'Catching Time': the Synchrony of Minds, Bodies and Objects in Literature

‘Catching Time’: the synchrony of minds, bodies and objects in literature

Isabelle Wentworth

A thesis in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

School of Arts and Media Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

March 2019

Thesis/Dissertation Sheet

Surname/Family Name : Wentworth Given Name/s : Isabelle Abbreviation for degree as give in the University : PhD calendar Faculty : Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences School : School of Arts and Media Thesis Title : ‘Catching Time’: the synchrony of minds, bodies and objects in literature

Abstract

Recent work in the neuroscience of time perception has revealed that humans have an unconscious capacity to ‘catch’, or synchronise with, other people’s subjective experience of time. This process has, I argue, been profoundly intuited by authors in their fictional explorations of time and subjectivity. Literary discourse offers a privileged site for explorations of temporal synchronisation, as authors are able to frame, refract and nuance the relationships they depict, so broadening our understanding of the role of subjective temporality within them. Yet there is a lack of understanding of the precise ways in which time, bodies and environments are intertwined, both in literary studies and cognitive science. This is a significant gap, because subjective time — the experience of temporal properties of events and processes, in particular duration — provides the organising fabric of conscious experience, both for fictional and actual minds.

My methodology combines cognitive poetics, cognitive linguistics and cognitive historicism. Through this multifaceted lens, I show how thinking through this intersubjective time can help us understand questions of style, character and plot in narrative. Furthermore, my research expands our understanding of temporal synchronisation, revealing aspects of this cognitive phenomenon that science hasn’t yet established.

In particular, literature demonstrates that temporal synchronisation can occur through two avenues: between people, as cognitive science has studied, and which I explore in my first chapter through Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist. Secondly, between people and objects —a phenomenon which has been illuminated by literature, rather than cognitive science. My second chapter starts here, looking at the influence that family homes can have on their inhabitants in Lisa Gorton’s The Life of Houses. Expanding my analysis beyond the bounds of the Western, Anglophone world, I show how this human/object temporal influence exists across linguo-cultural regions, exploring Isabel Allende’s La casa de los espíritus and Martín Felipe Castagnet’s Los cuerpos del Verano. My contribution is theoretical, offering not just original readings of texts but new methodological directions for literature and cognitive science, gesturing towards a new way of understanding time, bodies and environment.

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I hereby grant to the University of New South Wales or its agents the right to archive and to make available my thesis or dissertation in whole or in part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I retain all property rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation.

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‘I hereby grant the University of New South Wales or its agents a non-exclusive licence to archive and to make available (including to members of the public) my thesis or dissertation in whole or part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known. I acknowledge that I retain all intellectual property rights which subsist in my thesis or dissertation, such as copyright and patent rights, subject to applicable law. I also retain the right to use all or part of my thesis or dissertation in future works (such as articles or books).’

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Table of Contents

Originality Statement ...... iii

Inclusion of Publications Statement ...... iv

List of Publications ...... v

Acknowledgements ...... vi

Abstract ...... vii

‘Catching Time’: theoretical orientation and literature review ...... 1

‘Body Time’: Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist ...... 32

Part 1. Theorising time in The Body Artist ...... 32 1.1 Criticism surrounding the novel ...... 40

Part 2: Analysis of time in The Body Artist ...... 44 2.1 Lauren’s motor resonance ...... 47 2.2 Lauren’s shifting sense of time ...... 50 2.3 Lauren’s changing self-identity ...... 56

Concluding Thoughts ...... 63

Home Time: Lisa Gorton’s The Life of Houses ...... 65

Part 1. Anthropomorphic Temporal Synchronisation...... 65 1.1 Critical lineage of objects and literature ...... 68 1.2 Underpinnings of ATS in cognitive science ...... 75

Part 2. Analysis of time in The Life of Houses ...... 78 2.1 The Sea House’s physical influence ...... 82 2.2 Emotional influences ...... 89 2.3 The influence of stereotyping ...... 92 2.4 Kit’s character development ...... 98 ii

Concluding Thoughts ...... 103

Time Across Worlds: Isabel Allende’s La casa de los espíritus ...... 106

Part 1. ATS, chronemics, and Latin American magic realism ...... 106 1.1 ATS and Cognitive Cultural Studies ...... 110 1.2 Chronemics: polychronicity and monochronicity ...... 112 1.3 Critical reception of La casa de los espíritus ...... 115

Part 2. ATS within La casa de los espíritus...... 120 2.1 The Big House on the Corner anthropomorphised ...... 121 2.2 The Temporality of The Big House on the Corner ...... 126 2.3 Physical Structure of The Big House on the Corner ...... 130 2.4 Alba’s Sense of Time ...... 135 2.5 A New Phase in The Big House on the Corner ...... 143 2.6 The Re-Awakening of The Big House on the Corner ...... 151

Concluding Thoughts ...... 155

Time, Technology and the Body: Martín Felipe Castagnet’s Los cuerpos del verano ...... 156

Part 1. Living in the future ...... 156 1.1 Time, Literature and the Digital Age ...... 164

Part 2. Embodied Identification with Digital Technology ...... 172 2.1 Anthropomorphism and Technomorphism ...... 174 2.2 Digital Time ...... 182

Part 3: Bodily Time ...... 197

Concluding thoughts...... 207

Final Thoughts: Time, Bodies and Objects ...... 208

Works Cited ...... 216 iii

Originality Statement

‘I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, or substantial proportions of material which have been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis. I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the project's design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is acknowledged.’

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Date ………………………. iv

Inclusion of Publications Statement

UNSW is supportive of candidates publishing their research results during their candidature as detailed in the UNSW Thesis Examination Procedure.

Publications can be used in their thesis in lieu of a Chapter if: • The student contributed greater than 50% of the content in the publication and is the “primary author”, ie. the student was responsible primarily for the planning, execution and preparation of the work for publication • The student has approval to include the publication in their thesis in lieu of a Chapter from their supervisor and Postgraduate Coordinator. • The publication is not subject to any obligations or contractual agreements with a third party that would constrain its inclusion in the thesis

Please indicate whether this thesis contains published material or not. ☐ This thesis contains no publications, either published or submitted for publication

Some of the work described in this thesis has been published and it has been ☒ documented in the relevant Chapters with acknowledgement

This thesis has publications (either published or submitted for publication) ☐ incorporated into it in lieu of a chapter and the details are presented below

CANDIDATE’S DECLARATION I declare that: • I have complied with the Thesis Examination Procedure • where I have used a publication in lieu of a Chapter, the listed publication(s) below meet(s) the requirements to be included in the thesis. Name Signature Date (dd/mm/yy)

Isabelle Wentworth 23/03/19

List of Publications

A forthcoming article in Poetics Today is based on the first chapter of this thesis.

Wentworth, Isabelle. “‘Body Time’: A Cognitive Perspective of Don DeLillo's The Body Artist.” Poetics Today 40, no.4 (November 2019).

Acknowledgements

The past four years have been a wonderful period of my life, and I feel extremely lucky to have been given this opportunity – many thanks to UNSW and the School of Arts and Media for their generous support. I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr Chris Danta, for his wisdom, flexibility, reassurance and excellent guidance in all areas of this long process. I also wish to express my gratitude to my co-supervisor Dr Paul Dawson for his incisive insight and feedback.

In addition, I would like to acknowledge the many friends and family members that have helped me throughout the writing of this thesis. In particular I would like to extend thanks to my amazing parents, Shree and John Wentworth, and to Adam Piovarchy, William Wentworth, Ted Smith, Monique Davis, Darren Koppel, Bec Tier and Kate Davidson – from discussing my ideas to reading my drafts, they have encouraged and supported my work and enriched my life. vii

Abstract

Recent work in the neuroscience of time perception has revealed that humans have an unconscious capacity to ‘catch’, or synchronise with, other people’s subjective experience of time. This process has, I argue, been profoundly intuited by authors in their fictional explorations of time and subjectivity. Literary discourse offers a privileged site for exploration of temporal synchronisation, as authors are able to frame, refract and nuance the relationships they depict, so broadening our understanding of the role of subjective temporality within them. Yet there is a lack of understanding of the precise ways in which time, bodies and environments are intertwined, both in literary studies and cognitive science. This is a significant gap, because subjective time – the experience of temporal properties of events and processes, in particular duration – provides the organising fabric of conscious experience, both for fictional and actual minds.

In particular, literature demonstrates that temporal synchronisation can occur through two avenues: between people, as cognitive science has studied, and which I explore in my first chapter through Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist. Secondly, between people and objects – a phenomenon which has been illuminated by literature, rather than cognitive science. My second chapter starts here, looking at the influence that family homes can have on their inhabitants in Lisa Gorton’s The Life of Houses. Expanding my analysis beyond the bounds of the Western, English-speaking world, I show how this human/object temporal influence exists across linguo-cultural regions, exploring Isabel Allende’s La casa de los espíritus and Martín Felipe Castagnet’s Los cuerpos del verano. My contribution is theoretical, offering not just original readings of texts but new methodological directions for literature and cognitive science, gesturing towards a new way of understanding time, bodies and environment. 1

‘Catching Time’: theoretical orientation and literature review

The room, its dust-thickened half-light, held them in its own stillness. They each separately waited: an instant when Kit saw all three of them facing each other like people in a photograph, an instant exposed and final. It was a mark of how far out of time she had gone that it was Audrey, at last, who said: ‘There’s the telephone’. The Life of Houses, 139

There is at once a lot, and nothing at all happening in this tense scene in Lisa Gorton’s chilly family drama The Life of Houses. Kit, a young teenager, is staying in her grandparent’s house for the holidays: a setting that rattles with the resentful history of her mother’s family. Kit and her imposing grandmother, Audrey, stand in this frozen moment with Scott, a family friend. It is a strange stage of physical and temporal stasis – the three characters’ sense of time, like their bodies, seems to have almost stopped moving. Yet, though they themselves are still, there is something very active at work, some internal influence which is shaping how the scene unfolds. A fourth character is in play; the room in which they are standing, the old Sea House with its dust-muffled floors and sombre hush, is holding inhabitants and guests in its thrall, keeping them fixed in place and time.

The lines furnish us with small details of this intersection of time, bodies and physical surroundings. The old house is anthropomorphised, its influence on the characters underpinned by active agency: it ‘holds’ them in ‘its own stillness’. The possessive adjective ‘own’ gives a special significance to the continuity of motion between house and character – the stillness originates in the house, belongs to it. This mode of motion is not simply the lifeless immobility of buildings but seemingly part of the house’s nature. The passage builds upon this sense of the house’s identity with descriptions of its liminal ‘half-light’ – the house’s dim, still rooms, closed off from the outside day, create a space separate from the sun-tracked time of the outside world. The slowed temporality of this space is embedded in the syntax of the passage – the first two lines are punctuated by a trio of colons and commas, labouring the sentences and creating a slowing, a sense of pause. In this room, time has slowed almost to the point of being suspended, something that Kit describes through the 2 simile of the photograph, as well as through the deployment, and subversion, of the ‘moving observer’ conceptual metaphor of time (where an individual is a moving observer in time’s landscape1). The schema of this metaphor is disrupted as it is clear that Kit, and the other characters, have travelled outside of time’s landscape, seemingly stopped in this instant: ‘it was a mark of how far out of time she had gone’. The narrative pace, though only a brief excerpt, also helps to construct this temporality – discourse time relative to story time is long, and this ‘instant’ in Kit’s life is stretched by the three punctuation laden sentences.

However, such piecemeal observations of the passage don’t explain what the characters are actually experiencing, nor why it is significant. Why does the dark room of the Sea House have such an impact on the characters’ bodies, and especially on their sense of time? The scene shows a mechanism of influence running between an object – the house – and the characters’ physical and temporal perceptions. This passage is part of the novel’s broader stylistic, symbolic and structural patterns, which depict the slow, almost stopped sense of time experienced by the characters, and the role of the Sea House in shaping this temporality. Some critics may attribute the house’s role to artistic licence. However, I will argue that the interaction between objects, bodies and time is more than metaphor, more than literary artifice: rather, that such literary devices represent an aspect of subjective time that has a genuine neurophysiological basis. This is important because despite the fact that many works of literature are shaped by this phenomenon, literary criticism currently lacks a terminology to explain, in specific and precise terms, this influence running between physical surroundings, embodied minds, and time.

Over the course of this thesis I will explore, through a cognitive critical analysis of four texts from different countries, genres and languages, various ways that novels represent this influence on our sense of time. My analysis shows that patterns running through the stylistic, structural and diegetic encodings of time paint a particular story of time and embodied minds; however, it is not a story which is confined to fiction. Rather, these literary depictions resonate with what we’re beginning to understand about how our sense of time can be affected by the things – people, objects – in our environment. Within the last decade, neuropsychologists Sylvie Droit-Volet, Sandrine Gil, Francisco Nather et al. have developed

1 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 146. 3 the theory that our ‘internal clocks’ (or ‘endogenous sense of elapsed time’2) can speed up or slow down in alignment with those of other people, through mechanisms involving the motor synchrony of the mirror neuron system and the feedback loops of embodied cognition.3 In other words, as Gil, Nather and Droit-Volet claim, ‘time changes with the embodiment of another’s body’.4 The result is an unconscious capacity to ‘catch’, or synchronise with, other people’s subjective experience of time. However, cognitive science has only been looking at temporal synchronisation5 over the last decade, and there are still many unknowns about its causes, factors and instantiation in different contexts. Indeed, it is a difficult thing to explore empirically, as its neurophysiological bases (such as the firing of the mirror neuron system) are unconscious; its effects are subtle (making self-report studies difficult); it is affected by ongoing relationships, emotions and interactions; and it evolves over time – all of which makes this influence on subjective time difficult to study in a clinical setting.

So, there is a lack of understanding of the precise ways that time, bodies and environment are intertwined in both literature and cognitive science. This is a significant gap, because subjective time – the experience of temporal properties of events and processes, in particular

2 Chara Malapani and Stephen Fairhurst, “Scalar Timing in Animals and Humans,” Learning and Motivation 33, no. 1 (2002): 157, https://doi.org/10.1006/lmot.2001.1105. 3 Sylvie Droit-Volet and Sandrine Gil, “The Time–Emotion Paradox,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences 364, no. 1525 (2009): 1943–53, https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2009.0013; Francisco C. Nather et al., “Time Changes with the Embodiment of Another’s Body Posture,” PLoS ONE 6, no. 5 (2011): 1–7, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0019818; Francisco Carlos Nather and José Lino Oliveira Bueno, “Static Images with Different Induced Intensities of Human Body Movements Affect Subjective Time,” Perceptual and Motor Skills 113, no. 1 (2011): 157–70, https://doi.org/10.2466/24.25.27.PMS.113.4.157-170; Francisco Carlos Nather, José Lino Oliveira Bueno, and Emmanuel Bigand, “Body Movement Implied by Static Images Modulates Eye Movements and Subjective Time Estimation.,” Psychology & Neuroscience 6, no. 3 (2013): 261–70, https://doi.org/10.3922/j.psns.2013.3.04; Francisco Nather et al., “Implied Movement in Static Images Reveals Biological Timing Processing,” Paideia 25, no. 6 (2015): 251–59; Michel Chambon, Sylvie Droit- Volet, and Paula Niedenthal, “The Effect of Embodying the Elderly on Time Perception,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 44, no. 3 (2008): 672–78. 4 Nather et al., “Time Changes with the Embodiment of Another’s Body Posture.” 5 The term ‘temporal synchronisation’ is a shorthand way of referring to the process described by these cognitive scientists, rather than being an official name. Indeed, as I will highlight throughout the course of my thesis, it is more of a synchronisation with one’s perception of another’s time, which may of course not be accurate: we do not actually have access to another person’s sense of time in an accurate way, and so may be synchronising with a temporal mode quite different from that of the other person’s. In these cases ‘temporal synchronisation’ is perhaps not the best term - however, as I have said, it remains a useful shorthand for the time being. 4

duration – is ‘a ubiquitous feature of conscious life’6 and ‘a central part of human experience of the world’.7 Subjective time provides the organising fabric of conscious experience, both for fictional and actual minds. If the people or objects in our environment are changing our experience of time, this can impact – as the novels in my following chapters will show – how we think about and relate to others, to our physical surroundings, and to our own emotions and identity. To explore these impacts and better understand temporal synchronisation itself, both cognitive science and literature can work together – in different ways – to offer insights into how time perception affects experiences, relationships and identity.

Using a cognitive critical analysis of my four main novels, as well as a collection of supporting fictional works, I demonstrate the benefits to literary studies that an interdisciplinary focus on temporal synchronisation can offer. On the one hand, I explore how this cognitive perspective of time can help us to understand narrative features: temporal synchronisation can be a major aspect of fictional works, sometimes pitting itself against plot as a motivating force, moulding character trajectories, shaping stylistic expression, or weaving subtle continuities between these levels of literary phenomena. On the other hand, my analysis broadens our understanding of temporal synchronisation. In particular, I argue literature demonstrates that this temporal transfer can occur not just between people, as cognitive science has studied, but also between people and objects – as intimated by Gorton’s above description of the Sea House and its inhabitants, where the old building seemingly halts the characters’ sense of passing time. This temporal relationship between character and anthropomorphised object characterises my analysis in the second, third and fourth chapters of the thesis, developing a multidimensional image of a phenomenon – human/object temporal synchronisation – which has been illuminated by literature, rather than cognitive science. In expanding my analysis beyond the contextual bounds of the Western, Anglophone world, I also show how this human/object temporal influence exists across linguo-cultural regions, as in the Latin American texts of my third and fourth chapters. My contribution is theoretical, offering not just original readings of texts but new methodological directions for literature, ultimately creating a new way of understanding time, bodies and environment.

6 Marc Wittman, “Embodied Time: The Experience of Time, the Body, and the Self,” in Subjective Time: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Temporality, ed. Valtteri Arstila and Dan Lloyd (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014), x. 7 Geoffrey Lee, “Temporal Experience and the Temporal Structure of Experience” 14, no. 3 (2014): 21. 5

i. Cognitive Literary Criticism: A survey of the field

In concert with the development of cognitive science technologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and other forms of neuroimaging techniques, interest in cognitive literary studies has expanded exponentially within the last two decades. As Isabel Jaén and Julien Simon argue, ‘By the end of the 20th C, cognitive literary studies began to establish itself firmly as a new and exciting field aiming to understand literature in the context of the embodied mind and its dynamic interaction with the environment’.8 Rather than a specific theoretical model, cognitive literary criticism consists of a constellation of cognitively informed approaches, from neuro-aesthetics (see, for example, Vilayanur Ramachandran, David Miall and Semir Zeki9) to cognitive narratology (prominently championed by David Herman10). This diverse range of research is unified by an analytical animus: to discover what the cognitive sciences can teach us about art, and what art can teach us about cognition.11 However, due to the newness of cognitive science technologies themselves, as well as the unfamiliar territory of such an interdisciplinary dialogue, cognitive literary critics like Alan Richardson emphasize the ‘provisional, even embryonic character of research in the mind and brain sciences’.12 Progress is tentative; the field remains in a state of flux, constantly expanding and revising. Yet it is precisely this inchoate state that renders the field so rich: despite the proliferation of recent research, there remains a vast and untapped space for further investigation.

Unfortunately, cognitive approaches are still regarded with suspicion, and have a vexed relationship with the wider sphere of literary criticism. Tensions surround the perceived

8 Isabel Jaen and Julien Jacques Simon, eds., Cognitive Literary Studies: Current Themes & New Directions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013), 3. 9 Vilayanur Ramachandran and W. Hirstein, “The Science of Art: A Neurological Theory of Aesthetic Experience,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 6, no. 6–7 (1999): 15–51; Semir Zeki, Splendors and Miseries of the Brain: Love, Creativity, and the Quest for Human Happiness (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2011); David Miall, “Neuroaesthetics of Literary Reading,” in An Introduction to Neuroaesthetics: The Neuroscientific Approach to Aesthetic Experience, Artistic Creativity, and Arts Appreciation, ed. Jon O. Lauring (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2013), 233–47. 10 David Herman, “Narrative Theory and the Sciences of Mind,” Literature Compass 10, no. 5 (2013): 421–36, https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12062; David Herman, “Beyond Voice & Vision: Cognitive Grammar and Focalization Theory,” in Point of View, Perspective & Focalization, ed. Peter Huhn and et al (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2003). 11 Zeki, Splendors and Miseries of the Brain, i. 12 Alan Richardson, “Cognitive Literary Criticism,” in Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide, ed. Patricia Waugh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 554. 6

universalising impetus behind cognitive science’s stress on biological consistency, and literary criticism’s general emphasis on the self as historically and culturally contingent. Cognitive literary criticism has been accused of being deterministic, ‘ahistorical’13 and objectivist: diametrically opposed to the abiding relativism of post-structural interventions.14 It is true that, as Phillips describes, current cognitive criticism ‘emphasizes similarities in human brain structure over time’15; however, the multidimensionality of the field in fact takes as its premise that our minds and brains are shaped by both biological consistency and cultural, historical and individual context. As Nancy Easterlin outlines, while ‘cognitive predispositions’ can shape the content of a work of art, this is the background ‘against which innovations of culture, including its developing ideas’ are overlaid.16 As Richardson and Spolsky affirm, good cognitive critical approaches to literature ‘have no interest in repudiating the theoretical speculations of poststructuralist and historicist approaches to literature in favour of a ‘hard’ scientific approach’.17 Indeed many critics refer to themselves as cognitive historicists or cognitive cultural critics. Under this banner, many scholars – notably including Natalie Phillips, Michelle Sugiyama, Mary Thomas Crane, Patrick Colm Hogan, Alan Richardson, Joseph A. Murphy, Ellen Spolsky, Lisa Zunshine, and Suzanne Keen – work to foreground the brain’s embeddedness in a cultural context.

Another misconception is that cognitive literary criticism subordinates other theoretical frameworks and is dedicated only to a pragmatic limiting of possible interpretive space. As Chris Danta and Helen Groth argue, ‘in this scenario, cognitive theory represents the death of an aesthetics that embraces the uncertain, the unknowable and the inchoate meanings and difficult forms that render the literary distinct from the real’.18 Yet while the field undeniably

13 Alan Richardson, The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2010), 3. 14 Chris Danta and Helen Groth, Mindful Aesthetics: Literature and the Science of Mind (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013), 2. 15 Natalie Phillips, “Literary Neuroscience and History of Mind,” in The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 67. 16 Nancy Easterlin, A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2012), 43. 17 Alan Richardson and Ellen Spolsky, eds., The Work of Fiction: Cognition, Culture, and Complexity (London: Ashgate, 2004), 7. 18 Danta and Groth, Mindful Aesthetics, 2. 7 resonates with the ontological stances of materialism,19 it does not, as Jonathan Gottschall claims, attempt to undercut the wonder and beauty of literature with crudely reductive scientific explanations.20 A cognitively informed critical approach is inclusive, rather than exclusive, since it lucidly articulates both aesthetic and scientific, philosophical and narratological perspectives. In my thesis, I will be using this frame to foreground elements of the text that have not previously been studied, with implications for narrative and character that have not been previously considered. As a result, this cognitive approach is more generative than reductive: more exploratory than explanatory.

While in many regards my own theoretical approach differs from that of previous cognitive literary criticism, there are significant points of intersection. In deploying a cognitive linguistic analytical frame, my work resonates with cognitive approaches to imagery such as Gabrielle Starr, Ralph Savarese and Laura Otis21 and conceptual metaphors such as work by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Mark Turner and Mark Bruhn.22 In addition, particularly important to my analytical frame is the work of cognitive scientists, linguists and cognitive literary critics that define the mind as embodied. As neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s concludes, the mind cannot be solely explained in terms of brain events, and cannot be considered separately from the body.23 New models of mind as embodied and embedded have been hugely influential in the last several years, affecting scholarship in cognitive science, philosophy, linguistics and literary criticism.24 As philosopher Andy Clark argues,

19 Carl Plantinga, “Facing Others: Close-Ups of Faces in Narrative and Film,” in Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Criticism, ed. Lisa Zunshine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 300. 20 Jonathan Gottschall, Literature, Science, and a New Humanities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 54. 21 Gabrielle Starr, “Ethics, Meaning, and the Work of Beauty,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 35, no. 3 (2002): 361–78, https://doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2002.0033; Ralph James Saverese, “What Some Autistics Can Teach Us About Poetry,” in Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 393–417; Laura Otis, “The Value of Qualitative Research for Cognitive Literary Studies,” in Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 504–24. 22 Mark J. Bruhn, “Time as Space in the Structure of (Literary) Experience,” in Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 593–612; Mark Turner, Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. 23 Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (New York: Random House, 2011). 24 See, for example - Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought; Peter Garratt, The Cognitive Humanities: Embodied Mind in Literature and Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Karin Kukkonen, “Bayesian Bodies: The Predictive Dimension of Embodied Cognition and Culture,” in The Cognitive Humanities: Embodied Mind in Literature and 8

our thoughts, sensations and feelings are structured by our physical body and its interactions with the world around us.25 Our cognition relies on the fact that we have a body with a particular set of perceptual, sensory and motor capacities, moving through a particular physical world.26 This has been reiterated by not only many other philosophers of mind, but neuropsychologists and neuroscientists. For example, Evan Thompson and Francisco Varela argue that rather than discrete modules or subsystems, the cognitive system is better characterised as a dynamical system ‘that cuts across the brain-body-world divide’.27 Within this understanding of cognition, Yanna Popova and Elena Cuffari explore an enactive perspective of time in narrative. Though their work is tangential to my own, as it considers the temporality of reading and experiencing narrative fiction, there is a strong intersection as Popova and Cuffari examine temporality as ‘enacted in narrative interaction’.28 Where these researchers focus on the intersubjectivity of sense-making as a process that necessarily occurs in time, my work focuses on the intersubjectivity of time-sensing, or experiencing time, on a biological level. Yet the focus on interaction, the enactive engagement with the people and things in the environment and how these shape our sense of time, remains constant.

In her work Stories, Meaning, and Experience: Narrativity and Enaction, Popova further expands this understanding of mind and sense-making. There are strong intersections between my argument of an intersubjective, embodied experience of time and Popova’s descriptions of enactive social cognition, where ‘enactive approaches to human cognition foreground the social and intersubjective nature of human understanding’.29 Meaning and

Culture, ed. Peter Garratt (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 153–68; Lucia Foglia and Robert A. Wilson, “Embodied Cognition,” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science 4, no. 3 (2013): 319– 25, https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.1226; Vittorio Gallese and Valentina Cuccio, The Paradigmatic Body: Embodied Simulation, Intersubjectivity, the Bodily Self, and Language (Frankfurt: Open Mind, 2014); David Chalmers and Andy Clark, “The Extended Mind,” Analysis 58 (1998): 10–23; Julian Kiverstein, Mirko Farina, and Andy Clark, “The Extended Mind Thesis” (Oxford Bibliographies, November 27, 2013), http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/id/obo-9780195396577-0099. 25 Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 4. 26 Esther Thelen, “Grounded in the World: Developmental Origins of the Embodied Mind,” Infancy 1, no. 1 (2000): 4, https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327078IN0101_02. 27 Evan Thompson and Francisco J Varela, “Radical Embodiment: Neural Dynamics and Consciousness,” Trends in Cognitive Science, 2001, 418. 28 Yanna Popova and Elena Cuffari, “Temporality of Sense-Making in Narrative Interactions,” Cognitive Semiotics; Berlin 11, no. 1 (2018): 34, http://dx.doi.org.wwwproxy1.library.unsw.edu.au/10.1515/cogsem- 2018-0007. 29 Yanna Popova, Stories, Meaning and Experience: Narrativity and Enaction (New York: Routledge, 2015), 52. 9

understanding are created through interactive and dynamic enaction. Although Popova explores this participatory sense-making in the context of reading and appreciating fiction rather than occurring between fictional characters, this work informs the model of embodied, enactive cognitive systems which my analysis of temporal synchronisation relies upon, and which I discuss in further detail in my conclusion.

Indeed, part of my aim in this thesis is, in postmodern literary critic N. Katherine Hayles’ words, to explore ‘the nonconscious cognitive assemblages through which these distributed cognitive systems work’.30 Theories of the mind as embodied in a physical form and embedded in a physical world have influenced my approach in several ways. Temporal synchronisation itself is based on an understanding that our bodies influence our cognitive processing, particularly in explaining why our motor resonance systems can create unconscious internal mimicry of others’ movements and posture and how these bodily changes can impact our experience of time. This traces a feedback loop between internal brain and external world – including people and objects, both of which, as the following chapters will elaborate, can shape our perception of time.

ii. Methodology: an interdisciplinary approach

This feedback loop running across the divide of inside and outside is perhaps a good metaphor for my methodological approach, which is based on a bidirectional flow of insight between cognitive science and literature. In analysing fictional minds, my framework incorporates cognitive understandings of mind and time, and, like those neuropsychological studies which study these nuances of this phenomenon, my method partly involves deducing a character’s subjective time through markers of experienced duration. However, since I’m looking at fictional brains, my methodology primarily consists of textual interpretation, using the critical machinery offered by cognitive poetics and linguistics as well as a broadly cognitively informed analysis of thematic and diegetic constructions. Through these lenses I examine how time is encoded in the style, structure and plot of the novel. Grounding this cognitive focus is a historical approach, which examines how this cognitive phenomenon can manifest differently in different contexts. This comes to prominence in my third and fourth

30 N. Katherine Hayles, Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Unconscious (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 3. 10

chapters, where I highlight differences in the instantiations of temporal synchronisation as represented in two Spanish novels from Latin America, as compared to the English language novels of my first two. Here, following Elizabeth Hart’s directive, I aim to walk a middle line between objectivist realism and cultural relativism in my study of literature, in an approach which seeks to account for coherence or ‘consistencies’ across individual experiences while acknowledging that environmental factors shape representation and perception.31 In my analysis of texts from different contexts, cultures and languages, spanning from Australia to Argentina, I aim to acknowledge ‘the brain as a space where the person, culture and the environment intersect to produce meaning’.32

My methodology reflects that literature is not a transparent microcosm of reality, but, as critic of literary and cultural theory Ato Quayson describes, ‘refractions of that reality, with varying emphases of both an aesthetic and ethical kind’.33 In this sense I concur with Dorrit Cohn and likeminded scholars such as Kate Hamburger and Maria Makela in noting ‘the unique nature of fictional minds’.34 However, scholars such as Cohn and Hamburger see this uniqueness of fiction as setting literature apart from real life, enclosing literature and fictional minds in their own world.35 Cohn argues that fiction gives the illusion of the transparency of other minds in a way that is completely distinct from our real-world experience of other minds.36 There have been a number of rebuttals to this claim from cognitive narratologists, who argue from positions consonant with my own – that fiction is not exceptional in giving

31 Elizabeth Hart, “Foreword,” in Cognitive Literary Studies: Current Themes & New Directions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013), x. 32 Mary Thomas Crane, “Cognitive Historicism,” in Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 19. Iseli, Thomas De Quincey and the Cognitive Unconscious. Joseph A. Murphy, “Theory of Mind in Reconciling the Split Objective of Narrative Comprehension.” 33 Quayson, A (2012), Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation, Columbia University Press, Columbia, p.91. 34 Maria Makela, “Cycles of Narrative Necessity: Suspect Tellers and the Textuality of Fictional Minds,” in Stories and Minds (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 130. 35 Dorrit Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1999), 9; Käte Hamburger, The Logic of Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). 36 Scholars who tout Cohn’s theories, such as Makela, approach this point from the perspective of the reader - why the experience of reading about characters is different than the experience of hanging out with a group of people. While some scholars, such as Alan Palmer, disagree on this point, I won’t go into detail on this debate as it is not strictly relevant to my approach, in that I do not specifically explore the experience of fictional minds from the reader’s point of view. 11

access to the mind, since the mind is embodied, embedded and enactive, ‘neither “closed off” from the world nor limited to its internal states and processes’.37 Herman contradicts Cohn’s ‘Exceptionality Thesis’ (as Herman labels it) by highlighting the Cartesian dualism it presupposes, and furthermore rejecting it on the grounds that fiction is not exceptional in this regard: a model of mind that recognises cognition as both enactive and embodied means that the distinction between inside mind and outside world, subject and object, is not clear cut. The mind is not an internal, private theatre and therefore it is not only fictional works which can allow us to gain access to others’ subjectivities.38 My methodology builds upon this premise: I examine not just characters’ reported mental states but their movements, posture, attention to and perception of the outside world, and their embeddedness in a particular physical context, both in the sense of immediate surroundings and broader society. The mind, in this post-Cartesian view, is neither completely internal nor private, but rather bound up in a complex feedback system of brain, body and environment.

However, this does not mean that I’m arguing that texts offer a naturalistic account of minds: the phenomenology of consciousness is not directly translated into literary prose, but retains a unique discursive specificity. Some refractions of literature, however, can in fact highlight the nuances in our everyday experience, rendering them more visible. Cognitive critic Carl Plantinga, in his discussion of narrative and film, sees the mediating function of narrative as sometimes analogous to the distinctive warping of caricature: ‘we are sometimes able to recognise a pattern or behaviour more clearly in a slightly distorted reality’.39 This is evident within the four major novels I have chosen: the relationships between the characters, and between the characters and their houses, are often amplified under the thematic scrutiny of these novels. Additionally, the way that literature frames the world it refigures means that fictional representations ‘focus our attention on the… pertinent variables in the situation more sharply than “unframed reality” does”.40 These effects render literature an important site for investigation of temporal synchronisation, as it often magnifies this subtle process.

37 Marco Bernini, “The Opacity of Fictional Minds: Transparency, Interpretive Cognition and the Exceptionality Thesis,” in The Cognitive Humanities: Embodied Mind in Literature and Culture, ed. Peter Garratt (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 37. 38 David Herman, Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse In English (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 8. 39 Plantinga, “Facing Others: Close-Ups of Faces in Narrative and Film,” 294. 40 Plantinga, 317. 12

One particularly important uniqueness of literature is, as Patrick Colm Hogan explains, its ‘unusual degree of structure and relevance… A wide variety of formal literary techniques function to maximize relevance or patterning across encoded properties or relations’.41 In response to this, rather than treating fictional minds as if they were real minds in a neuropsychological study, I deploy cognitive linguistics, a field of research predicated on the fact that, as cognitive grammatist Ronald Langacker explains, ‘grammar is not autonomous from semantics, that semantics is neither well-delimited nor fully compositional, and that language draws on more general cognitive systems and mental capacities from which it cannot be neatly separated’.42 In my analysis, this involves looking at linguistic phenomena such as phonosemantics, morphology, and lexical patterns as well as conceptual metaphors used to describe minds, bodies and their physical environment. My approach is particularly indebted to cognitive linguists Vyvyan Evans, Stephanie Pourcel and Sharon Hutchins.43 My close focus on language structures – from punctuation to paragraphs – is predicated on their being potentially motivated by unconscious or conscious cognitive processes.

These terms - conscious and unconscious - require some unpacking, as they have been used in various ways. Consciousness has layers, from minimal consciousness (things that we are vaguely aware of but are not focusing on), and introspective or explicit consciousness (things that we are explicitly aware of and focusing on). As cognitive scientist Leonid Perlovsky explains, conscious phenomena exist on a spectrum ‘from vague-unconscious to crisp- conscious’.44 I contrast this with the term ‘unconscious’ in the neurocognitive sense, the ‘new’ unconscious as many cognitive psychologists and cognitive literary critics term it (to distinguish from the psychoanalytic Unconscious). As Vermeule poetically summarises,

41 Patrick Colm Hogan, Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists (London: Routledge, 2012), 52. 42 Ronald Langacker, Investigations in Cognitive Grammar (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), 40. 43 Vyvyan Evans, Language and Time: A Cognitive Linguistics Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Vyvyan Evans and Stephanie Pourcel, New Directions in Cognitive Linguistics (Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 2009); Sharon S. Hutchins, “What Sound Symbolism, Functionalism, and Cognitive Linguistics Can Offer One Another,” Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 23, no. 1 (1997): 148–60, https://doi.org/10.3765/bls.v23i1.1295. 44 Leonid Perlovsky and Roman Illin, “Conscious and Unconscious Mechanisms of Cognition, Emotions, and Language,” Brain Science 2, no. 4 (n.d.): 730. 13

The unconscious includes all of the internal qualities of mind that affect conscious thought and behavior, without being conscious themselves. This means all of the electrical activity generated by neurons; the baroque networks in which those neurons connect; the chemical transmitters moving across synapses; and the stew of hormones in which everything bathes.45

Building on this, to say that the embodied simulation of temporal synchronization occurs unconsciously means that the neuronal firings in the motor cortex are part of the electrical activity not accessible to conscious thought. We may notice this mimicry when it ‘slips out’, creating an observable movement, but in general it operates beneath our conscious mind. Similarly, though we may become aware of the changes in time perception which embodied simulation can bring about, the actual shift in time is beneath our conscious awareness and not accessible to our control: as Klincewicz states, ‘we are not consciously aware of changes but still experience the flow of time’.46

As with much social behavior, embodied mimicry is ‘being ‘controlled’ by external stimuli, not by his or her own consciously accessible intentions or acts of will’.47 The individual’s perception of the object of this mimicry - be it person or non-person - involves a complex interplay of conscious and unconscious processes. As John Bargh explains, object perception harnesses both bottom-up (signals from sensory organs) and top-down cognitive processing (for example, from the mind’s memories/representations of other objects). Even the bottom- up processes, however, do not merely involve the passive reception of sensory inputs. As Easterlin explores in her book A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation, organisms experience sensory perception relative to the ‘experiential matrix’.48 Raymond Gibbs further explains, ‘perception does not take place in the brain of the perceiver, but rather

45 Blakey Vermeule, “The New Unconscious: A Literary Guided Tour,” in Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 468. 46 Michal Klincewicz, “Understanding Perception of Time in Terms of Perception of Change,” Procedia: Social and Behavioral Sciences 126, no. 1 (2014): 58. 47 John Bargh, “Bypassing the Will: Toward Demystifying the Nonconscious Control of Social Behavior,” in The New Unconscious (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 2004), 37. 48 Easterlin, A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation. 14

is an act of the whole animal, the act of perceptually guided exploration of the environment’.49

This understanding of consciousness is relevant to our reading of character. As Nancy Easterlin notes, (along with several others, notably including Palmer), it is ‘no longer sensible to keep our analysis of character separate from the narrative presentation of consciousness.50 However, as Vermeule elucidates, unconscious neural processes are often difficult to observe in narrative: ‘The unconscious cannot be seen directly or even indirectly. The way to catch it is slant, by noticing how consciousness makes patterns and to try to figure out what motivates those patterns’.51 In this way, this distinction between literature and real life can be an advantage in explorations of the unconscious: the linguistic patterning of literature means that experiences of temporality can be expressed through extra-lexical channels of meaning. Paul Ricoeur explains that ‘poetic discourse brings to language aspects, qualities, and values of reality that lack access to language’ used in the everyday.52 Other scholars, when looking at how fictional minds are represented in a text, have often focused on the connection between modes of narrative voice and thought representation. Geoffrey Leech and Mick Short highlight this analogy, describing fictional consciousness as represented in three modes – direct thought, indirect thought, and free indirect thought.53 Here I concur with critics such as Alan Palmer who have criticised this ‘speech category’ approach on the grounds that it doesn’t take into account the range of literary phenomena which contribute to the representations of fictional consciousness, instead limiting analysis to inner speech or direct reporting of mind states. Our ability to perceive or infer the experiences of fictional minds – including, as Herman notes, ‘inferences about the felt, subjective nature of their experience’,54 is built upon a wide range of narrative phenomena.

49 Raymond Gibbs, Embodiment and Cognitive Science (Cambridge University Press, 2005), 43. 50 Easterlin, A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation, 44. 51 Blakey Vermeule, “The New Unconscious: A Literary Guided Tour,” in Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 468. 52 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 6. 53 Geoffrey N. Leech, Mick Short, and Michael H. Short, Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose (Michigan: Longman, 1981), 318. 54 David Herman, “Cognitive Narratology,” in Handbook of Narratology, ed. Peter Hühn et al. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), 38. 15

As such, investigation into the minds or subjectivities of the characters should not be limited to these categories of thought representation. Following this line, my analysis looks at fictional narratives from both first and third-person, with varying levels of direct, indirect and free indirect discourse, and – importantly – incorporates a broader range of stylistic phenomena than simply the character’s reported thoughts. For example, in my above analysis of the frozen moment between Kit, her grandmother and their family friend, we can see that aside from the explicit reporting of Kit’s experience in third-person, other aspects of the narrative style work together to create the sense of her subjective experience of time: conceptual metaphor, symbolic connotations, syntax, etc. In my chapters I take this further, considering characters as ‘soft-assembled wholes’55 of narrative elements, other characters, and narrative setting. Indeed, this is reflective of modern understandings of cognition – that it is not isolable from its environment. This provides a cognitive underpinning to Bakhtin’s character theory, which, as Anthony Wall summarises, holds that ‘a subjective, isolable consciousness in a human being, and thus in the literary character, is nothing less than a false notion’.56 As my chapters make clear, characters and their fictional minds are not delimited from other narrative elements – thematic, linguistic, and structural – nor from the other characters and the environment through which they move.

Acknowledging this, my methodology also harnesses cognitive narratology in exploring how the emplotment inherent in narrative becomes a mediating force in the mimetic process. The process of emplotment in figuring temporal experience shows how, as Ricoeur claims, ‘time becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of a narrative; narrative, in turn, is meaningful to the extent that it portrays the features of temporal experience’.57 My method deploys a narratological analysis of time in its exploration of narrative structure: the trajectory of narrative tension, the division of chapters, the temporality embedded in both discourse time, and story time (both internal to the characters and of the fictional world.) The combination of these various modes of analysis are vital to the contribution of my methodology: in drawing together different scales of focus, from the level of morphemes to the level of plot, my analysis attempts to illustrate the relationship

55 Kiverstein, Farina, and Clark, “The Extended Mind Thesis,” 2. 56 Anthony Wall, “Characters in Bakhtin’s Theory,” Studies in 20th Century Literature, Special Issue on Mikhail Bakhtin, 9, no. 1 (1984): 43. 57 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 61. 16 between different narrative levels. As Alan Richardson and Francis Steen suggest, this works to ‘bring various levels of a text, from its particular phonetic features through its formal organization to its paraphrasable semantic import, into meaningful relation’.58

Overall, my methodology aims to acknowledge literature as a distinct medium, shaped by the complex interaction of referentiality and fictionality. While I do not wish to collapse the complex problem of referentiality in narrative fiction, I equally do not wish to treat literature as set apart from the real world of its authors and readers. As Ricoeur notes, if we eschew literature’s referentiality, ‘then we paradoxically ratify the positivism we generally fight against, namely, the prejudice that only a datum that is given in such a way that it can be empirically observed and scientifically described is real. We also enclose literature within a world of its own’.59 It is this position which both my research, and cognitive literary criticism as a whole, seeks to break down.

iii. Originality of Contribution

Despite the critical influences of the scholars and fields which I have detailed above, in mapping the expression of temporal synchronisation in literature my deployment of cognitive literary criticism differs from general trends in the field. The majority of critics focus on the cognitive mechanisms and processes underpinning how ‘readers understand fictional minds’.60 This has been of particular interest to critics for over fifty years – as seen in Roman Ingarden’s Cognition of the Literary Work of Art (1968).61 Within the new wave of cognitive literary criticism, seminal works by Blakey Vermeule and Lisa Zunshine explore reader response theory from a cognitive perspective, elucidating ‘why we read fiction’ and ‘why we care about literary characters’.62 Adjacent inquiries into the didactic or formative function of

58 Alan Richardson and Francis F. Steen, “Reframing the Adjustment: A Response to Adler and Gross,” Poetics Today 24, no. 2 (2003): 153. 59 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 87. 60 Alan Palmer, Social Minds in the Novel (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2010), 39–42. 61 Roman Ingarden, The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1973). 62 Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006); Blakey Vermeule, Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2011). 17 literature have proposed that reading leads us to be more empathetic and altruistic, for example works by prominent philosopher Martha Nussbaum, psychologist Keith Oatley, and literary critics Patrick Colm Hogan and Suzanne Keen.63 In particular, many cognitive critics examine the neuroanatomy of our engagement with fictional stories.64 While this range of research is important, its goal is generally not to provide novel interpretations of texts. Crane sees this as a major gap in the field: ‘cognitive literary and cultural criticism continues to occupy a marginal place in our methodological tool kit because it has not so far tended to offer a hermeneutic, a mode of reading that allows us to produce novel interpretations of texts’.65 This is what my approach does. In focusing on the fictional minds of the text through a lens sensitive to the characters’ subjective time, my thesis provides a tool kit, combining cognitive science, linguistics, narratology and character theory to create new interpretations of texts. In particular, my readings produce a new way of understanding character progression (as in my first two chapters); the relationship of the character with their culture (particularly shown in my third chapter); and a work’s overall philosophical position (as highlighted in my fourth chapter). While complementary with other interpretations of these texts, this approach nevertheless provides a new perspective with which to understand these novels.

Furthermore, my analysis focuses on fictional minds, rather than those real minds of the author and reader. As I mentioned above, the questions ‘how and why does the mind create fictional narrative worlds, [and] how and why do readers process them’66 have been explored

63 Martha Craven Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Baltimore: Beacon Press, 1995); Keith Oatley, Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2011); Keith Oatley, “Fiction and Its Study as Gateways to the Mind,” Scientific Study of Literature 1, no. 1 (2011): 153–64; Patrick Colm Hogan, “What Literature Teaches Us about Emotion,” in Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 273–90; Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Suzanne Keen, “Human Rights Discourse and Universals of Cognition and Emotion,” in Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 347–66. 64 Norman Norwood Holland, Literature and the Brain (Cambridge: PsyArt Foundation, 2009); Hogan, “What Literature Teaches Us about Emotion”; Aaron Mishara, “The Literary Neuroscience of Kafka’s Hypnagogic Hallucinations: How Literature Informs the Neuroscientific Study of Self and Its Disorders,” in Cognitive Literary Studies: Current Themes & New Directions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), 105–23; Keith Oatley, Raymond Mar, and Maja Djikic, “The Psychology of Fiction: Present and Future,” in Cognitive Literary Studies: Current Themes & New Directions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013), 235–49. 65 Mary Thomas Crane, “Surface, Depth, and the Spatial Imaginary: A Cognitive Reading of The Political Unconscious,” Representations 108, no. 1 (2009): 76, https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2009.108.1.76. 66 Crane, “Cognitive Historicism,” 17. 18 from an impressive and fascinating array of angles. In a similar area to my own study, Karin Kukkonen has explored space and time in fictional works from the perspective of embodiment. Consonant with my own research, she notes that our sense of time is shaped by the way in which our ‘bodies relate to and interact with the world around them’.67 However, her aim is to investigate how this shapes readers’ experience, suggesting that readers run internal, embodied simulations of the fictional bodies they perceive. Such a focus is of significant interest to my own studies68; however, as I explain further in the conclusion to the thesis, a legitimate exploration of temporal synchronisation from the perspective of reader response theory warrants an empirically based project – one which was not possible within the scope of my current research. In other examples of reader-oriented cognitive criticism, the construction and reception of fiction has been examined from the perspective of evolutionary psychology (as in the work of Nancy Easterlin69) and the ways in which historical developments in cognitive science directly influenced authors has been explored by Richardson, Crane and Iseli.70 Although such a grouping combines vastly differing approaches, in a general sense the following cognitive critics have taken these functions of the author and readers’ minds – and the interactions between them – as a locus of their research: Marisa Bortolussi and Peter Dixon, Elaine Auyoung, Nancy Easterlin, Fritz Breithaupt, Richard Gerrig, Lars Bernaerts et al., David Herman, Joseph Murphy, Ralf Schneider, Porter Abbott, James Phelan and Alan Palmer.71 These approaches dominate a

67 Karin Kukkonen, “Space, Time and Causality in Graphic Narratives: An Embodied Approach,” in From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative, ed. Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2013), 49. 68 As Makela points out, ‘in one sense, the minds of narrating or experiencing fictional agents always merge the representation with the represented: the mind is simultaneously both the performer and the arena of performance’ (Makela, “Cycles of Narrative Necessity: Suspect Tellers and the Textuality of Fictional Minds,” 148.) Reader response is particularly important in investigations of time in narrative: many scholars note that discourse time is in many ways a metonym for reading time. However, as the following chapters indicate, there are productive ways to examine fictional minds without conflating them with the readers’ minds that help to produce them. 69 Nancy Easterlin, “Thick Context,” in Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 613–32. 70 Richardson, The Neural Sublime; Crane, “Cognitive Historicism”; Markus Iseli, Thomas De Quincey and the Cognitive Unconscious (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 71 David Herman, Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013); Marisa Bortolussi and Peter Dixon, “Minding the Text: Memory for Literary Narrative,” in Stories and Minds (Lincoln: Nebraska Paperback, 2013), 23–37; Elaine Auyoung, “Rethinking the Reality Effect,” in Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 581–92; Easterlin, “Thick Context”; Julia Breitbach, Analog Fictions for the Digital Age: Literary Realism and Photographic Discourses in Novels After 2000 (Ontario: Camden House, 2012); Richard J. Gerrig, “Why Literature Is Necessary, and Not Just Nice,” in Cognitive Literary Studies: Current Themes & New Directions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013), 35–52; Isabel Jaen and Julien Jacques Simon, 19

number of major recent anthologies in the field such as The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, (ed. Lisa Zunshine), Cognitive Literary Studies: Current Themes and New Directions (ed. Isabel Jaén and Julien Jacques Simon) and Stories and Minds: Cognitive Approaches to Literary Narrative (ed. Lars Bernaerts et al.).72 My own research does not explicitly refer to either the author’s or reader’s brain, but rather focuses on the fictional embodied minds represented in the text.

Another difference between my own work and much of the field of cognitive literary criticism lies in the nature of the cognitive phenomenon that I explore. Temporal synchronisation differs from the majority of cognitive processes spoken about in cognitive literary criticism in both its specificity – this neurophysiological process has not, to my knowledge, been previously examined in any literary criticism – and in its unconscious nature. As Crane (perhaps unkindly) notes, often cognitive literary criticism ‘involves pointing out the obvious’,73 searching for clearly identifiable conscious mental processes and their literal, one-to-one representation in literature. This is particularly evident in the empathy focused research within cognitive literary criticism, as it has been the conscious, cognitive and higher-order processes of empathy – such as perspective taking, or Theory of Mind (e.g. Zunshine’s or Richardson’s work) – which have received the most attention. Although not all individuals possess the terminology to meta-represent and describe these processes, they are easily identifiable and we can easily become aware that we are using them. This is quite unlike, for example, temporal synchronisation and the motor empathy (or motor resonance, i.e. the activation of mirror resonance systems) underlying it, which occurs almost entirely

Cognitive Literary Studies: Current Themes & New Directions; Lars Bernaerts et al., Stories and Minds: Cognitive Approaches to Literary Narrative (Lincoln: Nebraska Paperback, 2013); Joseph Murphy, “Theory of Mind in Reconciling the Split Objective of Narrative Comprehension,” in Cognitive Literary Studies: Current Themes & New Directions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013), 53–70; Ralf Schneider, “Toward a Cognitive Theory of Literary Character: The Dynamics of Mental-Model Construction,” Style 35, no. 4 (2001): 607; Porter Abbott, “How Do We Read What Isn’t There to Be Read?,” in The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 104–19; James Phelan, “Rhetorical Theory, Cognitive Theory, and Morrison’s ‘Recitatif,’” in Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 119–35; Alan Palmer, “‘Listen to the Stories!’ Narrative, Cognition and Country- and-Western Music,” in The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 136–54. 72 Bernaerts et al., Stories and Minds; Lisa Zunshine, ed., Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Isabel Jaen and Julien Jacques Simon, Cognitive Literary Studies: Current Themes & New Directions. 73 Crane, “Cognitive Historicism,” 19. 20 beneath our control or awareness. The influences of the people and objects in our environment on our sense of time are complex and combine material processes, the cognitive non-conscious and conscious thought. In general the actual mechanisms of influence pass beneath our conscious awareness, even if we do come to sense, on some level, a shift in our perception of time. While it has been widely noted in narrative theory that writers can be ‘researchers in the unconscious’,74 this has generally been taken to mean the psychological unconscious, rather than the cognitive unconscious.75 In my use of the term, the cognitive unconscious denotes the neural mechanisms and processes ‘that affect conscious thought and behaviour, without being conscious themselves’.76 There have been few researchers investigating this area in the humanities, as one literary critic to do so, Hayles, notes, ‘the very existence of nonconscious cognitive processes is largely unknown in the humanities’.77 However, in particular Vermeule’s chapter in The Oxford Handbook aligns with my own aims in taking ‘tentative steps towards opening up the new unconscious to literary study’.78 In this essay Vermeule examines literary correlates for features of the ‘new unconscious’ – in particular the flash lag effect, biases and automaticity. As in my own work, Vermeule argues that unconscious features of cognition can be reflected in fictional texts, and proposes that one can catch by ‘slant’ the patterns that these processes and mechanisms create in literary works.79 This is, however, as Vermeule notes, a new and underdeveloped area of study.

As Herman points out, cognitive literary critics are in a position to suggest how ‘more careful scrutiny of fictional minds can help illuminate the “real minds”…on which specialists in the cognitive sciences have traditionally focused’.80 My research shows how literary representations of mind can not only deepen our understanding of the conditions and influences acting on temporal synchronisation, but suggest an aspect of the phenomenon that

74 David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan, Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (New York: Routledge, 2010), 620. 75 Herman, Jahn and Ryan discuss how the unconscious - in a psychological sense - has been explored in the literary sphere, particularly through movements such as surrealism, modernism, postmodernism. Herman, Jahn, and Ryan, Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. 76 Ran R. Hassin, James S. Uleman, and John A. Bargh, The New Unconscious (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 3. 77 Hayles, Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Unconscious, 1. 78 Vermeule, “The New Unconscious: A Literary Guided Tour,” 466. 79 Vermeule, 471. 80 David Herman, Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences (Stanford: CSLI Publications, 2003), 23. 21 hasn’t been explicitly examined by cognitive science – that is, a temporal synchronisation which occurs between humans and anthropomorphised objects. Within the literary narratives I analyse, an individual develops an anthropomorphised conception of an object, and then their bodies respond to this conception as if it were, in some ways, an actual person. This means that the temporal influence which usually occurs between humans here takes place between human and anthropomorphised object. In this case, characters experience a subtle alignment with the object’s perceived temporal mode. This is the focus of my second, third and fourth chapters, as I explore how texts from different genres, contexts and languages depict this temporal relationship between an individual and an anthropomorphised object. I argue that literature has long been aware of this temporal connection between people and objects, showing a sensitivity to the influence that our physical surroundings have on our experience of time. This effect is, though culturally influenced, biological – originating in the body. It is not unique to certain individuals nor limited to a specific context, something evidenced by its representation in a constellation of texts spanning genres and time periods. In exploring novels from a range of different cultural regions, my aim is twofold: both to paint a picture of a common experience which persists across cultures and contexts, and to consider the way that the manifestations and representations of this influence on subjective time change across continents, countries and languages.

iv. Temporal Synchronisation: substrates and effects

Before exploring literature’s insights into temporal synchronisation, it will be useful to outline its bases in cognitive scientific terms. Just as it has been shown that physical and emotional convergence makes brain activity synchronise (‘brains areas tick together’81), there is also an increasing weight of evidence pointing towards the synchronisation of our phenomenological experiences. Interest in mirror neurons and empathetic resonance systems has expanded exponentially: major works such as Giacomo Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia’s Mirrors in the brain: How our minds share actions and emotions,82 Jean Decety

81 Lauri Nummenmaa et al., “Emotions Promote Social Interaction by Synchronizing Brain Activity across Individuals,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 109, no. 24 (2012): 9599, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1206095109. 82 Giacomo Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions and Emotions, trans. Frances Anderson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 22

and William Ickes’ The Social Neuroscience of Empathy,83 and Vittorio Gallese and Valentina Cuccio’s The Paradigmatic Body: Embodied Simulation, Intersubjectivity, the Bodily Self, and Language84 are just a handful of recent contributions to the field. In particular, within the last ten years, there has been a proliferation of neurological and psychological studies investigating how ‘individuals adopt other people’s rhythms and incorporate other people’s time’.85 Neuroscientists Droit-Volet and her colleagues have proposed that this neurophysiological process is an emergent property of interactions between our affective and motor resonance mechanisms and the neural substrates of our ‘internal clock’.86 Their research suggests that our internal sense of passing time can change to synchronise with the people around us: an ‘embodiment of the other person’s time’.87

Exactly how our resonance systems alter our sense of time is not known – largely because cognitive science has not yet conclusively identified the region/s of the brain that enable an internal experience of time.88 This is notably different to external, objective ‘clock time’: it describes the variable experience of time passing. It is a common experience that time passes quickly in some situations, for example at an enjoyable party, and slowly in others, for example during a boring conversation. This is influenced by many factors, and intertwined with several other cognitive systems, including memory.89 In this thesis I will be looking at the internal experience of duration of second, minute and hour intervals, which are categorised as ‘cognitive’ and appear to be underpinned by different neural mechanisms than,

83 Jean Decety and William Ickes, The Social Neuroscience of Empathy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009). 84 Gallese and Cuccio, The Paradigmatic Body. 85 Droit-Volet and Gil, “The Time–Emotion Paradox,” 1948. 86 Droit-Volet and Gil, “The Time–Emotion Paradox”; Sylvie Droit-Volet and Sandrine Gil, “The Emotional Body and Time Perception,” Cognition and Emotion 30, no. 4 (2015): 1–13, https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2015.1023180; Sylvie Droit-Volet, Sophie L. Fayolle, and Sandrine Gil, “Emotion and Time Perception: Effects of Film-Induced Mood,” Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience 5 (2011): 1–9, https://doi.org/10.3389/fnint.2011.00033; Nather et al., “Time Changes with the Embodiment of Another’s Body Posture”; Nather, Bueno, and Bigand, “Body Movement Implied by Static Images Modulates Eye Movements and Subjective Time Estimation.”; Nather and Bueno, “Static Images with Different Induced Intensities of Human Body Movements Affect Subjective Time”; Nather et al., “Implied Movement in Static Images Reveals Biological Timing Processing”; Kentaro Yamamoto and Kayo Miura, “Time Dilation Caused by Static Images with Implied Motion,” Experimental Brain Research 223, no. 2 (2012): 311–19, http://dx.doi.org.wwwproxy0.library.unsw.edu.au/10.1007/s00221-012-3259-5. 87 Droit-Volet and Gil, “The Time–Emotion Paradox,” 1948. 88 Wittman, “Embodied Time: The Experience of Time, the Body, and the Self,” 507; Marc Wittmann, Felt Time: The Psychology of How We Perceive Time (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016), 28. 89 Michail Maniadakis and Panos Trahanias, “Time Models and Cognitive Processes: A Review,” Frontiers in Neurorobotics 8 (2014), https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbot.2014.00007. 23

say, the experiencing of sub-second or year-long intervals.90 One proposal is that neural oscillators distributed along the motor nervous system of the brain are necessary for interval timing.91 For the neuropsychologists investigating temporal synchronisation, and for my own thinking, the standard psychological model of internal time has been useful. This model thinks about time as controlled by a pacemaker, which emits pulses that are accrued in an accumulator. Judgements about interval lengths are based on the amount of pulses accumulated.92 This abstract model allows for reasoning about what factors might influence our sense of subjective time. Despite this lack of knowledge about its neural bases, what we do known is that ‘the judgement of time is central to virtually all behaviours, from basic tasks like foraging and communication, to uniquely human activities like deciding which stock portfolio to invest in or whether to close a slow-loading web page’.93 The timing of seconds, minutes and hours provides a crucial role in organising our experience and events into a coherent whole.

As with our internal clock, mirror neurons and other aspects of our resonance systems are not fully understood. Like subjective time, they have received an enormous amount of attention in cognitive science. Motor resonance, motor empathy or motor simulation are three terms which refer to the activation of the motor system when an action is observed or perceived, rather than performed. The brain produces an ‘echo’ of the movements, posture, etc. that it perceives, which has been theorised to have far reaching effects for emotional contagion,94

90 David M. Eagleman, “Human Time Perception and Its Illusions,” Current Opinion in Neurobiology 18, no. 2 (2008): 131–36, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.conb.2008.06.002. 91 Daya S. Gupta, “Processing of Sub- and Supra-Second Intervals in the Primate Brain Results from the Calibration of Neuronal Oscillators via Sensory, Motor, and Feedback Processes,” Frontiers in Psychology 5, no. 816 (2014): 1–16, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00816; Matthew S. Matell and Warren H. Meck, “Cortico-Striatal Circuits and Interval Timing: Coincidence Detection of Oscillatory Processes,” Cognitive Brain Research, Neuroimaging of Interval Timing, 21, no. 2 (2004): 139–70, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogbrainres.2004.06.012. 92 John Gibbon, “Scalar Expectancy Theory and Weber’s Law in Animal Timing,” Psychological Review 84, no. 3 (1977): 279–325; Bruno Mölder, Valtteri Arstila, and Peter Øhrstrøm, Philosophy and Psychology of Time (Vienna: Springer, 2015), 144. 93 William Matthews and Warren Meck, “Temporal Cognition: Connecting Subjective Time to Perception, Attention, and Memory,” Psychological Bulletin 142, no. 8 (2016): 865, https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000045. 94 Elaine Hatfield, Richard Rapson, and Yen-Chi Le, “Emotional Contagion and Empathy,” in The Social Neuroscience of Empathy, ed. Decety & Ickes (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 19–30; Ulf Dimberg, Monika Thunberg, and Kurt Elmehed, “Unconscious Facial Reactions to Emotional Facial Expressions,” Psychological Science 11, no. 1 (2000): 86–89, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9280.00221. 24

theory of mind,95 and a wide number of other cognitive processes. In terms of time perception, researchers theorise that we can ‘catch’ modes (speeds) of subjective time from others through a process of empathetic resonance: watching, thinking, or even being reminded of another person can change the way we experience time. For example, as Gil and Droit-Volet describe, when a teenager spends time with an elderly person who speaks and walks more slowly, the young person’s internal clock slows down.96 This can be explained within the theoretical framework of motor resonance as the young people ‘embodied the slow movements of elderly people. This would therefore have slowed down the speed of their internal clocks’.97 Such an effect can also be produced by merely looking at a picture, for example of an elderly face98 or a body in a posture of implied motion,99 both of which can initiate an internal synchronisation with a perceived mode of movement and subsequently influence an individual’s experience of time.

The range of stimuli which can trigger this ‘synchronisation’ of time is suggestive, and there is still much research to be done. For example, cognitive science hasn’t examined how this ‘perceived motion’ can be detected in things which we perceive as partly human or human- like: anthropomorphised objects. The possibility that not just persons but also personified objects can influence our subjective time is, though underexplored in cognitive science, a familiar story in literature: literary narrative is, I argue, attuned to the subtle influences that the places and objects in our environment have on our experience of time. However, literary criticism doesn’t have the precise terminology to explain this phenomenon, which is, I believe, why it hasn’t received specific critical attention. Here a cognitive perspective that integrates literary insights with a cognitive science framework would open up the discussion of how and why inanimate objects can shape characters’ subjective experience of time.

95 Vittorio Gallese, “Embodied Simulation: From Mirror Neuron Systems to Interpersonal Relations,” Novartis Foundation Symposium 278 (2007): 3–19; Martin Davies and Tony Stone, Mental Simulation: Evaluations and Applications - Reading in Mind and Language (Oxford: Wiley, 1995). 96 Droit-Volet and Gil, “The Time–Emotion Paradox,” 1949. 97 Nather et al., “Time Changes with the Embodiment of Another’s Body Posture,” 1. 98 Chambon, Droit-Volet, and Niedenthal, “The Effect of Embodying the Elderly on Time Perception”; John Bargh et al, “Automaticity of Social Behavior: Direct Effects of Trait Construct and Stereotype Activation on Action,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 71, no. 2 (1996): 230–44. 99 Yamamoto and Miura, “Time Dilation Caused by Static Images with Implied Motion.” 25

In exploring literary representations of all types of temporal synchronisation, I contend that the temporal influence between characters or between character and object is not mere literary artifice nor poetic licence, but a literary rendering of a genuine neurophysiological process. Exploring this involves analysing characters and other literary phenomena through cognitive science discourses. To a degree, this means that I talk about fictional minds as if they are, in some ways, analogous to real minds. Cognitive literary criticism often takes a similar approach, as some scholars seek to ‘deontologize[] the distinction between fictional and ‘real’ minds’.100 Of course, as I will show throughout the following chapters, it is not as straightforward as that – literature does not perfectly reflect real life – but equally I argue that we shouldn’t consider fictional minds as entirely unrelated to real minds. Here I take as my premise the author’s ability to imbue a neurological validity into their characters at both a conscious and unconscious level. Supporting this position is a range of cognitivist studies investigating the neuroscience of writing. As David Lodge explains, the ability of novelists to not only create characters but to give a ‘plausible account of their consciousness is a special application of Theory of Mind’,101 a subsystem of our neurobiological empathy matrix, which, as Zunshine points out, is the same one used to ‘deal with real people’.102 Gregory Currie speculates, ‘Assuming, plausibly, that thinking up fictional stories is an imaginative project just as reading them is, we can think of writers as engaged in simulations which are only very imperfectly under conscious control’.103 In particular, recent discoveries and theorists have implicated the mirror neuron system in a ‘simulation theory’104 of empathy, which describes how individuals unconsciously simulate the affective and motor experiences of an observed or, (as is particularly important in the case of authors’ relationships with literary characters), perceived other. Authors do not objectively observe those around them and then dutifully write down exactly what they see. Rather, they empathetically embody their characters, imbuing their fictional figures with an element of their own experienced

100 J. Keith Vincent, “Sex on the Mind: Queer Theory Meets Cognitive Theory,” in Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 209. 101 David Lodge, Consciousness and the Novel (London: Random House, 2012), 92. 102 Lisa Zunshine, “Theory of Mind and Experimental Representations of Fictional Consciousness,” Narrative 11, no. 3 (2003): 273, https://doi.org/10.1353/nar.2003.0018. 103 Gregory Currie, The Nature of Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 163. 104 Simulation theory is the dominant psychological model of empathy, which posits that we use the resources of our own minds to “simulate the psychological etiology of the behaviour of others”. Robert Gordon, “Folk Psychology as Simulation,” Mind & Language 2, no. 2 (1986): 158. Alvin I. Goldman, Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Davies and Stone, Mental Simulation. 26

neurological reality. As Bernaerts et al. describe, these theorists have ‘given a boost’ to the study of fictional minds, ‘blending literary analysis with real-mind discourses’ and demonstrating the ability of the fictional mind to model those of real people.105

Further informing my position on the representations of embodied minds in literature is cognitive historicist Mary Thomas Crane’s refiguring of authorial intention. She advocates for a shift in thinking about authorial agency, in alignment with the problematic concept of agency in the cognitive sciences, by acknowledging the complex interaction of conscious, unconscious and contextual influences on the production of fiction. In her discussion of Shakespeare’s fictional representations of embodied brains, Crane concludes that ‘it is enough to say that these effects “emerge”’106 without rigidly delineating the role of authorial agency. Despite the fact that the authors whose work I explore in this thesis are not, presumably, explicitly aware of the cognitive processes underpinning temporal synchronisation, their experience and perception of the influences working upon our subjective time has moulded the temporality embedded in their narratives, at both characterological and narratological levels. Bolstering this assertion is Crane’s approach to a cognitive literary theory that ‘offers new ways to locate in texts signs of their origin in a materially embodied mind/brain’.107 Here, the authors’ empathetic embodiment of their characters can unconsciously imbue a degree of neurological validity into their narrative: just as empathy allows us to dissolve the strict divide between self and other, so it also troubles the boundaries between real and fictional brains.108

With this in mind, there are some important qualifications to make. It is dangerous to take preliminary studies in neuropsychological phenomena as gospel, since some of these studies still need to be repeated by others to be confirmed, and as mentioned above, the neural substrates of time perception haven’t yet been established: as with many other new cognitive discoveries, the findings are contingent upon further research. Additionally, a non-scientist

105 Bernaerts et al., Stories and Minds, 129. 106 Mary Thomas Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 25. 107 Crane, 4. 108 This research into empathy in literature shares a lineage with moral investigations into sympathy, particularly during the 18th Century. However, this more closely aligns with emotional, rather than motor empathy, and so is slightly tangential to my research. See Ildiko Csengei, Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Springer, 2011). 27

must tread carefully when interpreting these findings. However, what my work does is use this new phenomenon as a starting point, rather than an end in itself. The idea that other people and other objects can influence our sense of time resonates, I believe, with both lived experience and literary representations. There are many narratives which show the subtle and pervasive ways in which other bodies and things in the environment can influence us, and our sense of time. Approaching this from a cognitive perspective foregrounds this process and its impact, affording a space for specific discussions of the role of bodies and objects in our subjective time and also possibly offering a specific, tangible explanation for this role. Furthermore, such cognitive perspectives also open up a dialogue between literature and science, allowing literary studies to productively engage in exploration of this aspect of time experience.

v. Texts: An outline of the main novels explored in each chapter

Each chapter of this thesis focuses on one main text. In my first chapter, I analyse Don DeLillo’s haunting 2001 novella, The Body Artist.109 This chapter unpacks the intersection of time, intersubjectivity and identity within the novella. Building on cognitive linguistic principles, my methodology examines diverse linguistic phenomena from grammatical tense and mood to sound symbolism, demonstrating the resonances between the thematic trajectory of the novella and the neurophysiological process of temporal synchronisation. Part of this chapter’s contribution is the assemblage of a toolbox to analyse such temporal shifts in narrative: its deployment deepens our understanding of the novels’ commentary on time, offering a new reading of the protagonist’s journey through her emotional and existential struggles by positioning temporal synchronisation as the motivating force behind her character trajectory.

My next three chapters deploy cognitive and literary theory to explore the underpinnings and implications of a temporal influence between humans and objects, which I call anthropomorphic temporal synchronisation. The novels that I explore in these chapters show that our sense of time can be connected to the spaces and things around us; in particular, the houses in which we live can make the passing of time dilate, accelerate, even to seem to skip or stop. Yet the connection that they represent between time and objects has either been

109 Don DeLillo, The Body Artist (London: Picador, 2001). 28 glossed over with abstract or metaphysical terms or remains unexamined in criticism of these novels. In addressing this gap, my approach carries significance for cognitive science, literary theory and for each individual work, positing the temporal aspect of human-object relationships as a prism through which to understand questions of structure, style and character.

Through this prism, in my second chapter I analyse The Life of Houses (2015) from Australian poet and novelist Lisa Gorton. In this section I follow the indelible lines that the story draws between houses and their inhabitants. My reading examines how the protagonist’s relationship with her grandparents’ sea house creates a shift in her sense of time. This is significant for understanding the novel because, as with The Body Artist, this temporal synchronisation propels a key focus of the novel: the protagonist’s identity development.

In my third chapter I look at Isabel Allende’s La casa de los espíritus (1982). Again here I explore the diegetic, thematic and linguistic structures in the novel as they sketch an outline of the relationship between the characters’ sense of home and time. However, in contrast to my previous chapters, I move away from ‘Western’ literature, to examine anthropomorphic temporal synchronisation as represented in a different continent, language, and time-culture. In Allende’s novel, the process of temporal synchronisation is deeply tied to its Latin American ‘polychronic’ context. Here cognitive approaches intersect with cultural interpretation, constructing a multidimensional portrait of temporal synchronisation and locating cognitive literary criticism within a sociological and global context. My analysis of La casa de los espíritus presents a crucial step in my cognitive critical exploration of temporal synchronisation in literature, and offers a new reading of the role of the eponymous house in mediating the characters’ identity development and relationship with their surrounding culture.

The complex web of identity, surrounding society and time is again examined in my fourth chapter. This final section gestures towards the future, exploring how the digital age influences the relationship of time, bodies and environment. I analyse Argentinian novelist Martín Castagnet’s recent science fiction novel Los cuerpos del verano (2012). The protagonist’s identity here is bound up with the digital technology in his surroundings, and the effect that it has on his sense of time shapes his own self-conceptualisation as a biological being in a technological age. Despite the novel’s speculations on futuristic disembodiment, 29

an analysis of temporal synchronisation – a phenomenon which relies on embodied feedback systems, neuropsychological engagement with the people and objects in the environment – within Los cuerpos brings to the fore the novel’s deeper commentary on mind, body and technology.

I divided my chosen texts equally between English-language and Spanish-language novels, with the first two chapters exploring American and Australian works, respectively, and the last two chapters analysing Chilean and Argentinian novels. I did this because I wanted a range of different contexts and languages, to conduct a cognitive historical exploration of this biological phenomenon, tracing its various manifestations in different cultural contexts. I particularly chose novels from these countries because Western cultures such as America and Australia are described as having a different time culture to Latin American countries (as I explain in my third chapter), which I theorized could shape the subjective time portrayed in each novel. Each of the chosen texts is relatively contemporary – written within the last 50 years – to provide a sense of cohesiveness and to avoid anachronism in my comparative analysis. Ideally, I would have liked to look at a wider scope of texts from different places and time periods; however, within the confines of this thesis this wasn’t possible. Importantly, throughout my discussions of these main texts I’ve interspersed brief references to other novels, to show that my methodology is not merely useful for a limited number of texts, but can account more deeply and precisely for a wide range of works which look at time, bodies and environment.

As discussed, the continuities running through each of my four novels include a focus on subjective time, the embodied mind and its embeddedness in the physical environment. However, underlying this general linking theme there are variations in the temporal phenomena that they represent, and the organisation of my chapters follows a particular progression in my exploration of this aspect of subjective time. The Body Artist shows a synchronisation of subjective time between two people: echoing the process already examined by cognitive science. The novel of the next chapter, The Life of Houses, renders an anthropomorphic temporal synchronisation (ATS), evidence of which arises in literature but hasn’t been established by cognitive science.

An understanding of ATS is underpinned by recent neuroscientific studies which indicate that similar brain regions are involved when we think about the behaviour of both humans and of nonhuman entities, suggesting that anthropomorphism may be using similar processes as those used for thinking about other people (e.g. see Harriet Cullen et al., Chaminade et al., Gazzola et al. or Adam Waytz et al.110). Collating existing research in cognitive science suggests a possible syllogism: if embodied simulation can bring about a change in time perception between two humans, and embodied simulation is activated by our anthropomorphic connection to objects, then it is possible for objects to also bring about a change in time perception. The essential process remains the same as human-human temporal synchronisation: mirror neurons, largely in the motor cortex of the brain, initiate an internal resonance with a perceived other. Notably, however, despite the research in surrounding areas the temporal resonance of these nuanced relationships with anthropomorphised objects has not yet been confirmed by cognitipve science. (Though its plausibility was, however, confirmed in a personal correspondence by neuropsychologist Sylvie Droit-Volet, a key researcher in the field.111)

Such a cognitive effect, in order to be considered biological, ought to persist across cultures: my third chapter, on La casa de los espíritus, looks at ATS operating in a different time culture and continent. My final chapter looks at ATS within a futuristic context, analysing a speculative science fiction novel in order to explore how the temporal process interacts with technology. Conceptually speaking, ATS offers a lens through which to understand linguistic, narratological and characterological phenomena. While I do not wish to be overly prescriptive in the analytical model of ATS that I propose (as ATS may be represented in different ways), an analytical framework that includes cognitive research on anthropomorphism and temporal synchronisation helps us understand how people are

110 Harriet Cullen et al., “Individual Differences in Anthropomorphic Attributions and Human Brain Structure,” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 9, no. 9 (2014): 1276–80, https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nst109; Adam Waytz, Nicholas Epley, and John T. Cacioppo, “Social Cognition Unbound: Insights Into Anthropomorphism and Dehumanization,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 19, no. 1 (2010): 58–62; Thierry Chaminade, Jessica Hodgins, and Mitsuo Kawato, “Anthropomorphism Influences Perception of Computer-Animated Characters’ Actions,” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 2, no. 3 (September 2007): 206–16, https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsm017; Thierry Chaminade et al., “Brain Response to a Humanoid Robot in Areas Implicated in the Perception of Human Emotional Gestures,” PLoS ONE 5, no. 7 (July 21, 2010): e11577, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0011577. 111 Isabelle Wentworth and Sylvie Droit-Volet, “Re: Interdisciplinary Advice for an Australi... - [email protected],” May 8, 2015, https://tinyurl.com/yxqzfmr5. 31 influenced by objects. The example models I demonstrate in my chapters intertwines this analytical framework with a theoretical one, composed of cognitive linguistics, cognitive historicism, and narrative poetics. In each chapter, I explain why each particular novel – its specific intersections of genre, its plot and character trajectories, and obviously treatment of time – make them important and compelling examples of temporal synchronisation.

As this introduction has made clear, there are two main contributions of my thesis: exploring temporal synchronisation through literature, and exploring literature through temporal synchronisation. This offers a new understanding of cognitive subjective time as resulting from an intersection of minds, bodies and environment, while also suggesting a new framework for the analysis of texts by demonstrating the novel readings this framework can produce. The original readings yielded by an analysis informed by subjective time – ones which sees characters’ identities as shaped by time and embodied experience – will be the focus of my following chapters. It is through these readings that I hope to construct my own narrative: one of time and minds, bodies and objects, and the important connections which run between them. 32

‘Body Time’: Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist112

Part 1. Theorising time in The Body Artist

‘You are made out of time’ The Body Artist, 92

Feeling its way around the embodied experience of past, present and future, Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist grapples, in the words of David Cowart, with ‘time as it reveals itself in language and consciousness’.113 As the above epigraph attests, the relationship between identity formation and temporal experience is a principal preoccupation of the novella: perhaps even the fulcrum of its thematic and philosophical musings. Though a number of critics have previously explored these two central concerns – and despite the clearly cognitive tenor of the narrative – none have done so through a cognitively informed analytical framework. It is within this space that this chapter is positioned, demonstrating that an analytical frame buttressed by cognitive research into subjective time elucidates The Body Artist’s thematic and character trajectories. Although critics have previously examined the development of the protagonist, Lauren’s, identity, they have done so generally in metaphysical and intuitive terms. This chapter proposes a new mode of analysis which allows us to understand her inner journey in greater detail, nuancing existing accounts of the novel’s commentary on temporal experience and identity formation. The interdisciplinary framework enables a fine-grained textual analysis, integrating a micro level of linguistic and symbolic patterns with a macro account of thematic machinations. For The Body Artist, such a cognitive approach weaves key narrative elements – time, bodies, consciousness, intersubjectivity – into the main arc of the novel: Lauren’s reclamation of her identity.

112 A forthcoming article in Poetics Today (November, 2019: Vol. 40, No. 4) entitled "'Body Time': A Cognitive Perspective of Don DeLillo's The Body Artist" is based on this chapter of the thesis. 113 David Cowart, Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003), 202. 33

The Body Artist begins with the daily minutiae of a shared life. On the morning before his suicide, filmmaker Rey Robles eats breakfast with his young wife, Lauren Hartke: a body artist. In a meditation on intimacy and intersubjectivity, the novel depicts Lauren’s physical movement and sensation as seemingly imbued with her husband’s experienced reality:

Every time she had to bend and reach into the lower and remote parts of the refrigerator she let out a groan… She was too trim and limber to feel the strain and was only echoing Rey, identifyingly, groaning his groan, but in a manner so seamless and deep it was her discomfort too. (9)

This mimicry may seem insignificant: that couples may occasionally mimic each other is not revelatory. However, what is less often asked – and what The Body Artist forces us to question – is what deeper effects does this somatic contagion have? In what other ways are our experiences and perceptions shaped by the bodies around us? In short, what else do we catch from other people?

Operating in concert with The Body Artist’s thematic and diegetic exploration of physical mimicry is a subtler symmetry between characters: a synchronisation of their subjective time. As the novel progresses, an unconscious alignment of the protagonists’ sense of passing time occurs – a process which, I argue, structures both Lauren’s inner experiences and the thematic trajectory of the novel. A cognitively informed reading of The Body Artist foregrounds the novel’s poignant depiction of temporal synchronisation: an emergent property of interactions between motor empathy, embodied cognition and the neural oscillators of our ‘internal clock’. In The Body Artist, we see that it is not just the bends and groans that Lauren ‘catches’ from other people, but also, in a way, her sense of time.

The majority of the novel takes place after Lauren has become a widow, living in her dead husband’s house. After wandering aimlessly in this lonely space, unable to connect with the world around her, she finds a young – and perhaps mentally impaired – man living in an upstairs room. Yet increasingly Mr Tuttle, as she calls him, seems, rather than disabled, to be adrift: inhabiting a liminal space in time, sliding between subjectivities. Instead of following a fixed, chronological trajectory, he lives through moments of the past and future from the perspective of other people, seeming not to occupy his own space in time. He is never able to progress: his is a kind of time that is ‘simply and overwhelmingly there, laid out, unoccuring’ (77). Tuttle’s reality seems at first to be inconceivable, maybe even unreal; yet, eventually 34

Lauren herself begins to embody this marginal mode of temporality. A cognitive linguistic analysis (one ‘derived from work in cognitive science that sees thought as massively parallel, complex, and ambiguous, imbued with emotion, necessarily embodied, and deeply metaphorical’114) reveals that Lauren begins to experience the liminal position in time which Tuttle embodies. Viewing both Lauren’s speech and thought, as well as the more general narrative voice, through this cognitive linguistic lens highlights how verb tenses, grammatical moods, syntactic structures and conceptual metaphors come to reflect Tuttle’s indeterminate temporality. This linguistic and stylistic analysis is supported by more explicit diegetic machinations which reveal the gradual dissolution of Lauren’s division of past, present and future. As seen from her perspective, the events of her life become ‘softly unfixed’ (88) from their designated positions in linear chronology: like Tuttle’s, Lauren’s time seems to lose its ‘narrative quality’ (65). Rendered so receptive by her extreme grief, Lauren’s own sense of time begins to utterly dissolve into that of her strange guest.

In slowly adopting Tuttle’s sense of time, Lauren’s experience parallels discoveries within cognitive science, which show how ‘individuals adopt other people’s rhythms and incorporate other people’s time’.115 This hinges, neuroscientists theorise, on our mirror neuron system. In contrast to canonical neurons (our stock standard direct link between perception and action), we also have mirror neurons, which discharge both when we do something, and when we watch or even simply imagine something being done.116 James Kilner et al. explain that ‘imagining, observing or in any way preparing to perform an action excites the same motor programs used to execute that same action’.117 In particular, sensory mirror neurons fire during both the experience and observation of physical stimuli.118 However, our internal virtual simulation when we see someone else being massaged or stubbing their toe doesn’t mean that we literally feel these sensations. Rather, the dynamic

114 Crane, “Cognitive Historicism,” 16. 115 Droit-Volet and Gil, “The Time–Emotion Paradox,” 1948. 116 Decety and Ickes, The Social Neuroscience of Empathy, 24. 117 James Kilner, Yves Paulignan, and Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, “An Interference Effect of Observed Biological Movement on Action,” Current Biology 13, no. 6 (2003): 522; James Kilner and Chris Frith, “A Possible Role for Primary Motor Cortex during Action Observation,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 104, no. 21 (2007): 8683, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0702937104. 118 Vilayanur Ramachandran, The Tell-Tale Brain: Unlocking the Mystery of Human Nature (New York: Random House, 2012), 125. 35

interplay of inhibitory mechanisms and mirror neurons allows us to experience a measure of shared physical sensation with others.

Mirror resonance can encompass many aspects of physical movement and stimuli, and this scope is accurately represented in The Body Artist through Lauren’s subtle mimicry of Mr Tuttle’s expressions, movement and voice. This has been observed in a number of cognitive studies. Electromyography has revealed that people’s facial expressions tend to reflect ‘the most subtle of moment-to-moment changes’ in the emotional expressions of those they observe.119 According to Joseph Capella and Sally Planalp, ‘people have been shown to mimic and synchronise vocal utterances’.120 Similarly, Frank Berneiri et al. found that individuals will synchronise body posture and movements.121 Sometimes – as in the above example of Lauren’s empathetic mimicry of Rey – this ‘slips out’ and we visibly mimic the behaviour of others; other times, the motor mimicry is so swift and subtle that it ‘produces no observable change’.122 This capacity of our body to simulate, ‘catch’ or otherwise experience the physical and mental state of another – with a degree of genuine equivalence between ourselves and the observed other – offers an insight into our nature as social beings. Intersubjective synchrony deepens a feeling of connection. According to Michael Hove and Jane Risen’s article ‘It’s All in the Timing’, syncing up through mimicry of others creates a unique affiliation.123 It is a principal part of the psychophysiological matrix which allows us to gain a glimpse of subjectivities outside of our own.

This intersubjectivity is also influential in our experience of time, because movement and posture are both influential factors in modulating subjective time. As Daniele Di Lernia et al. explain, stimuli and feedback from the body create our bodily perception, and the way in

119 Elaine Hatfield, John T. Cacioppo, and Richard L. Rapson, Emotional Contagion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 97; Barbara Wild, Michael Erb, and Wolfgang Grodd, “Why Are Smiles Contagious? An FMRI Study of the Interaction between Perception of Facial Affect and Facial Movements,” Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging 123, no. 1 (2003): 17–36; Lars-Olov Lundqvist and Ulf Dimberg, “Facial Expressions Are Contagious,” Journal of Psychophysiology 9, no. 1 (1995): 203–11. 120 Joseph Cappella and Sally Planalp, “Talk and Silence Sequences in Informal Conversations,” Human Communication Research 7 (1981): 117. 121 Frank Bernieri et al., “Interactional Synchrony and the Social Affordance of Rapport,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 20, no. 3 (1994): 303–11. 122 Hatfield, Cacioppo, and Rapson, Emotional Contagion, 97; Lundqvist and Dimberg, “Facial Expressions Are Contagious,” 203. 123 Michael Hove and Jane Risen, “It’s All in the Timing: Interpersonal Synchrony Increases Affiliation,” Social Cognition 27, no. 6 (2009): 949–60, https://doi.org/10.1521/soco.2009.27.6.949. 36

which these perceptions unfold defines our awareness of passing time.124 In particular, according to cognitive scientists Nicholas Hanson and Janet Buckworth, subjective time can be altered by ‘physiological disturbances, such as varying heart and respiration rates’.125 Even just holding a tense or active position may cause an individual’s ‘internal clock’ to speed up, while conversely a still or relaxed position may cause it to slow down. From this premise, the syllogism underpinning our tendency to ‘catch time’ from other people is starting to emerge: our bodies synchronise with the posture and movement of other people; our posture and movement affect our experience of time; therefore, our experience of time is affected by other people. As research by Droit-Volet, Gil, Nather et al. suggests, ‘time changes with the embodiment of another’s posture’ and movement.126

These studies point towards a neuropsychological correlate for the experience of intersubjective temporality. Although this research broaches new ground in terms of the substrates of a synchronisation of time, this phenomenon has been pointed out by other researchers: for example, psychologist Thomas Fuchs discusses the synchrony of everyday life:

The everyday contact with others already implies a continuous fine tuning of emotional and bodily communication, an exchange of ‘vibrations’, or a ‘resonance’. In English, this is also pointed out by the expression ‘to be in synch’. … a basic feeling of being in accord with the time of the others, and to live with them in the same, intersubjective time.127

Fuchs’ words are congruent with more general folk intuitions about instances of being ‘in tune’ with another person. Furthermore, our resonance systems are so finely tuned that they can be stimulated by more than just face-to-face interaction. In a 2011 study by Nather et al. it was found that after viewing photographs of dynamic body postures (implying movement, such as mid-jump), participants’ perception of time slowed, illustrating that our resonance

124 Daniele Di Lernia et al., “Feel the Time. Time Perception as a Function of Interoceptive Processing,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 12 (2018): 1–17, https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2018.00074. 125 Nicholas Hanson and Janet Buckworth, “Sex Differences in Time Perception during Self-Paced Running,” International Journal of Exercise Science 9, no. 4 (2016): 514. 126 Nather et al., “Time Changes with the Embodiment of Another’s Body Posture.” 127 Thomas Fuchs, “Melancholia as a Desynchronization: Towards a Psychopathology of Interpersonal Time,” Psychopathology 34 (2001): 181. 37

mechanisms can be stimulated by a wide range of things in our environment.128 Notably, in Nather’s study, the participants’ embodiment occurs in alignment with the body postures perceived in another person – in this case, merely seen in a photograph of a person. This is significant in the context of my interpretation of The Body Artist, as it circumvents problematic questions about Mr Tuttle’s dubious ontology: whether or not he is truly a real person, he is certainly real in Lauren’s perception, and it is this perception that she embodies and synchronises with.

Such a statement, involving as it does the ‘blending of literary analysis with real-mind discourses’,129 is controversial. Hesitant to examine the resonances between literary discourse and real-life experience, Joseph Dewey explicitly argues for treating The Body Artist as an entity apart from life, declaring the novel as a caution ‘that the aesthetic artifact, inspected too closely, will inevitably, necessarily crack, will reveal its artificiality’.130 Yet the complete separation of literature from its referent is also inadvisable. As anthropologist Stewart Guthrie argues, attributing all literary phenomena to ‘“invent[ion]” or “calculated” metaphor or analogy and thus different from perception… can place unnecessary limitations on our understanding of literature and the reflections it offers on human cognition’. He goes on to explain, ‘this objection draws too great a distinction between perception and representation. Perception and representation interact as a partially closed loop… Artists may deliberately elaborate and use it, but first they experience it’.131 In the context of the following chapter, this suggests that DeLillo’s self-conscious experimentation with the theme of subjective time may still have stemmed from an unconscious, experiential source. In this use of the term, rather than in the Freudian sense, the unconscious denotes the ‘internal qualities of mind that affect conscious thought and behaviour, without being conscious themselves’.132 Unconscious processes – for example, temporal synchronisation – occur beneath our perception, yet help to structure our experience of ourselves and the world around us. Unfortunately, such processes are obviously not conducive to self-report methods of investigation: as Vermeule describes, ‘It isn’t just that consciousness is a poor and uncertain

128 Fuchs, 196. 129 Makela, “Cycles of Narrative Necessity: Suspect Tellers and the Textuality of Fictional Minds,” 129. 130 Joseph Dewey, Beyond Grief and Nothing: A Reading of Don DeLillo (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006), 132. 131 Stewart Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 47. 132 Ran R. Hassin, James S. Uleman, and John A. Bargh, The New Unconscious, 3. 38

guide to the automatic brain – it is rather that consciousness has little actual contact with nonconscious brain processes’.133 Yet neither can fMRI scanning and similar technologies access the phenomenological experience of a consciousness structured by these processes, thus making scientific investigation challenging. Literature addresses such an explanatory gap, providing a medium which can reflect and represent the phenomenological experience of a reality framed by these unconscious processes, without requiring the subject’s conscious awareness of their existence.

However, there is still a dearth of explorations of the neural unconscious in literature. This absence is particularly highlighted in Benjamin Bird’s ‘Models of Consciousness in the Novels of Don DeLillo’.134 Despite its insight, Bird sidesteps the question of unconscious cognitive processes in writing: when he refers to ‘the hidden capacities of mind’,135 he is speaking of only the ones that DeLillo explicitly explores: not the ones that may be hidden from DeLillo himself. Similarly, in his discussion of another of DeLillo’s novels, Ratner’s Star, Stephen J. Burn’s article ‘Neuroscience and Modern Fiction’ discusses only how DeLillo explicitly and intentionally ‘drew on’ scientific understandings of neurology.136 Although both Burn and Bird insightfully unveil the explicit engagement in DeLillo’s novels with neuro-concepts, discussions of only explicitly conscious cognition cannot account for the full concatenation of mental and neural processes that shape a text. As Palmer points out, ‘fictional narrative is, in essence, the presentation of mental functioning’,137 therefore providing a fertile site of investigation of all forms of mental functioning, whether visible to individual consciousness or not.

In her work Why Do We Care About Literary Characters? Vermeule discusses ‘a belief widely held by writers of fiction, namely, that their characters lead lives quite independent of them’,138 echoing DeLillo’s own words in an interview by Adam Begley as he spoke of his

133 Vermeule, “The New Unconscious: A Literary Guided Tour,” 469. 134 Benjamin Bird, “Models of Consciousness in the Novels of Don DeLillo” (Ph.D., University of Leeds, 2005), http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/163/1/uk_bl_ethos_422045.pdf. 135 Bird, 291. 136 Stephen J. Burn, “Neuroscience and Modern Fiction,” Modern Fiction Studies 61, no. 2 (2015): 210, https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2015.0018. 137 Palmer, “‘Listen to the Stories!’ Narrative, Cognition and Country-and-Western Music,” 136. 138 Vermeule, Why Do We Care about Literary Characters?, 65. 39

characters possessing ‘a life independent of my own will’.139 Since a wide array of both conscious and unconscious processes are involved in writing, this complicates the notion of authorial agency. Currie speculates that ‘we find a sensibly naturalistic explanation in terms of simulation. Assuming, plausibly, that thinking up fictional stories is an imaginative project just as reading them is, we can think of writers as engaged in simulations which are only very imperfectly under conscious control’.140 DeLillo himself likens the act of writing to an almost a passive act of transmission: ‘you want to let go. You want to lose yourself in language, become a carrier or messenger’.141 The Body Artist in fact metafictionally reflects on this complex engagement between authors and characters: ‘Or you become someone else, one of the people in the story, doing a dialogue of your own devising… Living between the lines, doing another version of the story’. (20) Within this ‘imperfectly’ controlled act of creation, the processes of reflection, simulation and intuition work together with the deliberate navigation of various aesthetic or thematic drives, opening a space in which authors may access aspects of their experience or awareness that are difficult to reach consciously. It is this position on authorial agency that underpins my exploration of this aspect of the unconscious in literary representations – a venture which is new, even within cognitive literary criticism.

