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

In their short parallel coexistence, past and present shed light on each other, disclosing to her a new perspective that allows her to evaluate positively herself and her life.

She realized that . . . the incident upon the mountain had been one of the great moments of her life - perhaps the greatest, certainly the most enduring: that she had drawn unacknowledged power and inspiration from it, just as the trees draw vigor from a subterranean spring. . . . There was more reality in it than in all the years of success . . . which had followed it and which it had rendered possible . . . She had been in love with Feo, and she had never loved so greatly again. A presumptuous boy had taken her to the gates of heaven, and, though she would not enter with him, the eternal remembrance of the vision had made life seem endurable and good. (216-17)

Her life, then, develops in "duree," it is lived as a continuum, and this new awareness can restore her to a full sense of her own dignity:

In that moment of final failure, there had been vouchsafed to her a vision of herself, and she saw that she had lived worthily. She was conscious of a triumph over experience and earthly facts, a triumph magnificent, cold, hardly human, whose existence no one but herself would ever surmise. (221)

The contrast between the two characters is the contrast between a man who has lived a "life in time" and a woman who has been able to live a "life by values": Losing contact with his own past and surrendering to the flow of linear time, Feo has been unable to preserve anything from corrosion, and as a result his reality is made up only of today's reality. Keeping memory, alive, anchoring herself to a moment of sublime intensity, Miss Raby has established a continuity in time and enriched her present with her past. Whereas Feo is only what he is today, Miss Raby contains within her the entire history of her existence; and whereas Feo is the product of change and transformation, she is the fruit of permanence within change. Thus the temporal dynamics of the story metaphorically express two opposite, hardly reconcilable modes of living, between which Forster does not seem to see any possibility of communication. The end of the story is, as I said, pessimistic, negative even for Miss Raby, the only bearer of positive values. Her words to Feo, addressed as they are to a concierge, and in public, are a transgression of social rules. This loses her the affection of Leyland, the elderly traveling companion with whom she had hoped to spend her old age. Leyland feels that by exposing "her thoughts and desires to a man of another class" she had "hurt him too much . . . Not only she, but he himself and all their equals, were degraded by it" (221). So, at the end of the tale, the woman silently walks away from the others toward a future of exclusion and isolation. "At that moment, if kind voices had called her from the hotel, she would not have returned" (221). The spiritual distance that separates her from the others is symbolically reflected in the immense spatial and temporal distance that seems to separate her from the valley: