details: lighting a fire, climbing stairs, etc.) They sat
there for a long time enjoying the firelight and the sensation of sharing
something—their common hopelessness.
(Justine stubbed out her cigarette and got slowly out of bed. [The parentheses
do not close until two long paragraphs later, paragraphs in which she selfrecriminates and finds a gray hair, and the narrator analyzes her, finishing
with the following dismissively sexist remark.] She was a walking abstract of
the writers and thinkers whom she had loved and admired—but what clever
woman is more?)
Nessim now took Melissa’s hands between his ownÁ(Durrell 205).
21
So the narrator controls the movement subtly by moving from actions (glancing at
the sleepy Melissa) to an observation “(allowed him to study me in her”), and then the
key phrasing “Her loveliness must have disarmed and disturbed him as it had me.” Look
at the tenses! Boy, is this masterful! So first we feel we are in the car with Melissa and
Nessim and then we feel the narrator (who is in the city with Justine) is also present in
the car. The conditional tense, in the words “must have” helps accomplish this illusion
and the words “him as it had me” provide a link between the two locations, characters,
and times. Then we have a semi-abstract sentence taking place in no discernible time: “It
was a beauty…” (Durrell 203). This resembles a device Bulgakov employed in Master
and Margarita, and is also similar to Woolf’s technique in To the Lighthouse. Then
Durrell speculates, again, as Woolf did, about what might have happened: “Perhaps he
remembered an anecdote…” (204).
Let’s recapitulate: I’m not confused taking the step from Pursewarden’s book,
“Now I have only myself to displease. Joy!” to Justine standing and watching the
narrator’s face. What prevents confusion? Durrell starts the next paragraph and sentence
with the word “Justine” which helps me get my bearings because it tells me right away
who is present in the scene.
The following paragraph leaps back to Nessim and Melissa in the car and that too
works well. Since I already know Nessim and Melissa are in a car, it isn’t hard to place
myself with them just by reading the words “They had driven” at the start of the new
paragraph. Durrell helps out by adding fairly quickly, “Nessim and Melissa.”
The only time Durrell uses punctuation here to help us see a transition (and I’m not sure
it’s needed) is in the next paragraph which begins, oddly, with a parenthesis. The closing
22
parenthesis doesn’t appear until paragraphs later, which, like Woolf’s coup, is an unusual
and innovative use of punctuation. This sentence too locates the reader in the story by
beginning with “Justine” so we know where we are. Ending the last paragraph with a
summarizing abstraction (“their common hopelessness”) aids the transition reminding us
that we aren’t really moving from apples to oranges, but perhaps from one kind of apple
to another (205).
So to sum up, the transitional devices included the following: quoting another
character’s book and letting the abstraction move the narrator from his island to
Alexandria;
•
Using “might have.” It’s not too intrusive, a great bridge. Then, and I don’t know
how this would work outside of this particular novel, though it might, he links the
thoughts of the character in one place with the thoughts of the character in
another.
•
After that, we actually have a third time and place involved and a new character,
Pursewarden who is introduced with: “Perhaps he [Nessim] remembered an
anecdote…” and then we have a brief scene in which Pursewarden, met and
assessed Melissa.
Qualifying words offer tremendous opportunity for guiding the reader into a
speculated time and place, then easily back to the speculator and her time and place.
Durrell seems to know how to use to the full the transitional potential of punctuation, not
only parentheses, but colons. In the following excerpt, we see a common experience that
links two characters and provides a transition from the car to a cabaret scene in which
Pursewarden had met Melissa “For the latter [Pursewarden] had found her as Nessim
23
himself had done: in the same stale cabaret:”(Durrell 203). The colon is not a
typographical error; the sentence continues with another subtle transition: “only on this
particular evening she had been…” which leads us right into a new mini- scene (203).
Interestingly, putting this transition after a colon may “hide” it, making it even more
subtle.
Interestingly, Durrell makes the entire episode of Pursewarden’s experience one
paragraph. How does he get us out of that event in the past and back to the present? Like
this: “[Melissa] replied: ‘Monsieur, je suis devenue la solitude meme.’ Pursewarden was
sufficiently struck to remember and repeat this passage….”(Durrell 203). Once again, we
move from a strictly delimited time, the time of a conversation, into a time with blurry
boundaries, the time of a continuing state—memory. Pursewarden’s memory continues
from past to present, thus forming a natural bridge.