Yet despite the singularity of my specific arguments about the novel and about temporal synchronisation in literature, my approach to this novel has been informed by the extensive work already accomplished within cognitive literary criticism, particularly within second generation cognitive literary studies. In the words of Karin Kukkonen and Marco Caracciolo, ‘second-generation’ refers to a specific strand in contemporary cognitive science, one foregrounding the embodiment of mental processes and their extension into the world through material artifacts and socio-cultural practices’.142 As well as the embodiment thematised so strongly in DeLillo’s novel, The Body Artist explores the mind as distributed and porous: subjectivity as constructed not only within but outside of the ‘parameters’ (67) of the body/brain. This preoccupation places the novel in dialogue with claims that researchers

139 Don DeLillo, Don DeLillo, The Art of Fiction, interview by Adam Begley, Fall 1993, http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1887/the-art-of-fiction-no-135-don-delillo. 140 Davies and Stone, Mental Simulation, 163. 141 DeLillo, Don DeLillo, The Art of Fiction. 142 Karin Kukkonen and Marco Caracciolo, “Introduction: What Is the ‘Second Generation?,’” Style 48, no. 3 (2014): 261. 40

of the mind should investigate ‘temporary, soft-assembled wholes’143 that mesh the processes of the brain and nervous system with the body and physical environment. In this vein, The Body Artist shows that mental processes – such as temporal perception – are best elucidated when we consider not only the protagonist’s mind, but a ‘soft-assembled whole’ which includes (though is not limited to) the characters surrounding her. As she struggles to find herself after the loss of her husband, Lauren’s identity develops in dialogue with her physical body and those of people in her surroundings. The title of this chapter is from the novel itself: at the end of Tuttle’s stay, Lauren produces a performance, in which she embodies a number of people – an old Japanese woman, a business man, even her enigmatic guest, Mr Tuttle. She calls this collage of subjectivities ‘Body Time’ – a phrase which resonates with the premise of my critical approach, a juncture of the three aspects of temporal synchronisation: our bodies, the bodies of others, and time.

1.1 Criticism surrounding the novel

DeLillo’s works are most often analysed with the instruments of socio-political criticism – indeed, his novels largely orbit around the symptoms of modernity: consumerism, capitalism, technology, and their effects on the postmodern subject. Frank Lentricchia, a seminal critic of DeLillo, characterizes DeLillo’s work as ‘a kind of anatomy, an effort to represent their culture in its totality’,144 while Elise Martucci describes his corpus as ‘a synthesis of consumer culture, technology, and natural landscape’.145 One of DeLillo’s less read works, many critics see The Body Artist as a departure, a ‘stark contrast’146 from his broader oeuvre. Rather than the sweeping, frantic cultural dissections characterising such works such as White Noise and Underworld, The Body Artist is introspective, preoccupied with, as Cornel Bonca writes, ‘the phenomenological textures of time – that is, how it feels, moment by moment’.147 Subsequently, the socio-political readings typical of DeLillo criticism (taken up by, for

143 Kiverstein, Farina, and Clark, “The Extended Mind Thesis,” 2. 144 Frank Lentricchia, Introducing Don DeLillo (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 2. 145 Elise Martucci, The Environmental Unconscious in the Fiction of Don DeLillo (New York: Routledge, 2012), 2. 146 Anne Longmuir, “Performing the Body in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist,” Modern Fiction Studies 53, no. 3 (2007): 528. 147 Cornel Bonca, “Being, Time, and Death in DeLillo’s ‘The Body Artist,’” Pacific Coast Philology 37 (2002): 60. 41 example, by Tom LeClair, John Duvall, and Lentricchia – approaches which a number of critics, such as Anne Longmuir, have applied to The Body Artist as well148) are not enough to get to the heart of the novel’s treatment of time and consciousness.

While I will not engage with the cultural reflexes that DeLillo’s work exposes, my approach does not attempt to undercut these modes of criticism. Nor is a cognitive approach antithetical to socio-political investigations. Rather than attempting to impose a scientific metanarrative about universal human behaviour onto the novel, I see cognitive literary criticism as imbuing biological insights with a cultural-historical specificity. As Crane explains, ‘the brain is altered and shaped by its environment… It is the interaction of human brains with historically specific circumstances that produces literary and cultural artifacts’.149 Temporal synchronisation, as a corollary of the empathetic response, exists on a spectrum, and its experience and expression is controlled by many different factors.150 The Body Artist is not evidence of a uniform process of temporal synchronisation within human relationships. Instead it observes how this mechanism can express itself within 21st Century America, within the life of a young woman, within grief, and – of course – within literature.151

148 Longmuir, “Performing the Body in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist.” 149 Crane, “Cognitive Historicism,” 15. 150 Simon Baron-Cohen, Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty (London: Penguin UK, 2011). 151 Several aspects of this particular scenario may influence the empathetic connection and shifts in subjective time that Lauren experiences. For example, studies of ontogenetic development and empathy reveal that young people are more likely to experience a ‘direct internal simulation of another’s state’. (Jean Decety and Margarita Svetlova, “Putting Together Phylogenetic and Ontogenetic Perspectives on Empathy,” Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience 2, no. 1 (January 2012): 20, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2011.05.003.) In terms of cultural factors, we know that ‘culture modulates brain activity during empathy’ (Moritz de Greck et al., “Culture Modulates Brain Activity during Empathy with Anger,” NeuroImage 59, no. 3 (2012): 2871–82, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.09.052.), and in particular recent studies have revealed that Western cultures place a comparatively significant emphasis on ‘empathic concern’, which would lead, presumably, to increased instances of motor resonance. (Tracy G. Cassels and et al, “The Role of Culture in Affective Empathy: Cultural & Biocultural Differences,” Journal of Cognition and Culture 10, no. 1 (2010): 309–26.) This has perhaps been influenced by the social changes wrought in the age of technology: several commentators have suggested the possibility of communications technology increasing and expanding the scope of empathy within Western culture. For example, see: Jeremy Rifkin, The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis (Los Angeles: Penguin Putnam Inc, 2010), 451. Also: PJ Manney, “Empathy in the Time of Technology: How Storytelling Is the Key to Empathy,” Journal of Evolution & Technology 19, no. 1 (2008): 51–61.). On an individual level, as well as situational context, personal experiences pay a role in the experience of empathetic identification. See: Alison Landsberg, “Memory, Empathy, and the Politics of Identification,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 22, no. 2 (2009): 221–29; Janelle Beadle et al., “Empathy in Hippocampal Amnesia,” Frontiers in Psychology 4 (2013): 69, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00069; William Ickes, “Empathic Accuracy,” in The Social Neuroscience of Empathy, ed. Jean Decety and William Ickes (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 57–71. 42

The novel ruminates explicitly and insistently on the nature of subjectivity, language and time, on the ‘limits of the human’ (24), probing the parameters of what we assume to be our enclosed selves and individual realities. According to Philip Nel, the novel displays a preoccupation with ‘translating consciousness into words, and with rendering sensory and visual experience’.152 It limns our corporeal, sensory perceptions; liminal states of consciousness; the time-frames in which we exist (‘clock time, body time, mental time’153) and the borders between ourselves and others. Such a preoccupation with both consciousness and subjective time seems to invite a cognitively framed reading. Yet, notwithstanding Benjamin Bird’s 2005 thesis – which brings a philosophy of mind perspective to bear on DeLillo’s corpus – researchers have been reluctant to attempt one.

Critical commentary on the novel’s philosophy of time often examines the contrapuntal motifs of clock time versus subjective time. The novel does explicitly explores this tension, from the titular allusion to Kafka’s Hunger Artist (whose cage was furnished only with a clock) to the first lines of the novel, ‘time seems to pass’ (7), which riffs on, as Cowart points out, Woolf’s title of the middle section of To The Lighthouse: ‘Time Passes’.154 However as my analysis has suggested, I believe The Body Artist also reveals some subtler nuances of time: the intersubjectivity of temporal experience. While some critics have commented on ‘the embodied protocols of shared space and shared time’,155 such as Boxall’s recent article on DeLillo’s later fiction, these aspects of shared subjectivity are not approached through a cognitive lens. Though a number of others have briefly alluded to the transference between Lauren’s and Tuttle’s subjective experience of time within their broader discussions of the

Furthermore, gender seems to play a role in the experience and expression of empathy. A number of studies have concluded that women are more likely to empathetically embody others (See Claudia Strauss, “Is Empathy Gendered and, If so, Why? An Approach from Feminist Psychological Anthropology,” Ethos 32, no. 4 (2004): 432–57.) which seems to both fulfil and perpetuating cultural assumptions about gender and empathy. These factors could all be said to have influenced Lauren’s pervasive and deep experience of empathy - or, perhaps more accurately, could have influenced DeLillo’s intuitive representation of the empathetic response of a young woman in a technologically advanced Western culture in the 21st century. I am wary that the Western perspective ‘has occupied the default position of the universal’, (Keen, “Human Rights Discourse and Universals of Cognition and Emotion,” 351.) a limitation I address in my following chapters. 152 Philip Nel, “Don DeLillo’s Return to Form: The Modernist Poetics of ‘The Body Artist,’” Contemporary Literature 43, no. 4 (2002): 738, https://doi.org/10.2307/1209040. 153 Cowart, Don DeLillo, 209. 154 Cowart, 203. 155 Peter Boxall, “A Leap Out of Our Biology: History, Tautology, and Biomatter in Don DeLillo’s Later Fiction,” Contemporary Literature 58, no. 4 (2017): 527. 43

novel, largely they have not deemed this temporal coordination worthy of critical analysis per se. Bird briefly notes that Tuttle ‘has also succeeded in transmitting to her his ability to experience the unity of past and present time’,156 yet he does not expound this process of ‘transmission’. Cowart links the temporal transferral to artistic inspiration: Tuttle’s presence has ‘plunged [Lauren] into temporal enigma… ripe for revelation’.157 Such a view is echoed by Duvall, who notes that ‘Mr Tuttle’s… time-lapsed condition eventually begin[s] to affect Lauren’s state of mind,’ a process through which Lauren is ‘inspired’.158 Presumably these critics attribute this process to artistic licence, rather than a plausible cognitive phenomenon worthy of examination in its own right.

A second explanation for treating the novel’s depiction of temporal synchronisation as merely a fictional device is that Mr Tuttle’s ontology is the site of much speculation. Some believe he is a ‘ghostly other’159; an inspirational muse160; ‘possibly autistic’161; a ‘projection of the woman’s grief’162; or the foreign body of traumatic memory.163 I do not need to speculate on this here – indeed, I feel there is no absolute answer to this problem. However, it is true that Lauren encounters him as a real person, with a real body. She feeds him (94), teaches him (60), bathes him (68), cleans up his ‘shit’ (64), and even caresses him as a lover (90). For Lauren, they are ‘two bodies in a room’ (85), and therefore it is coherent to consider theirs a relationship, at least from her perspective, between two people. A third, and perhaps most significant reason for the lack of critical attention to this aspect of the novel is that only within the last few years has neuroscience uncovered the link between empathetic embodiment and a synchronisation of time, and within collective consciousness it remains

156 Bird, “Models of Consciousness in the Novels of Don DeLillo,” 304. 157 Cowart, Don DeLillo, 204. 158 John N. Duvall, The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 147. 159 Jaeeun Yoo, “Ghost Novels: Haunting as Form in the Works of Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Michael Ondaatje, and J.M. Coetzee” (Ph.D., University of New Jersey, 2009), 67. 160 Cowart, Don DeLillo; Duvall, The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo; Mark Osteen, “Echo Chamber: Undertaking ‘The Body Artist,’” Studies in the Novel 37, no. 1 (2005): 64–81. 161 Christian Moraru, Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 291. 162 Boxall, “A Leap Out of Our Biology,” 526. 163 Laura Di Prete, “Don DeLillo’s ‘The Body Artist’: Performing the Body, Narrating Trauma,” Contemporary Literature 46, no. 3 (2005): 483–510. 44

arcane knowledge. Yet it is precisely this lag between new cognitive discoveries and their incorporation into cognitive literary criticism that offers such a fertile site of investigation.

As a result of these three reasons, and perhaps others, The Body Artist’s quiet reverie on relationships and consciousness has often been interpreted through a socio-political framework. Mark Osteen divines themes of privacy and identity.164 Anne Longmuir convincingly identifies a rejection of the body’s subjugation to a larger capitalist system, taking a Foucauldian frame to the power relations in the novel.165 Bird sees the novel’s trajectory as articulating the possibility of a ‘root identity’, a quest which is driven ‘by a desire to escape culture’.166 Although important, these forms of critical machinery cannot account for the deeper narrative of time and embodied minds that The Body Artist also weaves. An analysis informed by a cognitive scientific understanding of subjective time helps us understand this narrative and its insights into human experience. Appreciating the resonance between Lauren’s shifting subjective time and the cognitive process of temporal synchronisation deepens our understanding of the novel’s thematic trajectory. It offers a new reading of Lauren’s journey through her emotional and existential struggles by positioning temporal synchronisation as the motivating force behind her character trajectory. In doing so, the current chapter offers a new critical framework with which to understand a range of narrative phenomena, both in this novel and others, revealing them as motivated by a common element: subjective time.

Part 2: Analysis of time in The Body Artist

Exploration of temporal synchronisation in The Body Artist must begin with Lauren’s enigmatic guest, Mr Tuttle. Tuttle seems to live in another state: instead of following a fixed, chronological trajectory, he lives through moments of the past and future from the perspective of other people, seeming not to occupy his own place in time: ‘… he drifts from one reality to another, independent of the logic of time’ (91). Tuttle’s liminal temporality is further figured synecdochally in descriptions of his movement and position in space: his ‘thinness of physical address’, ‘curious’ motion (45), alternating between ‘uneasy’ movements and immobility (67). The connection between Tuttle’s physicality and his

164 Osteen, “Echo Chamber.” 165 Longmuir, “Performing the Body in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist,” 533. 166 Bird, “Models of Consciousness in the Novels of Don DeLillo,” 5. 45

experience of time is symbolically alluded to, his movements ‘a mechanical wag, a tick and a tock’ (47), like the hands of a clock. Such a yoking of time and motion foreshadows the role of motor mimicry in altering experienced subjective time. The rambling ‘Heideggerian poetry’167 of Tuttle’s language linguistically reveals the shifting uncertainty of his temporality, rhythmically oscillating between grammatical tenses and aspects: ‘from the moment I am gone, am left, am leaving’ (74). This lingual promiscuity occurs, the novel suggests, at the place where ‘language intersects with our perceptions of time and space’ (99). Mr Tuttle ‘is a stranger at this crossing, without words or bearings’ (99). In describing Tuttle’s liminality in terms of syntactic categories, DeLillo explicitly signals the interdependence of language and time: ‘There was something at the edge, unconnected to income levels or verb tenses’ (50); ‘the spaces where his chaos lurks, in all the soft-cornered rooms and unraveling verbs, the parts of speech where he is meant to locate his existence’ (100). Tuttle is, in this way, alike to Kurt Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim, who is similarly ‘unstuck in time’.168 In this state, Billy, like Tuttle, seems to lack a certain crucial aspect of his identity: it is important to our sense of selves that we are beings persisting through time and space. Billy, like Tuttle, slips in and out of moments, ‘unable to distinguish temporal relations among them so that he might understand why one follows another. His experience is haphazard, disconnected, and thin on significance for his development as an individual’.169 Similarly, rather than mapping his experience onto a standardised chronology, Tuttle ‘slides’ (83) into people’s time, able to find a temporal stability only through the physical embodiment of others, reliving moments in their past and future. Here we can see that Tuttle’s very existence in the novel intimates the possibility of a shared experience of subjective time. This virtual, vicarious life is prefigured by the novel’s representation of technology – in particular, before Tuttle’s arrival, Lauren begins to watch satellite camera view of a stretch of highway in a Nordic city called Kotka:

She spent hours at the computer screen looking at a live-streaming video feed from the edge of a two-lane road in a city in Finland. It was the middle of the night in Kotka, in Finland, and she watched the screen. It was interesting to her because it was

167 Duvall, The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo, 147. 168 Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (New York: Octopus Books Inc, 1980), 16, 18, etc. 169 Martin Coleman, “The Meaninglessness of Coming Unstuck in Time,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society: A Quarterly Journal in American Philosophy 44, no. 4 (2008): 685. 46

happening now, as she sat here… Kotka was another world but she could see it in its realness, in its hours, minutes and seconds. (38)

This virtual experience presages the bodily sharing of time that is to come. As Cowart explains, ‘electronic technology allows viewers in one time zone to share another time zone’s present’.170 In this way, this moment between Lauren and the Finnish highway offers a kind of technological analogue of temporal synchronisation, where two subjectivities are able to converge in their experience of the present.

This is what begins to happen between Lauren and Tuttle.171 While many critics have noted that Tuttle’s presence induces Lauren to explicitly question her understanding of time, a cognitively informed analysis reveals there is more than this going on: rather, Lauren actually begins to embody Tuttle’s liminal temporality herself. As it occurs in the narrative, the temporal transference, and its subsequent impact on Lauren’s mental state, is more dramatic than would be expected in daily life. As I will refer to later in the chapter, Tuttle’s mysterious temporal experience is almost otherworldly: as Lauren says, he ‘violates the limits of the human’ (100). Additionally, as a result of Lauren’s extreme grief and isolation after the loss of her husband, her and Tuttle’s brief relationship is more intense, and complex, than would ordinarily be found in day to day life. In his presence, she ‘find[s] herself moved in an unusual way’ (54). She spends all her time either with him, thinking about him or listening to his voice on her recorder. She feels responsible for his wellbeing, but also in some ways he provides a surrogate intimacy, replacing her relationship with her husband. Tuttle’s role in Lauren’s life oscillates between child, lover, ghost, confidant and muse. When her temporal phenomenology begins to synchronise with his, it is not the subtle adjustment customary in everyday life, but a radical shift into a time seemingly outside of standard chronology.

170 Cowart, Don DeLillo, 208. 171 There is a legitimate question as to why Lauren’s sense of time begins to align with Tuttle’s, rather than the other way around. Perhaps an answer could be due to Tuttle’s mysterious ontology - he does not seem to be a neurotypical human, at the very least. Lauren senses how abnormally unengaged he is in their interactions: ‘Why do you think it is that I’m standing closer to you than you are to me?’ (85) Or perhaps an argument could be made that Tuttle’s experience of time is, in fact, influenced by Lauren: however, within the space of this chapter, I was not able to investigate this. 47

2.1 Lauren’s motor resonance

Lauren’s syncing with Mr Tuttle begins in the novel – as it does in our own bodies – with motor resonance. As previously explored, the synchronisation of subjective time often results from motor empathy, a physical and involuntary embodiment of the movements, posture, expression and vocalizations of another person. This phenomenon plays a deep role in The Body Artist, with somatic resonance and mimicry operating as central motifs. Lauren herself is extremely susceptible to this phenomenon: in the early pages, illustrated by the above excerpt, she embodies her husband’s ‘discomfort’. She tends to ‘insert herself’ into the stories of the newspaper, reflexively reflecting the role of the reader as she finds herself ‘living between the lines’ (14). As Justin Vicari comments, she ‘identif[ies] with others to the point of mimicry and extension’.172 Lauren experiences an ineffable moment of intimacy with the blue jay, a ‘skilled mimic’ (22), foreshadowing her connection with the enigmatic Mr Tuttle which develops later in the novel. Indeed, Mr Tuttle himself is almost a hyperbolic embodiment of this human tendency to mimic others. He seems to lack an identity (64), being ‘unable to make himself up’ (90), instead adopting the voices, expressions and mannerisms of others:

It wasn’t outright impersonation but she heard elements of her voice, the clipped delivery, the slight buzz deep in the throat, her pitch, her sound, and how difficult at first, unearthly almost, to detect her own voice coming from someone else, from him, and then how deeply disturbing. She wasn’t sure it was her voice. Then she was. By this time he wasn’t talking about chairs, lamps, or patterns in the carpet. He seemed to be assuming her part in a conversation with someone. (50)

More subtly, after cohabiting for a number of weeks, Lauren begins to exhibit a reciprocal mirroring. While less explicit, she comes in turn to synchronise with Tuttle’s ‘curious’ (107) mode of movement. Tuttle’s postures and gestures, when he is not mimicking others, are characterised by an eerie stillness. Lauren often finds him seemingly frozen in space:

He was sitting in the tub when she opened the door. He did not move his head or in any way acknowledge. She stood there looking. He had soap in one hand and a

172 Justin Vicari, Marks of Toil: Work and Disfigurement in Literature, Film and Philosophy (Jefferson: McFarland, 2014), 99. 48

washcloth in the other. He remained in this position, hands poised, and she watched him. He did not move. He did not look at her or acknowledge by other means. (67)

Lauren, similarly, begins to echo this unnatural stillness: ‘When she called again and Mariella answered, she put down the phone, softly, and stood completely still’ (71); ‘At night she stood outside his room and watched him sleep. She stayed for an hour’ (71); ‘She waited inside with a book in her hands, a prop, sitting and thinking, not thinking’ (78). As her movements begin to imitate Mr Tuttle’s, the symbolism used to describe their movements converges. In her body work exercises, Lauren conceptualises her movements as mechanical rather than organic: ‘the body levered by the arm and the head cranking incrementally’ (73), echoing her previous description of Tuttle’s movement as ‘a mechanical wag, a tick and a tock, like the first toy ever built with moving parts’ (47). Furthermore, where Tuttle’s movements are like ‘a tick and a tock’, Lauren’s movements during her body work exercises are likened to the movements of ‘the second hand on the missing watch’ (73). This symbolism not only suggests motor mimicry, but again points to a figurative yoking of physical movement with time.

