Time in Literature

Author(s): J. Hillis Miller

Source: Daedalus , Spring, 2003, Vol. 132, No. 2, On Time (Spring, 2003), pp. 86-97
Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20027843

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J. Hillis Miller

Time in literature

But, Holy Saltmartin, why can't you beat zel's "Memory, Stillness, and the Tem
time? poral Imagination in Yeats's 'The Wild
Swans at Coole'" in the Yeats Eliot Re
- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
view.1
On the other hand, the topic seems
It's about time. All literature is about
these days somewhat outmoded, old hat,
time. Yet concern with time in literature
vieux jeu. The most salient works in this
today is untimely. It comes at the wrong area were published quite some time ago
time.
- among them Wyndham Lewis's Time
These two contradictory propositions and Western Man (1927), Georges Poulet's
should govern all contemporary reflec magisterial series of four critical books
tion about time in literature.
called Etudes sur le temps humain (1950 -
On the one hand, an enormous and 1968), A. A. Mendilow's Time and the
continually augmenting secondary liter Novel (1952), and, more recently, Paul Ri
ature exists on the subject of time in lit coeur's authoritative three-volume
erature. A search of the Modern Lan
Temps et r?cit (Time and Narrative, 1983 -
guage Association of America's Interna 1985). Indeed, explicit concern with time
tional Bibliography from 1963 to April of seems today a feature of a somewhat fad
2002 produces twenty-one pages of ed modernism, as in Proust's? la re
items for "time and literature." Some of
cherche du temps perdu (1913 -1927),
these items are trivial or irrelevant, but
Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg (1924),
many are on the mark. One example of Jorge Luis Borges's Nueva refutaci?n del
the latter, of so many, is William Weit tiempo (1947), and Samuel Beckett's That
Time (1976).
/. Hillis Miller is UCI Distinguished Research In these days of focus on class, race,
Professor of English and Comparative Literature and gender, the subject would seem to
at the University of California at Irvine. A Fellow many literary scholars far too abstract,
of the American Academy since 1970, he has artificial, philosophical, and formalistic
written widely about nineteenth- and twentieth to be worth pursuing. Time may never
century English and American literature, compar theless make a backdoor entry through
ative literature of the same period, and literary the now ubiquitous topic of 'history'
theory. His many books include "The Ethics of (epitomized in Fredric Jameson's slogan
Reading" (1986), uAriadne s Thread" (1992), "Always historicize"). But for many lit
and "Speech Acts in Literature" (2001). erary historians, history is construed as a
i Yeats Eliot Review 16 (4) 2000: 20 - 30.
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sequence of materially and socially im er in a progressive clarification, as scien
posed epochs (as in the notion of 'the tific theories of time at least aspire to do ;
time of late capitalism'), and not in Shakespeare's time is not Faulkner's, nor
terms of an exigent conception of the are either like Yeats's. Each literary work
temporal 'event.' Such a temporal event has a different time sense - even those
is something irruptive and unpredict by the same author - though a short es
able, both in its causes and effects. An say like this one will not be able to prove
example is the inaugural event of the that hypothesis convincingly.
composing and signing of the American
Declaration of Independence - or, for lhe basic issue for me now is the ques
that matter, the publication of Kant's tion of how words can be used to repre
Third Critique. It is not fortuitous that sent the subjective experience of lived
my two examples are both textual. I shall time, in a different way for each work.
return to this. Literature, after all, is made of words.
Literary works, no one can doubt, may The basic object of literary study is
reflect the philosophical, theological, or therefore linguistic in nature. The prob
scientific concepts of time prevalent lem, as Heidegger long ago recognized in
when they were written. Much second Sein und Zeit (1927), is that the words and
ary work has been devoted to demon figures for temporality in Western lan
strating, whether persuasively or not, guages are primarily spatial. They trans
these connections - for example, the in form time into space. Time thereby es
fluence of Bergson on Virginia Woolf. capes direct representation. It is turned
Nevertheless, by 'the study of time in lit back into an abstraction.
erature' one presumably primarily The most salient everyday example of
means the investigation of the way liter the spatialization of time is the move
ary works present in one way or another ment of the clock's hands through space.
the human experience of lived time. This Lots of clockwatching is represented in
is not easy to do ; doing it is not the same literature, for example in all those mys
thing as just mentioning time or at tery stories that turn on the exact time,
tempting an abstract analysis of tempo as registered by some clock, at which the
rality, human or otherwise. One would murder or something ancillary to it oc
not go to literature for scientific infor curred; or as in Quentin Compson's at
mation about time. And vice versa : the tempt to destroy clock time by tearing
essays in the September 2002 issue of the hands off his watch, in William
Scientific American devoted to time make, Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (1929).
as one might expect, hardly any refer Heidegger's own formulation of the
ences to its place in literature - aside 'ecstasies' of time, and his definition of
from a few illustrative thematic citations Dasein's temporality as a moving for
from Herrick, Marvell, and Shakespeare. ward into the future in order to come
Though scientists and philosophers back to the past are no exception to the
disagree about time, their goal is by sci rule of spatializing time. Indeed, Heideg
entific or logical methods to reach uni ger's idea of 'ecstasy' (in the etymologi
versal and universally accepted defini cal sense of standing outside) and his fig
tions of it. By contrast, representations ure of moving forward to come back are
of human time in literary works are sin both spatial.
gular, sui generis, different from all the No literal words as such exist for lived
others. They do not build on one anoth time. All terms for it in literature are

