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

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1997 by Silvana Caporaletti

2 Of the many interesting publications dealing with time, the following are particularly relevant to our discussion: Barletta, Chronos: figure filosofiche del tempo; Coveney and Highfield, Arrow of Time: A Voyage through Science to Solve Time's Greatest Mystery; Davies, About Time; Elias, Time: An Essay; Fraser, Time, the Familiar Stranger; Poulet, Studies in Human Time; and Reale, La psicologia del tempo.

3 "Time, understood in the sense of a medium in which we make distinctions and count, is nothing but space" (Time and Free Will 91).

4 "Daily experience ought to teach us to distinguish between duration as quality, that which consciousness reaches immediately . . . and time so to speak materialized, time that has become quantity by being set out in space" (Time and Free Will 127).

5

Pure duration is the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former states. . . . In recalling these states, it does not set them alongside its actual state as one point alongside another, but forms both the past and the present states into an organic whole, as happens when we recall the notes of a tune, melting, so to speak, into one another. (Time and Free Will 100)

Later on, in Creative Evolution (first published in French in 1907), Bergson seems to identify duration with life itself: "Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances" (7).

6 Although some of these authors may not have had first-hand knowledge of Bergson, his theories certainly were very much in the air at the time. As Douglass points out, T. E. Hulme "set out to transmit Bergsonian thought to the English-speaking world" and "preached Bergson to Pound and Eliot" (3). Eliot also had direct access to Bergson's theories by attending some of his lectures at the College de France at the beginning of 1911; and in a letter to Eudo Mason dated 19 April 1945, he admitted to having suffered a "temporary conversion to Bergsonism" (qtd. in Johnson 206). On the same topic see also Le Brun.

7 Bakhtin's observations on the "cyclical daily time" that frames the story of Madame Bovary and has "no advancing historical movement" may well apply to Joyce's "The Dead":

Time here is without event and therefore almost seems to stand still . . . It is a viscous and sticky time that drags itself slowly through space. And therefore it cannot serve as the primary time of the novel. Novelists use it as ancillary time, one that may be interwoven with other noncyclical temporal sequences or used merely to intersperse such sequences; it often serves as a contrasting background for temporal sequences that are more charged with energy and event. (248)

8 Although many scholars essentially agree with Ellmann and Goldberg, who consider "The Dead" as a journey of spiritual development, others interpret its end in rather negative terms. Peake, for example, sees it as a "critical evocation of resignation to spiritual death" (53). Reynolds compares Gabriel's final vision of a snow-covered Ireland to Dante's description of a frozen world in the Inferno (124). It seems clear to me that Gabriel's final decision to turn westward is, symbolically, a recovery of his Irish identity and a token of a future reunion with Gretta.