Lauren adopts Tuttle’s elliptical echolalia (81) and later, his voice itself, as she imitates him. Just as Tuttle seemingly acts as a human tape recorder, recording and replaying the dialogue of others, Lauren’s tape-recorder symbolizes a prosthetic instrument of imitation: she carries it everywhere, recording and then playing the tapes compulsively (63). Later, she herself becomes the tape-recorder, the mimic, as she begins to imitate Tuttle’s voice, reproducing his voice unnervingly accurately:

At first the voice she used on the telephone was nobody’s, a generic neutered human, but then she started using his. It was his voice, a dry piping sound, hollow-bodied, like a bird humming on her tongue (101).

During the last weeks of his stay, Tuttle’s language is no longer animated by mimicry, and he reverts back to his own uninflected, flat mode of speech, in which ‘there were no grades of emphasis here and flatness there… [She] couldn’t locate rhythmic intervals or time cues or even the mutters and hums that pace a remark’ (66). This dysphoria transfers itself to Lauren, whose ‘days become toneless and droning’ (95, my italics). Her imitation is also aesthetically manifested: she transforms herself, bleaching, cutting her hair, stripping herself of culture and vanity, becoming as blank, as spectral as Mr Tuttle himself: 49

She wax-stripped hair from her armpits and legs. It came ripping off in cold sizzles. She had an acid exfoliating cream, hard-core, prescribed… She had a fade cream she applied just about everywhere, to depigment herself… to disappear from all her former venues of aspect and bearing and to become a blankness (84).

Lauren is striving to become ‘someone who is classically unseen, the person you are trained to look through, bled of familiar effect, a spook in the night static of every public toilet’ (84), just as Tuttle is ‘of the spectral sort’ (86), ‘someone you technically see but don’t quite register’ (95), ‘like a man anonymous to himself’ (95). Both Lauren and Tuttle now share his ‘thinness of physical address’ (45). In the final pages, during her performance as a contortionist Lauren comes to explicitly embody Mr Tuttle, ‘taking on his aspect’.173 As described by the reporter that comes to watch the show, Lauren reproduces Tuttle’s uneasy movement through space, ‘as if the air had bends and warps’ (45), his shifts into ‘another kind of reality’ (64), and his ‘unadjusted words’ (65):

The last of her bodies, the naked man, is stripped of recognizable language and culture. He moves in a curious manner, as if in a dark room, only more slowly and gesturally. He wants to tell us something. His voice is audible, intermittently, on tape, and Hartke [Lauren] lip-syncs the words… His words amount to a monologue without a context. Verbs and pronouns scatter in the air and then something startling happens… It is a seizure that apparently flies the man out of one reality and into another. (107-108)

Through this embodiment of Mr Tuttle, Lauren feels a resonance of his subjective experience: in taking on his movements, posture, and voice, she is closer to understanding his experience, to metaphorically ‘see[ing] things through his eyes, … whatever might warrant his regard that you have forgotten to see’ (64). As I discuss below, this new perspective, though disorienting, becomes important in guiding Lauren through her personal crises after her husband’s death.

Lauren’s embodiment of others, and particularly Mr Tuttle, has been explained in different ways. Justin Vicari identifies it as an escapist defence mechanism against her own grief, ‘her intuitive imitations breaking into fractals as she seems to want to escape her own life

173 Longmuir, “Performing the Body in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist,” 531. 50 more’.174 Laura Di Prete sees this ‘interconnectedness as the consequence of traumatic experience’.175 In general, critical commentary has characterised the process as aberrant – arising from ‘the mute shock of bereavement’176 – and furthermore has not engaged with the possibility of a neurophysiological correlate of this other-embodiment. I believe these trends partially negate the novel’s commentary on motor empathy and embodiment within our own lives. While the process is certainly amplified by Lauren’s grief, interpreting it solely through her tragedy eschews its relevance to daily human relationships and our nature as social beings. As Lauren herself reflects, at the end of the novel, after she has come through her journey,

How simple it would be if I could say this is a piece that comes directly out of what happened to Rey. But I can’t. Be nice if I could say this is the drama of men and women versus death. I want to say that but I can’t. It’s too small and secluded and complicated. (109)

The novel’s insights on intersubjectivity should not be restricted to the domain of trauma, or even of literature: the truths that The Body Artist reveals about bodies, minds and time are part of the small, complicated reality of our everyday.

2.2 Lauren’s shifting sense of time

Lauren’s empathetic motor resonance with Mr Tuttle leads her closer to a subtle alignment with his temporal mode: as she progressively embodies Mr Tuttle’s movements, speech and appearance, she begins also to embody his liminal space in time. I argue that this is a neurophysiologically accurate portrayal of what can happen when two people spend time together – the change in feedback of proprioceptive and kinaesthetic information as a result of motor mimicry has a flow on effect on our sense of passing time.

174 Vicari, Marks of Toil, 99. 175 Prete, “Don DeLillo’s ‘The Body Artist,’” 483. 176 Nel, “Don DeLillo’s Return to Form,” 755. 51

In DeLillo’s novella, the changing texture of Lauren’s subjective time shows itself through the narrative style. Here, the formal patterning or ‘sculpt[ed]’177 nature of literary discourse means that experiences of temporality can be expressed through extra-lexical channels of meaning; literary discourse can sometimes offer more linguistic evidence of temporal synchronisation than everyday speech. As Vermeule suggested, we must catch by ‘slant’ the evidence of the changing nature of Lauren’s subjective time. For example through the use of tense and aspect in Lauren’s dialogue. At first she corrects Mr Tuttle’s mixed tenses, trying to solidify his grasp on time: ‘It did not rain. It will rain’ (45); ‘He said, “But you did not leave”. She looked at him. “I will leave. In a few weeks”’ (49). However, twenty pages later she is exhibiting the same mid-sentence mixing: ‘You know him where he was’ (66). This grammatical flux becomes a frequent element of her communication: ‘How could [past] you be living [present progressive] here without my knowing?’ (69); ‘But before [adjective of time, past], I hear [present] a noise and you are [present] in a room upstairs’ (81); ‘This is (present) when you, yes, you said (past)’ (81). This is no casual accident but a deliberate renegotiating of the boundaries between time and language, as Cowart foregrounds, ‘DeLillo frames his subject – time – in terms of language’.178 The Body Artist emphasizes language’s role in not only the conceptualisation of time but the experience of it: ‘the parts of speech where [one] is meant to locate [their] existence’ (100). The characters’ ‘unravelling verbs’ (100) have both a reflective and formative relationship to their subjective time.

As I mentioned in the introduction to this thesis, the reader’s capacity to perceive the subjective nature of a character’s experience is built on a wide range of narrative phenomena, and is not limited to direct speech or thought representations. Though formally in third- person, the story is an ambiguous blend of the narrator’s and Lauren’s idiom, allowing the narrative voice to not only reflect Lauren’s internal experience but gesture towards the intersubjective nature of the self. Alongside direct dialogue, Tuttle and Lauren’s marginal position within time is linguistically alluded to through the recurrent use of the conditional or subjunctive mood. The latter ‘represents a denoted act or state not as fact but as contingent or possible’,179 and although in English the subjunctive is not often marked by a distinct

177 Nel, 739. 178 Cowart, Don DeLillo, 208. 179 “Subjunctive | Grammar : Of or Relating to the Verb Form That Is Used to Express Suggestions, Wishes, Uncertainty, Possibility, Etc.,” accessed September 11, 2015, http://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/subjunctive. 52

morphology, it is used in expressions of various states of ‘unreality’, such as hypothetical scenarios, requests, beliefs, imaginings, etc.180 Such a liminal state of ‘unreality’ cannot be easily mapped onto a standard ‘chronology of events’ (83), and in this way it mirrors – or perhaps, overlaps – with the liminal temporal space which both Tuttle and Lauren come to inhabit. Early in the novel we can see that Mr Tuttle’s entire existence seems mired in this uncertain grammatical mood: ‘as if he were a piece of found art’ (81). Lauren explains, ‘it was always as if. He did this or that as if’ (45). This phrase, interestingly enough, resonates strongly with historical descriptions of empathy: scholars from Adam Smith to psychotherapist Carl Rogers and contemporary philosopher Chris Kramer have used ‘as if’ to describe empathy’s ability to provide us with intersubjective experience: we emotionally and physically simulate others ‘as if’ we were experiencing their reality.181 With a circular logic, it is through the vicarious ‘as if’ experience of motor empathy that Lauren comes to embody the ‘as if’ of Tuttle’s tenuous position in time and space, seemingly also ‘sliding’ into this indeterminate landscape. Her language reflects this shift: her dialogue and descriptions from her perspective are often framed in the subjunctive or conditional moods, characterised by the conditional conjunction ‘if’, particularly in relation to either Tuttle or recollections of Rey. ‘“If there is another language you speak,” she told him, “say some words”’ (55); ‘as if the air had bends and warps’ (45); ‘Do you recognize what you said weeks earlier, and yes, if it is recited back to you, and yes, if it is the last thing you said, among the last things, to someone you loved and would never see again’ (87). In framing her speech and thought in these non- indicative grammatical moods, Lauren’s language gestures towards her transition into ‘another kind of reality’ (64), drawing closer to Tuttle’s ‘as if’ place in space and time.

As well as tense and mood, the temporal shift which occurs in Lauren’s subjective time can be perceived through a change in syntactic structures. In his elliptical, disjointed speech, Tuttle reveals a crucial aspect of his experience of reality. Lacking the continuity of sequential chronology to provide ‘narrative’ (92) to his experience, his consciousness seems reduced to piecemeal perceptions: ‘I will leave the moment. Chair, table, wall, hall, all for the moment, in the moment. It has come to me’ (74). In this inability to configure his

180 Oxford Dictionary, “‘Subjunctive,’” accessed November 9, 2015, http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/subjunctive. 181 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (New York: Penguin Books, 1761), 10; Carl R. Rogers, “Empathic: An Unappreciated Way of Being,” The Counseling Psychologist 5, no. 2 (1975): 2–10, https://doi.org/10.1177/001100007500500202; Chris A. Kramer, “As If: Connecting Phenomenology, Mirror Neurons, Empathy, and Laughter,” PhaenEx 7, no. 1 (2012): 275–308. 53

phenomenological experience into a coherent narrative, Tuttle highlights the significance of a chronological sense of subjective time. As Blakey Vermeule explains, ‘sights and sounds arrive in a syncopated fashion. Subjective time filters and smooths the stuttering mass of sensory data and binds it all up into a coherent story’.182 This is why subjective time is so crucial to our entire perception of reality. Lacking this crucial linearity, Tuttle ‘violates’ (100) the standard meronymy, or whole-part relations, of human perception, unable to synthesize his sensations into unified concepts.183 His ‘fracted time’ (87) subjugates his world to fragments and parts, which is linguistically revealed in his disjointed syntax during the few conversations when he is not mimicking the speech of others. When Lauren tries to teach him about the white paper birches outside the house, he replies, ‘the white ones… Beyond the trees… It rained very much’ (44). In another conversation, Lauren entreats him, ‘Tell me something’. He replies, ‘“I know how much.” He said, “I know how much this house. Alone by the sea.”’ (48). In one of their last conversations, he rambles, ‘Coming and going I am leaving… Leaving has come to me. We all, shall all, will all be left. Because I am here and where. And I will go or not or never’ (74). Just as the fragmented moments of his life do not add up to a cohesive temporal narrative, the parts of his speech do not add up to a coherent whole. Eventually, as she begins to shift into this unstable mode of experiencing time, Lauren also adopts Tuttle’s strangely clipped mode of expression, his word form errors, and almost- not-quite mode of sense making: ‘When I say mother, the woman who gives birth to a child, the parent, the female parent, does this word? Tell me. What?’ (55); ‘Then and now. Is that what you’re saying? Did you stand outside the room and hear us talking? When I say Rey, do you know who I mean? Talking in a room. He and I’ (62); ‘Talk like him. Do like him. Speak in his voice. Do Rey. Make me hear him. I am asking you nice’ (71). She also reverts into childish language that, like Tuttle’s, omits normal auxiliaries: ‘Understand hidden?’ (66). This style of non-standard language continues event when Lauren is conversing with other people. When her landlord enquires about the state of the house, she strangely replies ‘No, it’s fine, I think. Rooms… Rooms and rooms’ (118). Similarly, Lauren’s perspective takes on Tuttle’s use of asyndeton, the omission of conjunctions. This evokes his unmediated perceptual experience, lacking the organised, sequential structure of linear time. As Tuttle simultaneously sees ‘chair, table, wall, hall’ (74), when Lauren ‘sees’ her dead husband she observes their lovemaking as one synchronic perceptual flash, evinced by the omission of

182 Vermeule, “The New Unconscious: A Literary Guided Tour,” 466. 183 Evans and Pourcel, New Directions in Cognitive Linguistics, 7. 54

grammatical conjunctions: ‘His cock is rising in her slack pink fist. Their mouths are ajar for tongues, nipples, fingers, whatever projections of flesh’ (122). Through this non-standard use of language, Lauren disrupts what Mark Bruhn calls ‘the inescapable temporality of the linguistic medium’,184 revealing the fragmented frame of consciousness with which she has aligned.

Both conceptually and symbolically, Lauren’s temporal synchronisation with Tuttle is partially revealed via the image schema linking time and space, as the novel plays on our tendency to use space as a ‘cognitive model’ to conceptualise time.185 As described by cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, ‘all our understandings of time are relative to other concepts such as motion, space and events’.186 This is alluded in the above quoted descriptions of Tuttle and Lauren’s physical movements and appearance, which figuratively evoke the liminal temporal space they inhabit. In describing Tuttle’s temporal mode, Lauren makes this conflation explicit, juxtaposing spatial and temporal adverbs: ‘Maybe this man experiences another kind of reality where he is here and there, before and after, and he moves from one to the other shatteringly’ (64). All talk of Lauren and Tuttle’s position in – or outside of – time is founded on this conceptual framework, since as Hikaru Fujii notes, ‘the notion of ‘outside’ involves both spatial and temporal dimensions’.187 Reflection on this mode of conceptualisation clarifies a link between Tuttle’s physical wanderings (he arrives inexplicably [41], is often missing for hours even during his stay [77], and then disappears suddenly [95]) and his drifting in time. As Lauren synchronises with his time and her own temporal narrative begins to unravel, she replicates this link between physical and temporal drifting, as she wanders aimlessly through the remote area around her house: ‘[she]…walked for hours along the edge of the saltgrass marshes and down the middle of lost roads and she listened to Mr Tuttle’ (63). This description achieves a number of things: in metonymically substituting distance for time (‘walked for hours’) it reveals itself as a metaphor for her lost place in time. Phonetically, the elongated /a:/ sound of ‘grass’ and ‘marsh’ resonate with each other, stretching out the sound in the middle of the sentence. The

184 Bruhn, “Time as Space in the Structure of (Literary) Experience,” 606. 185 Evans, Language and Time, 22. 186 Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, 137. 187 Hikaru Fujii, Outside, America: The Temporal Turn in Contemporary American Fiction (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013), 89. 55

placement of this assonance is not arbitrary – pages later, there is a parallel description of her wanderings: ‘as she walked for miles through the blueberry barrens in blowing mist, jacket fastened and tape reels turning’ (69). Yet again, the alliteration in the middle noun phrases (repetition of /r/ and /b/ phonemes) snags us in the middle of the clause. In both cases, we get lost in the middle of the sentence, just as Lauren is lost in the middle of the road – or, figuratively, in the passage of time. This combination of metaphor and sound-symbolism (‘non-arbitrary relations of either a natural or conventional sort between sound and meaning’188) is underpinned by Tuttle’s presence: that she listens to him as she wanders represents his pervasive influence on her reality, almost guiding her as she wanders through time and space.

As well as linguistically, this temporal mode is shown in the narrative structuring. This resonates with Anthony Wall’s claim that ‘we cannot determine for a single character specific bounds which unequivocally delimitate him from all other elements of the text’.189 Lauren’s subjectivity cannot be considered in isolation from the other narrative features. The disruption of her linear chronology is reflected in the discourse time: the novel switches abruptly from scene to scene, skipping to different moments in time without any explicit temporal positioning: ‘They stood outside the house near the top of the sloped field’ (44) is fluidly followed by ‘They sat in the grim panelled room’ (45). ‘She began to work naked in a cold room’ (58) flows into ‘She stood in the front hall and called, “Where are you?”’ (60). Some scenes seem to start in the middle, as if already underway. As though there had been some precedent, a paragraph will start with a sequence adverb, for example when a phone conversation with a lawyer is immediately followed by, ‘Then he stopped eating. She sat him down at the table and fed him by hand’ (94). Without warning the narrative shifts into present tense, both in the second person sections (‘you stand at the table shuffling papers and you drop something’ [89]) and also when the narrative voice blends more ambiguously with Lauren’s thoughts:

She felt the label scratchy at her throat. Not scratchy but something else and she slipped her index and middle fingers inside the neck, elbows thrust up and out, thinking into the blankness of her decision. They said grim winter grim. But she is

188 Hutchins, “What Sound Symbolism, Functionalism, and Cognitive Linguistics Can Offer One Another,” 148. 189 Wall, “Characters in Bakhtin’s Theory,” 45. 56

[shift into present tense] here again, in the house, as he’d said she would be… Not that she recalls his exact words. But this is what she’d understood him to say. (112)

In many ways the narrative time reflects the nonlinear, intersubjective and multifaceted time that first Tuttle, and then Lauren, experiences. There are many ellipses in narrative time: for example the discourse time skips from Tuttle’s disappearance to after Lauren’s performance, or elsewhere it jumps between the first scene on the morning of Rey’s death and Lauren’s return to the house, several weeks later. Metatextuality also facilitates the multifaceted nature of Tuttle’s time as the narrative abruptly shifts to different text types and points of view, for example the newspaper article reporting Rey’s death, or the journalist’s recount of the interview between herself and Lauren. Also, as discussed below, the narrative often blends Lauren’s immediate experience with hypothetical situations and flashbacks. The general effect of these structural inconsistencies is to deprive the reader of a sense of a continuous time passing, resonating with Lauren’s growing uncertainty about chronological sequence.