Repetition of a pattern has a great deal of power. Even an unusual form of
transition, if repeated several times, moves more smoothly with each repetition. It should
be a rocky leap from Pursewarden’s experience/memory back to Justine in the present
time of the novel, but it isn’t-- because this is the third time we’ve made that trip, and the
reader recognizes a pattern.
Possibly the same phenomenon is at work in helping us move from the narrator’s
comment about clever women like Justine and how they absorb all the thoughts and ideas
of their lovers, to Nessim taking Melissa’s hand. (Melissa is not considered a clever
woman, so the transition doesn’t glide along on a common experience this time unless we
consider the mere fact of the man-woman relationship to be the common experience.)
With each repetition, one’s signposts can be more subtle. The reader seems to fill in gaps.
24
Although they are complicated to explain, these multiple transitions involving
speculations; repeated movement between two sets of places, times, and characters;
quoting a character’s book; and using an experience several characters have in common,
oiled the tracks so that Durrell could achieve his ends. Unlike some novelists, Durrell
definitely has a set of intellectual ideas he wants to foreground (and attack). Like Woolf,
he embodies his ideas in characters and vivid settings, so that we don’t feel the fiction has
stopped and now we are listening to a sermon or lecture. For those of us who are deeply
interested in ideas and wondering what form allows this content to exist in a novel, this is
a really useful tool to study.
Now let us turn to a writer who uses fewer transitional tools, but one in particular
(a mixture of internal and external dialogue that involves differentiating several aspects
of a character’s psyche into specific, named characters) to outstanding effect. Jamie
O’Neill, like Durrell but probably at the opposite political pole, is also engaged in ideas,
especially socio-political ideas. His novel, At Swim, Two Boys, covers not only significant
political events involving a large cast (like Dennis Lehane’s The Given Day) but the
personal interrelationships among a man and two teenage boys, and that man’s past
experiences which are very germane to the plot as it unfolds in the present.
Time Transitions in Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys
Jamie O’Neill’s stunning novel, published in 2001 and set in Ireland just before
the 1916 cataclysms, illuminates the intersecting lives of an aristocratic gay man,
MacMurrough; his poverty-stricken boy-for-hire and later friend, Doyle; and the
storekeeper’s son, Jim whom they are both in love with. In this novel, the past and
25
present are very interestingly comingled and time transitions work hand in hand with
character development.
During the time O’Neill focuses on, a period of about five years, he shows
MacMurrough growing from an alienated and somewhat predatory “john,” who haunts
the public restrooms looking for a quick assignation, to a purer spirit willing to forego his
own pleasure to safeguard and strengthen the younger men’s love for each other.
O’Neill renders the older man’s psychological development and key experiences of his
past through the device of hybrid dialogues involving not only the two people who are
physically present, but up to four internal sub-personalities or “aspects” of
MacMurrough. These “characters” comment, urge action, and reminisce during crucial
scenes. In one such scene, MacMurrough seduces Doyle; in the second, they run into one
another on the street and MacMurrough gives Doyle money. What “happens” are not
only the concrete events themselves but also an imaginary dialogue. I found this a most
original and effective method of showing self-division and the results of inner conflict.
Marvelously efficient, these dialogues offer small, character-illuminating flashbacks
through the contributions of a sub-personality who is the introject of MacMurrough’s
former lover, now dead but living on in MacMurrough’s mind. The presence of this key
figure deepens MacMurrough’s character and brings in back-story without incurring
boredom or plot derailment.