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/. milis therefore in one way or another figura To the last syllable of recorded time ;
or? er tive. The strongest figures, it turns out, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
time use language itself as a form for tempo The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief
rality. candle !
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
JLjxpressions of the inscrutability of That struts and frets his hour upon the
time have punctuated the history of stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
thinking about temporality in the West.
I shall cite four of these. Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Book Nine of St. Augustine's The Con Signifying nothing. (V.v.19 - 28)
fessions is one of the earliest great reflec A few years later Blaise Pascal was, in
tions on the mystery of human tempo R?flexions sur la g?om?trie en g?n?ral (1657
rality. There Augustine asks, "What then or 1658), to define 'time' as one of the
is time?" and goes on to answer, "If no
"primitive words." 'Time' has neither a
one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain nominal definition nor a real definition
it to one that asketh, I know not."2
according to the distinction Pascal
Augustine's meditation on time culmi makes between words that are used
nates in a reflection on what happens as within an arbitrary code like mathemat
he repeats a psalm he knows by heart - ics and words whose validity depends on
at first expecting the whole, then gradu their reference to extraverbal things. The
ally, as he repeats more and more of its problem with such words as 'time' is
words, moving them one by one back in that they do not ensure knowledge of the
to the past, into his memory of having entities they name. "It is not the case,"
said them. For Augustine, human time is says Pascal,
experienced and measured through the
that all men have the same idea of the es
sequential syllables of a sacred poem,
the psalm that he already knows before sence of the things which I showed to be
he begins reciting it. impossible and useless to define . . . (such
Shakespeare uses a similar figure in as, for example, time). It is not the nature
Macbeth's great speech about lived time. of these things which I declare to be
For Macbeth, time is a sequence of days known by all, but simply the relationship
that stretches out in a line leading to its between the name and the thing, so that on

cessation at death, figured as a series of hearing the expression time, all turn (or
syllables making a sentence or strings of direct) the mind toward the same entity
sentences, for example a speech by an [tous portent la pens?e vers le m?me
actor on the stage. Time, for Macbeth, objet].3
exists only as it is recorded. It is a mad, Pascal here has a touching faith that
nonsensical tale, an incoherent narra we all turn our minds toward the same
tive. Such a narrative is made of pieces entity when we hear the word 'time.'
that do not hang together, a series of syl How would one go about verifying that?
lables that do not cohere into words and As Paul de Man observes, Pascal is de
sentences :
scribing a tropological turning.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow 3 Blaise Pascal, Oeuvres compl?te, ed. Louis La
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, fuma (Paris : Seuil, 1963), 350 ; and translated
by Paul de Man, "Pascal's Allegory of Persua
2 Saint Augustine, The Confessions, translated sion," in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej War
by Edward B. Pusey (New York: Pocket Books, minski (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota
1951), 224. Press, 1996), 56.