When using such unusual techniques, it is best to be straightforward, and O’Neill
is:
MacMurrough woke …with the boy’s body beside him. He watched it form in the
greying light while the voices came in his head. Scrotes [the former lover, a
26
scholar, whom he met while imprisoned for homosexuality] as usual remained
above the fray but Dick [yes, literally MacMurrough’s dick] and the chaplain
went at it like cats. (153)
After Dick makes salacious remarks and the chaplain threatens hellfire, Nanny Tremble
appears as a fourth “kinder voice” who says “Now men, leave off the argufying. We have
a guest staying and the poor boy is at his slumbers yet. Little lamb, he must be worn
away.” (O’Neill 153)3
The interaction among these five (or at times only three or four) is so lively that it
seems like direct action even though it is secondary dialogue experienced within a
character’s mind. This really solves the problem of the long boring reminiscences that we
novices sometimes employ to inform readers about the past. A much less skillful method
would stop the current action in order to say, “Three years ago, MacMurrough had been
thrown into prison for homosexuality, and there he met and fell in love with the scholar,
Scrotes, who later died. He also had a strict, anti-sexual Catholic upbringing.”
Listen to how MacMurrough leads us from the “now” of being in bed with the
boy to the “then” of Scrotes as he knew him in prison. “Lazily, MacMurrough thought to
catch Scrotes’s attention. …But the old shade was not easily conjured. …At times like
this, MacMurrough conceived a fusty don in a turret room…huffing every now and then,
scowling over the affray below” (O’Neill 155-6).
What I like about this technique is that it conveys a psychic reality: at important
moments, we may well remember significant people, hear their comments in our heads,
and see them at some typical task, so that they are integrated into the present though they
are “in reality” no longer with us. Then too, any self-aware person is aware of warring
27
impulses, personal editions of Id and Superego, that seem to have their own personalities.
O’Neill presents this phenomenon to an almost surreal extreme yet, as with magic
realism, we subscribe to it because both the imagined events and the “real” ones are
imagined deeply and believably enough that each personality stands out with its own
compelling voice and aims. In the next excerpt, the dead man, Scrotes, enters the “real”
conversation:
“Who’s Scrotes?” said the boy, watching him.
“Scrotes?”
“You was calling him out.”…
“Really?” You hear that, Scrotes? I call out your name. In the throes of passion I
call for you.4
“Friend, is it?”
MacMurrough flicked the match with his nail… “Someone I used to know. Dead
now.”
Hear that, Scrotes? You’re dead.
Distantly he heard the rustle of sere pages. (O’Neill 157)
Another advantage of this technique is that it allows O’Neill to capture the
psychological phenomenon of dissociation as in this next scene:
It was safe now to leave Dick in charge and MacMurrough felt himself depart. In
his mind he climbed spiral stone stairs till he entered a draughty turret room.
Scrotes looked up from his text.
--I see you have taken to rape now.
--Is it rape? asked MacMurrough.
28
--Do you need to ask? Or do you need to be told? (156).
This is not flashback; it is a hybrid of the present and the past, yet it has
something in common with flashback because it gives us information about Scrotes and
MacMurrough’s relationship, their personalities, and the physical setting where they
knew each other.
In another passage, “the chaplain” aspect of MacMurrough’s character, which is
probably a Superego compound of numerous church teachings, butts into a conversation
MacMurrough is having with Doyle:
“Are you never worried you’ll be catched?”
--We will be caught, said the chaplain [in MacMurrough’s head]. We will go
down for habitual degenerates and it will be that young blackguard’s blame.
MacMurrough said, “Actually, I was.”(O’Neill 160)
A paradox seems at work here: the technique gives us an experience that is both more and
less like lived experience than the standard forms of narrative which only allow room for
one time and place at any given moment. The technique of “intruding inner voices,”
especially if it seems clever, illustrates the hazards of form and its potential to interrupt
the wished-for dream-state of novels. On the one hand, these hybrid conversations offer a
skillful means of both presenting a current psychological state and conveying information
about the past without stopping the action. On the other, a clever technique calls attention
to itself, in the worst case, too much. The ordinary reader does not read to observe or
admire structure. Every new technique involves some danger. To make a novel read
29
easily and seamlessly while navigating different times, places, and points of view seems a
feat of magic.
The danger in At Swim, Two Boys, is lessened because the inner characters do not
appear randomly. A former lover emerges in the presence of a current lover. The church’s
threat emerges in the presence of a “mortal sin.” Current actions call up past actions. This
harks back to Lan Samantha Chang’s suggestion about related images or events
conveying us from one time to another. Below, we see a brief example of how O’Neill
brings off a move from present to past within one sentence:
His head fell on the pillow and…he heard the pounding of his heart; and every
pound was a footstep, as down the iron-railed hall the warder clanged, calling out
the numbers of the cells…Slam. This cannot be. Prison. But it is.
Songbirds released him. Ballygihen, smell of lawns and the sea. He forced his
eyes to open. His breath returned and the pounding ceased. (157)
“Every pound was a footstep” is the bridge phrase, a metaphor that links two concrete
phenomena.
O’Neill’s techniques of time travel—the hybrid inner and outer dialogue, the
metaphor linking past and present-- are arresting and memorably accomplished. I
wondered if readers familiar with O’Neill’s book would immediately spot that technique
in another book. Perhaps they wouldn’t or perhaps it wouldn’t matter if the writer who
“copied” the form offered characters with conflicting inner selves that were significantly
different from O’Neill’s.
Now we turn to possibly the most radical technician of the writers examined here,
the Argentinean, Julio Cortazar.
30
Time Transitions in Julio Cortázar’s “Axolotl”
One of Cortázar’s radical techniques, which appears in his short story, “Axolotl,”
is explicit mention of the craft of writing in the midst of his stories. This brings up a
whole new question about time and moving back and forth: What time is something
outside the novel? Before? During? After? Amazingly, Cortázar does not lose our
interest in the story.5
In “Axolotl,” we begin at the end, not an unusual choice (also true of Durrell’s
Justine). If more conventional in form, the story would go on to relate how this end came
to be. Cortázar, however, moves in several other directions, as we will see. Rather than
giving a specific time and place, he chooses an interesting past-continuous time in his
opening statement:6 “There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axolotls”
(Cortázar 3). How long did that time last? We don’t know. He ends that paragraph with
the stunning: “Now I am an axolotl” (3). He takes us from an uncertain past to the present
in one graceful and unusual paragraph.
The next paragraph brings us into a time frame, simple past, to which we are
accustomed in fiction: “…one spring morning….I was heading…then I took…”(Cortázar
3). And yet, there is the subtle “I was heading,” present continuous, which suggests more
time than “I headed.” We follow the narrator, who is not yet an axolotl, to the zoo, the
aquarium, and then the library. Only four paragraphs in, Cortázar introduces a continuous
event, “I knew then….” (3). This is continuous because unlike walking or eating or
hitting, we seldom “know” something for just a second, although we may first know it
31
during a particular second (4). He follows that vague “knowing time” with the present
modal “would,” which brings the future into the past, and a verb with a continuous
meaning, “kept,” followed by a gerund. Here’s how it works: “I would lean up against the
iron bar…something infinitely lost and distant kept pulling us together”(Cortázar 4).
These subtle verb choices pull readers out of specific hours and actions and bring us into
thought-time, reflections on what is true to the narrator.
In that same paragraph, Cortázar features one of his parenthetical interjections
which interfere with time by constantly reminding us of other times instead of allowing
us to stay in the story: “The axolotls huddled on the wretched and narrow (only I can
know how narrow and wretched) floor of moss and stone….”(4). Often I find this kind of
interruption, sometimes called “post-modern,” very annoying, but with Cortázar, I never
feel he is just jerking the reader around to demonstrate an intellectual point about reading
and writing. Instead, I always feel that what he is saying is important to him on an
emotional level, too. The narrator’s ponderings, his need to tell, his fear of telling, all add
emotional weight as do the physical circumstances of the axolotl. In addition, the
physical details suggest imprisonment and helplessness, an attempt to understand a huge
shift in identity which is always more or less perilous.
The parenthetical remark reminds us of the narrator’s transmogrification into an
axolotl, a metamorphosis that has been told but not yet shown in the story. Interestingly,
that early alert (giving away the climax?) does not undermine the story. In fact, it allows
Cortázar to get away with what comes in the next paragraph, which is a shift from an
observing “I” to a collective “we:” “I saw the diminutive toes poise mildly….It’s that we
don’t enjoy moving a lot and the tank is so cramped”(5). So the identity shift, which
32
involves a slight shift in point of view as well, is even more remarkable: not only has the
narrator become another species but a group of axolotls! Keeping these parenthetical
remarks in the same setting, the aquarium tank, also allows Cortázar to make this slide
from the character who was an observing man to the one that is an axolotl or a group of
them. By the next paragraph, the narrator is back to being an observer: “It was their
quietness that made me lean….”(Cortázar 5). What’s amazing is that all these subtle
shifts in point of view and time are not really confusing. I think they allow Cortázar to
ponder identity metamorphosis, an idea with which expatriates and refugees must
grapple.