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 The word 'trope' means, etymological ing you into the chasm, if you stop half- Time in
ly, 'turn.' The word 'time' is a trope. To way across. As Val?ry writes :
be more exact, it is a catachresis, or
It is almost comical to ask oneself exactly
"abusive transfer," for something that
remains unknown and therefore has no what is the meaning of a term that one
uses all the time with full satisfaction. For
literal name. The word 'time' is posited,
example : I catch the word Time as it flies
without authority or possibility of verifi
by. This word was absolutely limpid, pre
cation, as a figurative expression for cise, honest, and faithful in its service, as
something unknowable. De Man's for
long as it played its part in a proposition,
mulation of the way this 'turn' works is
and as long as it was spoken by someone
succinct and precise. "Here," he says,
who wanted to say something. But here it
the word does not function as a sign or a is, all by itself, seized by its wings. It takes
name, as was the case in the nominal defi revenge. It makes us believe that it has
nition, but as a vector, a directional mo more meaning than it has functions. It
tion that is manifest only as a turn, since was only a means, and now it has become
the target toward which it turns remains an end. It has become the object of a
unknown. In other words, the sign has be frightful philosophical desire. It changes
come a trope, a substitutive relationship itself into enigma, into abyss, into tor
that has to posit a meaning whose exis ment of thought....5
tence cannot be verified, but that confers
upon the sign an unavoidable signifying
function.4 if time is such an enigma, and if the
word 'time' - even after the most strin
The final literary assertion of time's gent philosophical analysis - does not
inscrutability that I will discuss is from give us any sense of what lived human
the twentieth-century French poet and time is really like, if all words for time
essayist Paul Val?ry. The word 'time,' are doomed to be catachreses, how then
says Val?ry in "Poetry and Abstract can literature find ways of expressing
Thought," is no problem when you just and conveying to a reader this or that of
use it in any number of everyday expres the innumerable diversified experiences
sions - for example in asking "What of human time?
time is it?" - without thinking much Here I must make some important dis
about it. The word becomes a problem, tinctions. Critical analyses of temporali
he says, when you detach it from any ty in literature tend to fall into three cat
context, look at it in isolation, and ask egories. These correspond, more or less,
yourself, as St. Augustine did, "What is to the three categories of the medieval
time ?" The word then becomes an un trivium, the basis of language instruc
fathomable enigma. tion in the Middle Ages : grammar, logic,
It seems to have far more meaning and rhetoric. Grammatical investiga
than the sum of its uses in ordinary lan tions - such as G?rard Genette's three
guage. One might compare the word to a volume Figures (1966 -1972), or Harald
plank over an abyss that holds your Weinrich's Tempus (1964) - tend to con
weight without difficulty if you step centrate on tense structures and on the
briskly across it, but that breaks, plung use in literature of terms that refer di

4 De Man, "Pascal's Allegory of Persua 5 Paul Val?ry, "Po?sie et pens?e abstraite," in

sion," 56. Oeuvres (1), ?d. Jean Hytier (Paris : Gallimard,
1968), 1317 ; my translation.

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/. milis rectly to temporal dimensions : before, Irony is defined by de Man, following
onl er after, then, now, etc. Logical investiga Friedrich Schlegel, as "permanent para
time tions, such as Ricoeur's Time and Narra basis," that is, as the suspension, all
tive, or even Poulet's Studies in Human along the narrative line, of narrative co
Time, focus primarily on thematic repre herence and sense. Allegory is the
sentations of temporal experience in lit spreading out along a temporal axis, in a
erature, taking the language of these rep narrative, of the disjunctions that are ex
resentations more or less at face value. pressed punctually, in an instant, by
What I call rhetorical interpretations of irony.
temporality in literature - my focus in De Man's essay ends by claiming that
what follows - tend to concern them Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma
selves with the means whereby figura (1839) is an "allegory of irony." De Man
tive language of certain extreme and clarifies what this means in a much later
problematic sorts is used in literature to essay, "Pascal's Allegory of Persuasion"
represent that unknowable thing, hu (1981). After having said that "'irony, like
man temporality. zero, is a term that is not susceptible to
The classic critical essay in this third nominal or real definition" -just as Pas
region of investigation is Paul de Man's cal had claimed was the case with 'time'
"The Rhetoric of Temporality" (1969). - de Man remarks that :
In that essay, de Man identifies irony and
To say then, as we are actually saying, that
allegory as the tropological devices of
allegory (as sequential narration) is the
language that can be used to convey to
trope of irony (as the one is the trope of
the reader a vivid sense of the enigma of
zero) is to say something that is true
time. Allegory is a sign to sign relation,
enough but not intelligible, which also
as opposed to the sign to thing relation
implies that it cannot be put to work as a
of symbol. In modern secular allegory,
device of textual analysis.?
says de Man, the meaning of the allegor
ical signs is "not decreed by dogma" : De Man's sentence is itself unintelligi
ble - because ultimately, or perhaps
We have, instead, a relationship between
from the start, neither irony, nor zero,
signs in which the reference to their
nor time, is intelligible, though they may
respective meanings has become of sec
be figured. Irony and time can be figured
ondary importance. But this relationship
in literature by allegory in the de Man?an
between signs necessarily contains a con
sense, just as zero in mathematics is rep
stitutive temporal element; it remains
resented by the one - that is, by saying
necessary, if there is to be allegory, that
that zero is one something, for example
the allegorical sign refer to another sign
the empty set.
that precedes it. The meaning constituted
Is all this, pace de Man, of any con
by the allegorical sign can then consist on
ceivable use in the reading of actual rep
ly in the repetition (in the Kierkegaardian
resentations of temporal experience in
sense of the term) of a previous sign with works of literature?
which it can never coincide, since it is of
I move now to give some examples of
the essence of this previous sign to be pure
my own approach to what I would call in
anteriority.
one way or another 'rhetorical,' as op
6 Paul de Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality," posed to grammatical or logical, repre
in Blindness and Insight : Essays in the Rhetoric of
Contemporary Criticism, 2d ed. (Minneapolis :
7 De Man, "Pascal's Allegory of Persuasion," 61.
University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 207.

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sentations of lived human time in litera Faulkner was extraordinarily adept at Time in
ture. Any literary narrative, it might be using spatial figures to express human l era ure
argued, is a spatially arrayed allegory of temporality. Vivid, circumstantial de
temporality. I mean by this that the scriptions of 'realistic' events are in his
words in sequence, as you read them, works used as allegories, in the de Man
follow one another across the page, one ?an sense, of time. The realistic circum
by one, from the beginning to the end, in stantiality of the vehicle of the allegory
a literally spatial display. The words is no bar to the allegorical function of
must be read one after the other if sense the description - it is necessary to it. As
is to be made of the narration, just as, for de Man says in "Pascal's Allegory of Per
human or literary temporality, moments suasion":
in time follow one another until they
The "realism" that appeals to us in the de
add up to make a story - the story, for
tails of medieval art is a calligraphy rather
example, of someone's life, from begin than a mimesis, a technical device to en
ning to end, though that story may be
sure that the emblems will be correctly
like a tale told by an idiot.
identified and decoded, not an appeal to
This figuration of temporality by the
the pagan pleasures of imitation... .The
spatial sequence of the words on the
difficulty of allegory is rather that this em
page is often, in turn, emblematized in
phatic clarity of representation does not
narratives by the actual journeys upon
which their characters embark. An ex stand in the service of something that can
be represented.9
ample is Odysseus's journey that forms
the narrative armature of the Odyssey. In the case of Faulkner, I am claiming,
Odysseus moves through time and space the something that cannot be represent
experiencing virtually endless adven ed but that is nevertheless allegorically
tures that keep putting off the moment 'stood for,' alluded to, catachrestically
when he will reach home and Penelope's named, is human time.
arms, just as the reader makes his or her The primary vehicle of Faulkner's alle
way through book after book of the nar gorical expression of time is the move
ration-just as Homer's hearers followed ment of human bodies through space.
it from moment to moment as he recited Such movements organize whole novels
it. by Faulkner, such as the antithetical
movements of Lena Grove and Joe
-L/et me exemplify this spatial allegoriz Christmas that structure the double plot
ing of temporality by way of William of Light in August (1932), or the journey to
Faulkner's novels. Trying to convey bring the coffin containing Addie Bun
through narration the experience of dren's body to the cemetery and bury it
temporality was clearly one of Faulk that her family makes in As I Lay Dying
ner's most abiding concerns. As Jean (1930). In both cases, death is the end
Paul Sartre put this, "Faulkner's meta point of human time, though in different
physics is a metaphysics of time."8 ways in the two novels.
The representation of human time in
8 Jean-Paul Sartre, "On The Sound and the Fury : Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (1929)
Time in the Work of William Faulkner," in Lit is too complex for adequate treatment in
erary Essays (New York : Philosophical Library,
this short essay, but one aspect of it is
1957), 79- This essay was originally published in
French in 1939. 9 De Man, "Pascal's Allegory of Persuasion," 51.