Cortázar is a writer concerned with the biggest ideas, (the life in values, as Forster
said, and Welty’s mystery of causality that drives writers to explore significant characters
and their choices) but like Woolf and Durrell, he always hinges them on direct, specific
detail. The axolotls are so like an artist and writer possessing, “…their secret will, to
abolish space and time with an indifferent immobility” (Cortázar 4-5). Even more
writerly, they are “…like witnesses of something, and at times like horrible judges” (7).
This is the language, not of events but of value. Cortázar continues with his character’s
visits to the aquarium but offers no more dates or days: “It got to the point that I was
going every day…”(7). Readers don’t know how long this went on. As with Durrell, we
see the usefulness of speculation for building bridges between times: “Perhaps they could
see in the dead of night….I know now that there was nothing strange, that that had to
occur”(Cortázar 7-8). Each word counts, not just, “I know” but “I know now” which
draws our attention to a previous unknowing.
33
In one sentence, we see several times: the present (“I know now”), the apparently
simple past (“there was nothing strange”), and another apparently simple past tense (“that
had to occur”). But “to know,” “to be,” and “to have” are unlike other verbs. They do not
happen in an observable moment, unlike “said” or “kicked.” They could go on a very
long time which makes them interesting vehicles for time transitions. They can still be
happening while other shorter actions take place.
At its end, the story feels mostly as if it is taking place in the present, but a closer
examination shows that past tense is used as often as present “…he comes less often
now…I saw him yesterday”(Cortázar 9). Thoughts and speculations seem to unite past
and present.
Here’s a mysterious sentence with elements of both past and present in a
paragraph where many sentences contain both a past-tense clause and a present-tense
clause: “He returned many times but he comes less often now…Since the only thing I do
is think, I could think about him a lot” (Cortázar 9). Why “could” and not “can”? “Could”
is the ambiguous past-tense counterpart to a past-tense verb in another sentence: “I saw
him yesterday” (9). The modal, “could” is one of those chameleon verbs when it comes
to time. We can say of the past, “When I was young, I could do a backbend” or, of the
future, “I could go to the store if it wasn’t raining.” It’s a malleable verb. So progressive
and modal verb forms definitely help Cortázar move far from the restrictions of simple
past which does not allow much simultaneity.
Cortázar also skips all over time in one sentence, moving from actions to
thoughts, from repeated events to speculation, from the recent past to the far past:“It
occurs to me that at the beginning we continued to communicate” (9). Following that, we
34
have another time-combining sentence: “the bridges were broken…because what was his
obsession is now an axolotl… “I think that at the beginning I was capable of returning to
him…”(Cortázar 9). Again, a thought about the past is in the present, and again it’s the
mushy “to be” verb. Reading these sentences, are we reading about the past or the
present? And to think all this has to be conveyed in translation!
Cortázar’s tour de force appears at the very end in a sentence layered with times
and self-reflexive irony, referring to a future we know is already in the past: “he is going
to write a story about us…about axolotls”(9). That, of course, is what Cortázar has
already done, and we have just finished reading it. Not only past and present, but past and
future merge with time outside the novel entirely. Perhaps this reflects the mind’s
activity, constantly on the move between times or “lost” in thoughts, that unless jarred by
present events, release us, to some extent, from present reality. And perhaps these timemergings and time-jugglings give time value. One thinks of Blake’s “eternity in an
hour.”. What are even the most dramatic events without someone to ponder and feel
them? As Shakespeare put it, “A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying
nothing”
Desiderata: Why Time Transitions Matter to Readers and Writers
While Cortázar’s stories, in particular, seem like edifices for which every brick
has been carefully selected and placed, all these works have this structural tightness in
common. There are few, if any, loose stones, little deviation from a plan and pattern
(though the pattern may have arisen from unconscious sources). How much artifice there
is in seamless art! Less experienced writers may undervalue the reader’s need for
35
signposting, for clues that allow us to follow characters through shifts in time. Writers
may also underestimate the reluctance of readers to shift time frequently unless one is
repeating a previous shift, which makes it more familiar. However, given sufficient
assistance in the form of repeated moves and patterns, readers can accept fairly frequent
disjunctions in chronology, especially if the writer has a serious purpose in doing so.