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/. milis admirably encapsulated in a figure Jean fathered. Lena exchanges Bunch for
or? er Paul Sartre uses in what is the best essay Burch - a replacement of just one letter,
time on Faulknerian time. As Sartre rightly n for r, as if to suggest that for her one
put it, for Faulkner "Man's misfortune man is just about as good as any other.
lies in his being time-bound."10 Faulk Lena represents an inexhaustible hu
ner's "vision of the world," he goes on to man vitality that can move forward
say, through time as through space and that
constantly renews itself by change. She
can be compared to that of a man sitting
travels by a kind of metaphorical or at
in an open car and looking backward. At
least tropological - since it is as much
every moment, formless shadows, flicker
m?tonymie as metaphorical - displace
ings, faint tremblings and patches of light
ment, while still remaining the same.
rise up on either side of him, and only
"My, my," says Lena in the novel's con
afterwards, when he has a little perspec
cluding lines. "A body does get around.
tive, do they become trees and men and
cars.11 Here we ain't been coming from Alaba
ma but two months, and now it's already
Sartre's spatial figure is an admirable Tennessee."
emblem of the time lag between the Lena's story, treated with affectionate
event and the awareness of the event and admiring irony by the narrator, sur
that defines Quentin Compson's sense rounds the deathbound story of Joe
of his doom, in his part of The Sound and Christmas. Christmas is caught in the
the Fury. He can never quite catch up impossibility of being either black or
with his present. white. He is unable to break out of the
sterile circular repetition of the impasse
1^/ight in August balances two antithetical he is in, which keeps bringing him back
ways to be related to time. The novel to the same place :
opens with Lena Grove thinking to her he is entering it again, the street which ran
self, "I have come from Alabama : a fur
for thirty years. It had been a paved street,
piece. All the way from Alabama a-walk where going should be fast. It had made a
ing. A fur piece."12 She is traveling in circle and he is still inside of it. Though
search of Lucas Burch (or Brown), who
during the last seven days he has had no
has made her pregnant and then run paved street, yet he has traveled further
away. The novel ends with Lena still
than in all the thirty years before. And yet
traveling, but now having made it he is still inside the circle. "And yet I have
through Mississippi all the way up to been further in these seven days [while he
Tennessee. She gives birth along the is fleeing after killing Joanna Burden] than
way, and replaces, along the way, Lucas in all the thirty years," he thinks. "But I
Burch (alias Joe Brown) with Byron have never got outside that circle. I have
Bunch. The latter will now accept the
never broken out of the ring of what I
responsibilities of being husband to have already done and cannot ever
Lena and father to the child he has not
undo."1^
?o Sartre, "On The Sound and the Fury, " 79. Clearly it is better to be Lena Grove
than Joe Christmas, but the novel shows
11 Ibid., 81-82.
why it is not all that easy to choose to be
one or the other.
12 William Faulkner, Light in August (New
York: Vintage International, 1990), 3. 13 Ibid., 339.

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J\ddie Bundren says in her only solilo tively brief segments of internal mono
quy in As I Lay Dying, "I could just re logue ascribed to one or another of her
member how my father used to say that family or neighbors, although the title
the reason for living was to get ready to suggests that the whole novel takes place
stay dead a long time."14 Living is mov within Addie's consciousness, as she lies
ing, in As I Lay Dying and Light in August, dying. 'Internal monologue' is not quite
even though the movement is, as for all the right term for these strange pieces of
of us, toward death as endpoint and un language ; they are rather fragments or
derlying motivation. At the conceptual wedges of first-person narration present
center of Addie's soliloquy is a radical ed by one or another of the characters,
disjunction between words and doing: and represent the perpetual present of
consciousness to itself as it registers the
... I would think how words go straight
stream of its experience, what it sees and
up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and hears and also what it thinks and feels.
how terribly doing goes along the earth,
Human temporality, this mode of nar
clinging to it, so that after a while the two
ration suggests, consists of blocks of lan
lines are too far apart for the same person
to straddle from one to the other ; and that guage that register what is 'out there'
from different temporal and spatial
sin and love and fear are just sounds that
points. These articulations always exist
people who never sinned nor loved nor
in the present, even when conscious
feared have for what they never had and
ness/language is devoted to the act of
cannot have until they forget the words.15
remembering, even, as is sometimes the
Though Addie allows for a condition case in this novel, when they are enacted
of "dark voicelessness in which the in the past rather than present tense and
words are the deeds," as opposed to "the out of chronological order. Flashbacks
other words that are not deeds, that are and retracings of particular events from
just the gaps in peoples' lacks,"16 among different perspectives produce a jagged,
the latter she includes the word 'time' : cubist rendering that suggests that any
"I knew that that word [ 'love' ] was like human event consists of the linguistic
the others : just a shape to fill a lack.... perspectives on it. These perspectives
time, Anse [her husband], love, what are in turn discontinuous, fragmented,
you will, outside the circle."17 If this is as the events move forward in time. It
the case, to name time directly is to falsi seems as if the reports of those events
fy it. Time can only be spoken of indi must exist in an atemporal database to
rectly, in those performative figures for which only the invisible narrator has ac
time, words that are deeds, that Faulkner cess ; and the events of the story as
tirelessly invents. turned into language seem to hover
As I Lay Dying, with the exception of somewhere in perpetual simultaneity,
Addie's one soliloquy, consists of rela going on being repeated over and over,
waiting to be partially recited in one or
14 William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (New another of the blocks of narrative.
York: Vintage, 1964), 161.
Taken all together, they add up ulti
15 Ibid., 165-166. mately to a story, as the reader reads
them, one by one. The reader moves for
16 Ibid., 166.
ward through the time of reading, skip
17 Ibid., 164.
ping over the blank spaces between one
narrative block and the next. Each block

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/. milis is labeled with the name of one or naked through my clothes. I said You dont
^ er another of the characters. These are know what worry is. I dont know what it
time given in the running heads, oddly is. I dont know whether I am worrying or
not. Whether I can or not. I dont know
enough, in parentheses, as though the
name were no more than a nominal tag whether I can cry or not. I dont know
whether I have tried to or not. I feel like a
attached to a given block of language :
"(Darl)," "(Vardaman)," "(Anse)," wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.18
"(Addie)." These chunks of narration do
In a strange anomalous kind of indi
not, however, add up to a shapely organ
rect discourse - strange because it is in
ic whole. There are gaps and hiatuses
between them. Each moment of sus the first, not the third person - the ubiq
uitous, anonymous, effaced, omniscient
pended temporality exists as a potential
narrator has given to the characters his
ly limitless multitude of linguistic per
(or its) power of language. This is a dis
spectives on it.
tinctively Faulknerian, inimitable lingo
It is wrong to think of these blocks of
(one remembers that Faulkner is sup
narrative as registering in a completely
posed to have written As I Lay Dying on a
straightforward way the linguistic con wheelbarrow used as a desk while he
sciousness of this or that character, as
was working for a coalfired power plant
Joyce at least purports to be doing in
in Mississippi). The whole novel is en
Molly Bloom's soliloquy at the end of
closed within the grave, compassionate,
Ulysses. The characters in As I Lay Dying
perpetual present tense of the narrative
have a prescient knowledge of events voice. This is a kind of collective con
they have not seen or heard with their
sciousness/language, within which the
own eyes and ears - as though they could individual voices of the characters are
be where they are not. The absent Darl, embedded. This narrative voice, it could
for example, narrates the episode in
which Cash and Vernon finish Addie's be argued, coincides, or at least overlaps,
with the distinctive consciousness/lan
coffin in the pouring rain. Though often
guage of Addie Bundren, the protagonist
the dialect of the characters is mimed, it
who lies dying.
is extremely unlikely that these country
If the narrative voice, an anonymous
folk would find language for the lyric
'it,' encompasses the whole narration in
Faulknerian representations of what
consciousness is conscious of. an embrace like that of some god or god
dess who has taken the form of a ubiqui
One example, of so many, is what goes
tous cloud, it is just as true to say that
on in Dewey Dell's mind when she goes the whole novel is enclosed within Ad
down to the barn to milk the cow just
die Bundren's mind. As I Lay Dying is sur
after her mother has died. Dewey is
rounded as a strange kind of proleptic
pregnant by Lafe, a town boy. She is
anticipation by the consciousness of the
more than a little worried about that,
T of the title, that is, of Addie, as she lies
worried beyond worrying. The word
dying. In the opening narrative segments
'dead' echoes through her musing:
she is still alive, listening to her son Cash
The sky lies flat down the slope, upon the as he saws and nails her coffin, but by
secret clumps. The dead air shapes the the sixth segment, spoken by the neigh
dead earth in the dead darkness, further bor Cora, she is dead. Cora's soliloquy is
away than seeing shapes the dead earth. It in the past tense, spoken at some inde
lies dead and warm upon me, touching me
18 Ibid., 61.