Cortázar seems deadly serious about conveying timelessness within time as part
of the artist’s struggle to capture the “unalterable.” So many of his characters are writers,
photographers, musicians. Rather than wrenching us out of a story, the time alterations,
flips, and distortions deepen the experience for us, offering analogies. Woolf does
something similar with a key character in To the Lighthouse, Lily Briscoe, who is also an
artist struggling to convey a sense of things that will always evade the purely rational.
Durrell’s narrator is a writer too, reflecting in solitude about dramatic experiences and
about other pieces of writing such as diaries. Only O’Neill does not allude to art and
artists in his use of time shifts. The movements in At Swim, Two Boys appear more
universal, relevant to any person struggling with inner and social conflicts. Not
surprisingly, his work is concerned with politics, an arena of continual struggle in which
the past and future are always objects of interpretation and promise, where talk revolves
around “moving forward” or “getting back to,” “progressive” and “reactionary” goals as
if we had the power to bring history forward or backward.
For me, although I find the difficulties of art fascinating, that topic is at best a
minor feature of my own novel (unless it appears as an unconscious implant).
An average reader may not be interested in the problems of writing or politics, but all
readers seek the continuing dream-state that makes them forget surroundings and feel
36
themselves part of another world. If jarred too abruptly, that magical state turns to
consciousness and then rapidly to boredom, annoyance, or exasperation. This is, in my
opinion, the highest stake. One could discuss the difficulties of writing or politics in a
conventional essay, but one cannot convey the dream-state.
Furthermore, the artist who hopes to convey somehow with language or pigment
or steel, something true about the experience not only of things but of the mind that
regards those things, and the body that responds and anticipates-- that artist must find a
way to suggest all of this continuing, uneven movement, the sharp peaks and placid
flows. Forster (and Cortázar) point out explicitly, others implicitly, that life is not lived
entirely in time; it is lived in value, meaning, the felt sense of individual experience. I
share the values that underlie the jumps in time on the page, the difficult interweavings
that are meant to promote our participation in and understanding of larger issues. Those
ideas, intellectual and philosophical, are more important to me than the “and then, and
then, and then” of manipulative art such as certain genre novels (though I am sure
exceptional work exists in every dismissed genre) or movies whose purpose is to give
people a “high” and make money. Their hallmark is sameness. Fiction writers who intend
their work to embody or at least aim for significant personal if not universal truths, have
to find the tools that allow such visions to be shared as far as human communication
permits.
Having studied all these wonderful means of moving characters back and forth,
into and out of multiple times and unknown times, I have felt overwhelmed by the task.
It’s very much akin to watching acrobats at Le Cirque du Soleil. Without the physical
evidence in front of me, I wouldn’t even suspect the human body to be capable of such
37
feats. In my own novel which offers multiple characters and settings, I’ve found even
simple time transitions fearsome, the very area where I dread the novel will fall apart and
lose its plot. There are certainly times when I have no aim to be a virtuoso; I just hope to
god to find an adequate structure.
The most useful materials for me right now are the simplest: employing a
common image or place to bring a character from present to past and back, for example.
And controversial as they are, I’m very fond of dreams as a vehicle for time travel. Some
writers and teachers, Harry Crews, for example, claim you should never include dreams
in fiction at all, but I cannot agree. Though one must be mindful not to overuse them or
use them clumsily, they are convenient, effective, and in fact, real psychological
phenomena which, in many people’s lives, prompt both thought and action. Fantasies too,
it seems, could work the way dreams do, though perhaps fantasies make characters seem
passive. Dream, fantasy, and memory are related time-travel vehicles and they offer
certain flexibility. A dream in the present can be about the past and serve as a segue to
that past. Memories, though, usually appear as real time, as flashbacks, while fantasies
and dreams have to be signaled as such. Even so, a short remembered image could work
like a dreamed or fantasized image to propel a novel from one time to another. I haven’t
used the “could have” technique that Durrell and Woolf employ, which is essentially
fantasy, but it seems to have a lot of potential.