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terminate time after Addie's death. If tion - a motion so slow as to seem move- Time in
Addie's consciousness as she lies dying ment in place - of the Bundren wagon iterature
is thought of, on the strength of the title, toward a goal called, opaquely, "it" -
as encompassing the whole novel - in presumably the grave in which Addie
cluding all the events that happen after will be buried. Here movement through
she is dead and laid in the coffin her son space seems to be a crossing through
has fashioned with hand tools - then the time that is everywhere at once : "We go
novel would, with a vengeance, express a on, with a motion so soporific, so dream
moment of Heideggerean 'ecstasy' - a like as to be uninferant of progress, as
moving forward into the future, a move though time and not space were decreas
ment even beyond the moment of one's ing between us and it."20
death, to come back to the past. That Dewey Dell's lovemaking with Rafe
past is articulated in Addie's sole sec happens in the woods beyond the rows
tion, inserted long after her death has where they have been picking cotton. If
been narrated. The dead-alive Addie her cotton bag is full by the end of the
soliloquizes about her past life with her row, she thinks, she will join him in the
husband and the infidelity to him with a woods ; he fills her bag for her, and she
local preacher that produced her son succumbs : "I said if it dont mean for me
Jewel. to do it the sack will not be full and I will
turn up the next row but if the sack is
If the relation of a human body's move full, I cannot help it.... And so it was full
ment through space - that is, the move when we came to the end of the row and
ment of Addie's corpse toward its bur I could not help it."21
ial - provides the large-scale temporal This is one of the many places where
framework for As I Lay Dying, certain lin Faulkner dramatizes his sense that hu
guistic moments encapsulate Faulkner man time, as he understands it, elimi
ian lived temporality more exactly, in a nates human freedom and any moment
single emblematic representation. of decision. For Dewey Dell 'not yet' has
The novel opens with an odd narra proleptically turned into an 'always al
tion, by Darl, of the way he and his half ready,' as if every deed is done before it
brother Jewel walk in single file across a is done - a view of time that eliminates
cotton field, with Jewel at first behind by the very possibility of an irruptive, un
fifteen feet and then ahead by fifteen feet predictable and inaugural event.
after Darl follows the path around the The most explicit identification of spa
cottonhouse in the middle of the field, tial movement with time in As I Lay
while Jewel steps through the cotton Dying comes when the family is trying to
house, in one window and out another.19 pull, futilely, with rope, the wagon con
Spatial movement here allegorizes tem taining the coffin that holds Addie's fast
poral progress. The scene suggests that rotting corpse across the flooded river.
time develops according to different Part of the family (Darl, Cash, and Jew
rhythms for different people. It would el) is on this side of the river with the
follow that temporal progress is relative, wagon, the coffin, the corpse, the mules,
not synchronized. Cash's tools, and Jewel's horse. Part is
Another passage, quite characteristic on the other side (" Vernon and pa and
of Faulkner, describes the dreamlike mo 20 Ibid., 101.
19 Ibid., 3-4 21 Ibid., 26.

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/. milis Vardaman and Dewey Dell").22 The would be nice if you could just ravel out
into time."24
onl er looping rope across the river, the "ter
time rific " flowing of the flooded river itself, For Faulkner, one does not ravel out of
express the sagging of time. This is per sequential time into eternity. One ravels
haps a reference to the bending of time out, or wishes to ravel out, into time. To
in Einsteinian relativistic physics, bor ravel out into time would be to escape
rowed by Faulkner to express in a spatial the false time in which one thing seems
figure the disjunction or timelag be to happen after another, in a line, by dis
tween one person's experience of time solving or fraying out into the all-at
and another's. By Darl's account: onceness or always-already that is time
for Faulkner.
The river itself is not a hundred yards
across, and pa and Vernon and Dewey
lo conclude, I would like briefly to in
Dell are the only things in sight not of that
dicate how W. B. Yeats's "Leda and the
single monotony of desolation leaning
Swan" expresses a quite different con
with that terrific quality a little from right
ception of human time from Faulkner's.
to left, as though we had reached the place
where the motion of the wasted world ac For Yeats, time is neither a simultaneity
(as it is for Faulkner) nor a seamless con
celerates just before the final precipice. Yet
tinuum between past, present, and fu
they appear dwarfed. It is as though the
ture. It is, rather, a flow punctuated
space between us were time : an irrevoca
rhythmically by violent instantaneous
ble quality. It is as though time, no longer
interruptions, as well as by innumerable
running straight before us in a diminish
smaller events, such as those his poems
ing line, now runs parallel between us like
often register. These larger irruptions
a looping string, the distance being the
come in two-thousand-year intervals as
doubling accretion of the thread and not
the interval between.23 'annunciations' from on high, and are
radically inaugural. They precipitate the
This passage explicitly thematizes the series of historical events that fatefully
way human temporality is experienced flow from them, just as the smaller
as some form of spatial movement - how events are in one way or another deter
space transforms into time. minative for individual lives.
Time, for Faulkner, exists not as a con Zeus's rape of Leda is signaled by
tinuity between future, present, and Yeats's use of the word 'sudden,' as im
past, but as a simultaneity, an all-at-once portant and recurrent a word for Yeats as
viewed from multiple perspectives. To the word 'terrific' is for Faulkner. "Leda
die, for Faulkner, is to enter time as the and the Swan" begins : "A sudden blow :
co-presence of everything happening at the great wings beating still/Above the
once. Darl, closest perhaps to Faulkner staggering girl_" Then : "A shudder in
of all the characters in As I Lay Dying the loins engenders there/The broken
(though, ironically, he ends up in an in wall, the burning roof and tower/And
sane asylum), best expresses this distinc Agamemnon dead" 25 - this event, since
tively Faulknerian temporality in one of it engenders Helen and Clytemnestra,
his soliloquies : "If you could just ravel 24 Ibid., 198.
out into time. That would be nice. It

22 Ibid., 137. 25 William Butler Yeats, The Variorum Edition

of the Poems, ed. Peter Allt and Russell K.
23 Ibid., 139. Alspach (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 44i

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 'causes' the Trojan War and Clytemnes Kant's Third Critique. "The editor of a Time in
tra's murder of her husband, two central political review [George Russell, editor l era ure
stories in Greek historical mythology. of The Irish Statesman ), " says Yeats,
However, as the note of explanation "asked me for a poem... but as I wrote,
Yeats wrote to accompany the first publi bird and lady took such possession of
cation of the poem (in The Dial, June the scene that all politics went out of
1924) indicates, the poem grew out of it."27 The poem, like all felicitous speech
concern not for the distant past but for acts, brings about the thing it talks
the political present. The Enlighten about. It is an ironic, punctual allegory,
ment, initiated by Hobbes, Yeats says, in the prolonged instant of the poem, of
has left "a soil so exhausted that it can the contemporary politics that have van
not grow that crop again for centuries.... ished from any explicit mention in the
Nothing is now possible but some move poem.
ment from above preceded by some vio It would take a longer argument to
lent annunciation."26 make my claims about the distinctive
That new annunciation, I claim, is the temporality of Yeats's "Leda and the
poem itself. The poem is a performative Swan" fully intelligible and persuasive.
linguistic event that exceeds its circum But I hear the bartender in Eliot's "The
stances. In this, it is, in its own small Waste Land" calling out "HURRY UP
way, an irruptive, unpredictable, and in PLEASE IT'S TIME."
augural event, just like the Declaration So a fuller discussion of time in litera
of Independence or the publication of ture must await a timelier occasion.

26 Ibid., 828. 27 Ibid.

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