I am also intrigued by movements into “no time,” the time of continuing states,
philosophy, reflection, eternal truths. This a-chronological realm seems promising for a
smooth transition to the past. Thoughts, having a long half-life, can form a bridge
between past and present. I’m struggling with ways to bring in significant pieces of the
38
early lives of my central character and his mother. I have begun my novel in at least four
different times of my characters’ lives; I have begun with different characters; I have put
in and taken out chapters and sections of back story; and I haven’t yet figured out where
they go or how much to include.
In this extremely difficult task, I take heart from an essay by Malcolm Gladwell
that appeared recently in the New Yorker and drew on the work of David Galenson,
author of Old Masters and Young Geniuses. Of the writer Ben Fountain, Gladwell says,
“An experimental innovator would go back to Haiti thirty times. That’s how that kind of
mind figures out what it wants to do” (40). Some artists master these skills early. I,
however, identify with Fountain as someone requiring “a long period of fermentation”
(Gladwell 42). When I think too much about the nuts and bolts of form, I can’t remember
why I wanted to write a novel in the first place. This is where I most clearly feel form to
be at war with content. Perhaps the resolution of that war illustrates Jungian theory about
the integration of opposites.
But recently, as a few problems in my novel began to budge like icebergs
breaking up in the spring, it occurred to me that perhaps this kind of writing knowledge is
like knowledge of how to read. When we aren’t yet readers, we benefit from readingrelated activities and from being around others who read. As writers, we benefit from
activities and assignments involving forms (such as time transitions) and from,studying
the work and processes of other writers. But the leap, when it happens, is an internal
process. We have to wait for and believe in it.
39
NOTES
1
Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, for example, veers from the time of Christ to
early Soviet Russia and back several times.
2
As an interesting side note, the narrator knows things he cannot possibly know (how an
object looked or how someone else felt when he was absent from a scene) in a detail that
he cannot have heard told. This point of view shift is done so subtly that it passes and
only occurred to me upon a second, close reading. Perhaps every writer hopes readers
will overlook and forgive the occasional impossibility.
3
O’Neill sometimes eschews quotation marks for the more European dash or no
punctuation at all.
4
O’Neill does not punctuate MacMurrough’s comments to Scrotes.
5
I’m just now reading Steinbeck’s Sweet Thursday which has a wonderful Prologue
about the craft of writing, but says nothing explicit about it in the body of the novel.
6
Unlike Alice McDermott’s That Night, for example, which orients itself to the events of
a particular night.
40
WORKS CITED
Bulgakov, Mikhail. The Master and Margarita. New York: Vintage International, 1996.
Chang, Lan Samantha. “Time and Order: The Art of Sequencing.” Ed. Julie Checkoway.
Creating Fiction. Cincinnati, Ohio: Story Press, 1999.
Cortázar, Julio. Blow-Up and Other Stories. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985.
Durrell, Lawrence. Justine. New York: Pocket Cardinal, 1965.
Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. New York: Harcourt Brace Harvest Books, 1956.
Gladwell, Malcolm. “Late Bloomers.” The New Yorker (20 October 2008): 38-44.
Goldman, Jane. “A Brief Introduction to To the Lighthouse.” Excerpt.
The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf, Cambridge University, 2006. 12
December 2008 <http://www.dundee.ac.uk/english/research/lighthouse.htm.>
Lehane, Dennis. The Given Day. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.
McDermott, Alice. That Night. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1987.
Munro, Alice. “The Albanian Virgin.” Open Secrets. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1995, 81-128.
O’Neill, Jamie. At Swim, Two Boys. New York: Scribner, 2001.
Steinbeck, John. Sweet Thursday. New York: Bantam Books, 1961.
Trevor, William. My House in Umbria. New York: Penguin, 1991.
Walker, Alice. The Temple of My Familiar. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990.
Welty, Eudora. “Some Notes on Time in Fiction.” The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays
and Reviews. New York:Vintage, 1977.
Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. San Diego: Harvest/Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich,
1978.