2.3 Lauren’s changing self-identity

Even from quite early on, Lauren describes how Tuttle’s presence makes her feel disconnected from the standardised durations of clock time: ‘It was only mid-morning but she had the feeling he’d been here a week’ (47). This disengagement from standard chronology becomes more radical as Tuttle’s stay in the house lengthens: as their period of cohabitation goes on, descriptions of Lauren’s daily experience reproduce Tuttle’s imbricated perceptions of past, present and future. Tuttle dissolves the ‘arbitrary division’ (80) of time, reproducing and seemingly reliving scenes from both the past and the future: ‘he lived in overlapping realities’ (82). In particular, he ‘lives’ through past moments between Lauren and her now- dead husband, Rey, perfectly echoing their dialogue:

But it was Rey’s voice she was hearing. The representation was close, the accent and dragged vowels, the intimate differences, the articulations produced in one vocal apparatus and not another, things she’d known in Rey’s voice, and only Rey’s… This was not some communication with the dead. It was Rey alive in the course of a talk he’d had with her, in this room, not long after they’d come here. (61) 57

Lauren, too, comes to exist in an overlapping present moment. Her reality is, by the end of the novel, a shifting collage of memory, present day perceptions, and flashes of future. In a moment of premonition, she ‘sees’ the owner of the house coming to speak with her weeks before his actual arrival:

She thought of a man showing up unexpectedly. Not the man who was here now… a man appearing suddenly, as in a movie, and he is shot from below… She saw herself in the scene, in the driveway, listening to the man. It was just a passing thing, a story she told herself, or screened, forgettably. (79)

She loses track of the present moment: ‘she didn’t know how long she was there. Maybe a long time… How much time is a long time?’ (52). Occasionally her sense of time becomes doubling, recursive: ‘when he wasn’t there she knew he wouldn’t be’ (96); ‘she stepped slowly through the rooms, knowing it would happen like this’ (120); ‘She knew how it would happen, past the point of playing it through’ (122); ‘Once she steps into the room, she will already have been there’ (122). Also, Lauren, like Tuttle, begins to relive moments between herself and Rey:

She could hear him in her chest and throat, speaking hypnotically, and she approached the door to her room… that’s where Rey was intact, in his real body, smoke in his hair and his clothes. (121)

She remembers the hanging lamp… and then turns and looks, knowing what she will see. He [Rey] sits on the edge of the bed in his underwear, lighting the last cigarette of the day. (122)

One morning, Mr Tuttle begins to reproduce the conversation that Lauren and Rey had on the morning of his suicide. Ambiguously blending second person narration with Lauren’s thoughts, the narrative reflects:

Do you recognize what you said weeks earlier, and yes, if it is recited back to you, and yes, if it is the last thing you said, among the last things, to someone you loved and would never see again. This is what she’d said to him before he got in the car and drove, if only she’d known, all the way to New York… It did not seem like an act of 58

memory. It was Rey’s voice, all right, it was her husband’s tonal soul, but she didn’t think the man was remembering. It is happening now. (87)

The shift from past to present progressive (‘she didn’t think’ – ‘it is happening now’) shows how, for both Lauren and Tuttle, this is not a flashback nor a memory: they seem to have genuinely shifted ‘location’ in time. Later, Lauren again relives this opening scene of the novel, the choreographed domesticity of the morning before Rey’s death, now switching into the future perfect tense:

They will already have slept and wakened and gone down to breakfast, where they muddle through their separate routines, pouring the milk and shaking the juice, a blue jay watching from the feeder. (123)

Elsewhere, Lauren’s grammatical tense illustrates that she experiences events as both past and present simultaneously: ‘she saw herself, she sees herself crawling towards him’ (87); ‘It was her future too. It is her future too’ (98). This echoes her description of Tuttle’s time as ‘simultaneous’ (77). Although she fights against it, reassuring herself that ‘past, present and future are not amenities of language’ and that ‘time unfolds’ sequentially (99), Lauren herself suspects the ‘laid out, unoccuring’ (77) nature of her subjective temporality, again expressed through the fluidity of verb tense and aspect: ‘Something is happening. It has happened. It will happen’ (98). She has been drawn deeper into Tuttle’s non-linear, almost synchronic mode of experiencing time.

Synchronising with Tuttle’s time precipitates a marked shift in Lauren’s sense of self, as she discovers that your sense of identity becomes unstuck when you lose the sense of your place in time. Her perspective, in this state, is ‘ever changing, plunged into metamorphosis, something that is also something else, but what and what’ (36). This is reflected in her physical aspect: in aligning with Tuttle’s physical topography, Lauren also conforms to the flattened temporal contours of her guest. Tuttle’s body seems not to reflect chronology – he is not ‘a child but then [not] quite a man either’ (69). Similarly Lauren becomes ‘ageless’ (103) as she bleaches, scrapes and exfoliates her body, stripping the detritus of time:

she rubbed in the cream to remove wastepapery skin in flakes and scales and little rolling boluses that she liked to hold between her fingers… She had a fade cream she applied just about everywhere, to depigment herself. She cut off some, then more of 59

the hair on her head. She used astringents to remove soap residues, greases and chronic lurking dirt. (84)

This was her work, to disappear from all her former venues of aspect and bearing and to become a blankness, a body slate erased of every past resemblance. (84)

Temporal terminology such as ‘aspect’ (the grammatical category describing how verbs denote time190) and ‘chronic’ emphasizes how through this process of aesthetic excoriation – removing dead skin, dead hair, and all signs of colour and vitality – Lauren is also stripping herself of the markings of time. This process is hugely significant. As Lauren herself muses, time is integral to identity: ‘you are made out of time’ (92). This is true of fictional and real characters alike: in the words of cognitive neuroscientist Daniele Di Lernia and her colleagues, ‘time perception is a fundamental element of human awareness. Our consciousness, our ability to perceive the world around us and, ultimately, our very sense of self are shaped upon our perception of time’.191 Accordingly, Tuttle’s radical temporal influence on Lauren leads to a degree of ‘displacement of self’ (69). Through the process of temporal synchronisation, Lauren’s certainty in her individual experience of time is lost to Tuttle’s pervasive influence, and she eventually recognizes that ‘something has separated, softly become unfixed’ (88). This is amplified by her deep grief over her husband’s death: though temporal synchronisation is an everyday, common experience, it is heightened in this forlorn novella. After feeling so coupled, bodily and psychologically, with her husband Rey, in his absence her sense of self is rendered unstable, making her more susceptible to outside influence and the empathetic resonance with others. Before Tuttle’s arrival, Lauren seems stuck in her grief, stuck in time: ‘days the same, paced and organized but with a simultaneous wallow, uncentred, sometimes blank in places, days that moved so slow they ached’ (32). After synchronising with Tuttle, Lauren becomes ‘unstuck’ in time, to use Vonnegut’s phrase. Tuttle’s radically non-linear time pushes Lauren further out of chronology, into a space where she is not simply tied to the past, to Rey’s memory, but dislocated from the present, living out both past and future moments. The effect is disorienting: just as Tuttle, without the ‘sequential order… we engender to make us feel safe in the world’ lacks a ‘protective surface’ (90), in the last pages of the novel, Lauren also feels stripped of the

190 Cambridge English Dictionary, “‘Aspect,’” accessed February 21, 2019, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/aspect. 191 Di Lernia et al., “Feel the Time. Time Perception as a Function of Interoceptive Processing.” 60

security of linear time: ‘feeling whatever she felt, exposed, open, something you could call unlayered maybe’ (121). In sharing Tuttle’s ‘vulnerability’ she experiences a degree of what it feels like to no longer calibrate her sense of time with the standard asymmetric then, now, after.

It is this shift which catalyses her shift in self-identity: as the novel tells us, ‘time unfolds into the seams of being. It passes through you, making and shaping’ (99). As Escobar notes, ‘so important is time and its link to suffering (and recovery) to Lauren’s embodied consciousness that it becomes nearly synonymous with the mystery of identity itself’.192 Tuttle’s discombobulation of Lauren’s time sense is, therefore, deeply significant; it dislocates her from her sense of self. However, though disorienting, the dislocation is productive, as it throws Lauren into a re-evaluative space where she is able to process her grief and reconstruct herself and her own place within time, paving the way to reformation of an identity without her deceased husband. Indeed, in Vonnegut’s novel, another character adrift in time, Billy Pilgrim, finds himself in a similar re-evaluative space outside of normal chronology. Billy, like Lauren, is mired in his own traumatic experiences, as a result of which he ‘found life meaningless’193 – he attempts to make sense of this by ‘trying to re-invent [himself] and [his] universe’.194 As critic of the novel Gregory Sumner claims, just like Lauren, Billy is able to cope better by becoming ‘unstuck in time’, able to re-evaluate and reorder his sense of self.195 In The Body Artist, however, this is mediated through an other: in a moment of foreshadowing, Tuttle mimics a comment that Rey made to Lauren before his death: ‘I regain possession of myself through you’ (62). This reflection presages Lauren’s own self-reclamation, through Mr Tuttle.

Personal identity, as communications scholar Tom Bruneau describes, is intertwined with an inner sense of time. ‘Pattern, sequence, and seriality are the foundation of meaning providing the individual with a semblance of linear continuity through history’.196 When Lauren is unstuck in Tuttle’s time she loses her sense of personal identity: ‘I am Lauren. But less and

192 Matthew Escobar, The Persistence of the Human: Consciousness, Meta-Body and Survival in Contemporary Film and Literature (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 101. 193 Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 58. 194 Vonnegut, 58. 195 Gregory Sumner, Unstuck in Time (Melbourne: Hunger Publishers, 2011), 181. 196 Tom Bruneau, “Subjective Time, Social Interaction, and Personal Identity,” in Interaction and Identity, ed. Mokros Harmut (New York: Routledge, 2018), 107, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351293525-5. 61

less…’ (117) Yet after Tuttle’s departure, Lauren begins to renegotiate her own relationship with time: ‘She…felt an easy alertness, a sense of being inside the moment’ (119). This is further symbolised by the final scene, which deploys the classic trope of new beginnings: the open window.

She threw the window open. She didn’t know why she did this. Then she knew. She wanted to feel the sea tang on her face and the flow of time in her body, to tell her who she was. (124)

As Fujii points out, Lauren is, grammatically, the subject of every sentence in this final paragraph, showing a tentative reclamation of a stable and persisting identity.197 Importantly, this experience is explicitly tied to her body. Before Tuttle’s arrival, dealing alone with the grief of her husband, Lauren explains that ‘her body felt different to her in ways she did not understand. Tight, framed, she didn’t know exactly. Slightly foreign and unfamiliar’ (33). However, by the end of the novel, with this new ‘flow of time in her body’, Lauren re- engages with her physical self. In the final moments of the novel, Lauren seems to, for the first time, fully inhabit her own body, her own movements and senses. She is now ‘breathing completely’ (124), ‘she could see the true colours of the walls and floor’ (124). She is no longer unsure or indecisive: ‘Then she knew’. The preposition focuses the sentence on this internal experience of time, ‘the flow of time in her body’, suggesting that here Lauren is reclaiming her own temporal experience, an individual subjectivity that is, while not delimited or independent, no longer dissolved into Tuttle’s or Rey’s.

Time, here, acts as an instrument of Lauren’s recovery and self-discovery: both the thematic and character trajectories of the novel are also stories of Lauren’s shifts in temporal experience. It is time that, as Lauren recognises, ‘stretches events and makes it possible for us to suffer and come out of it and see death and come out of it’ (92). Paradoxically, this would not have been possible were it not for Tuttle, had Lauren not been thrust into such a radically different temporality and given the space to build her sense of self again, from the ground up. In this way, Tuttle’s stay has helped Lauren to ‘reenter the flow of communal life, of life after her husband’s death’.198 After the shock of his visit, she feels again ‘alert’, part of the chronology which creates our cohesive selves: beings with a past, a present, and a future. It is

197 Fujii, Outside, America, 92. 198 Boxall, “A Leap Out of Our Biology,” 526. 62

a future that she can face as more than Rey’s widow, more than Mr Tuttle’s keeper, but as Lauren: more and more.

Seeing these shifts as representations of temporal synchronisation offers a new way to understand The Body Artist, and more broadly to explore the intersection of time, intersubjectivity, and narrative. This cognitive approach nuances existing readings, supplementing aesthetic, metaphysical or intuitive accounts of the relationship between Lauren and Tuttle with precise understanding of Tuttle’s influence. While criticism of The Body Artist has acknowledged the sharing of subjectivity between the two characters, it has not given proper credence to Tuttle’s role in Lauren’s shifting sense of time and its links to developments in her personal identity. Often the language used to describe the overlapping experiences between Lauren and Tuttle reveals an implicit defence of the dominant cultural values of an ideally individuated and autonomous consciousness. In particular, many see the novel’s illustration of a dynamic intersubjectivity space as somehow aberrant or intrusive, which negates the broader implications of synchrony, other-embodiment and permeable subjectivity in day to day life. Descriptions of Tuttle’s influence on Lauren are often couched in terms implying the decay or disruption of the natural order. Kitis and Kontoulis dramatise Lauren’s response: her ‘other-proof subjectivity crumbles’.199 Osteen sees Tuttle as representing the ‘muse as intruder’.200 Di Prete sees Tuttle’s influence as ‘psychic intrusion’201; Dewey describes it as ‘intrusive trauma’.202 Vicari uses explicitly combative terminology: ‘How does an individual consciousness function in a world where it is constantly impinged upon by every other consciousness?’203 Yet as this chapter has argued, Tuttle’s role presents not so much an intrusion of mind as an extension: a reflection of our intersubjective nature. His relationship with Lauren and the influence this has on her shows how ‘sensing, thought and feeling are structured by our body-based interactions with the world’ – a concept of mind which I will revisit later in the thesis.204 Tuttle’s influence

199 Cleopatra Kontoulis and Eliza Kitis, “DeLillo’s ‘The Body Artist’: Time, Language & Grief,” Janus Head 12, no. 1 (2011): 222. 200 Osteen, “Echo Chamber,” 72. 201 Prete, “Don DeLillo’s ‘The Body Artist,’” 484. 202 Dewey, Beyond Grief and Nothing, 130. 203 Vicari, Marks of Toil, 99. 204 David Chalmers, “Introduction: BRAINBOUND Versus EXTENDED,” in Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension, ed. Andy Clark (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 1. 63

needn’t be confined to the realm of ghosts, nor indeed of fiction: it mirrors real-world interactions, founded upon complex resonance systems which can create a shared sense of time between people. In the context of cognitivism, the intersubjectivity in the novel is not simply achieved because of ‘an eerie quality to Mr Tuttle’s abilities’ (99) but through a biological tendency to temporally synchronise with others. In this way the novel presents a more ambivalent portrait of the multiplicitous nature of the self, as one which is embodied and embedded in its physical and social environment.

Concluding Thoughts

This chapter has sought to delve deeper into the role of subjective time in The Body Artist, showing how Lauren’s internal time motivates her character development, facilitated by the temporal synchronisation she experiences with her spectral guest, Mr Tuttle. Through a cognitive critical lens, Tuttle’s influence offers a neurophysiological perspective on the extension of subjective experience, even intimating one sense of how relational identity construction might happen at the level of neurology. The cognitive framework that I’ve used to explore this development is not reductive in the sense of providing a mere explanation, but rather exploratory, as it seeks to open up The Body Artist, revealing the nuance and depth of its insights into embodied minds, subjective time, and identity.

Considering biological phenomena in literature – particularly when discussing largely unconscious aspects of human experience, such as time perception – is controversial. However, without collapsing the distinction, identifying the marked resonances between neuropsychological accounts and literary representation of subjective time offers insight into linguistic, symbolic and thematic patterning of individual texts. Within The Body Artist, a cognitive perspective clarifies Lauren’s changing time and sense of self, positioning Tuttle’s impact on Lauren as an important part of her inner development.

The fact that DeLillo has intuited this process of temporal synchronisation suggests how literature can represent fictional minds in a neuropsychologically valid way, which lends credence to a comment made by DeLillo himself: in a personal correspondence with Peter Boxall from 2016, DeLillo wrote that the task of novels is to ‘reveal consciousness’.205 The

205 Boxall, “A Leap Out of Our Biology,” 553. 64

way in which The Body Artist shows temporal synchronisation’s potential significance demonstrates how literature can offer valuable insights into consciousness and its intersections with time and bodies – both our own and those of others. These insights may not be strictly mimetic, as seen in The Body Artist’s representation of a heightened temporal synchronisation; however, this does not mean that we cannot learn from thinking of fictional minds in terms of real minds. In a similar vein, Kurt Vonnegut said of Billy Pilgrim’s journeys through time and trauma, ‘I think all I was describing in Slaughterhouse-Five was a very real memory process’.206 As The Body Artist and Slaughterhouse-Five show, literary authors use the discursive specificity of the medium to explore things like emotion, time, bodies and trauma in ways that everyday discourse or self-report cannot articulate. The influences that these can have on our mind may shape our experience, yet they are often, in Lauren’s words, ‘outside the visible spectrum’ (53) of consciousness. In this chapter I have tried to demonstrate how cognitive science may offer a framework for understanding the insights offered by these literary works and, conversely, how literature may be able to fill these gaps in cognitive science’s understanding.

However, in order for such a union between the cognitive sciences and the arts is to be successful, it cannot be asymmetric. This chapter alone perhaps does not go far enough in proving the potential for reciprocation between literature and cognitive science. As Zunshine notes, ‘cognitive literary studies can risk a unidirectional model of interdisciplinary scholarship’.207 In addition to a new cognitive understanding of literature, fictional narrative can in itself help to construct theories of human cognition and behaviour. Importantly, literature can propose new avenues of exploration as novels naturally encounter cognitive enigmas in their exploration of human experience. It is one such avenue, the proposal of an anthropomorphic temporal synchronisation, which I will explore in my next chapter.

206 Interview with Kurt Vonnegut, 1980, quoted in Sumner, Unstuck in Time, 181. 207 Lisa Zunshine, “From the Social to the Literary,” in Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 56. 65

Home Time: Lisa Gorton’s The Life of Houses

‘… a strong feeling for possession, property, which can be a trap for children born into that obsession with the past’. Lisa Gorton, 2015208

Part 1. Anthropomorphic Temporal Synchronisation

In my first chapter, I examined the phenomenon of temporal synchronisation in human relationships. In this chapter I will look at temporal synchronisation between humans and nonhuman objects. Cognitively informed analyses of these relationships in literature are not common.209 Though the influence of our inanimate surroundings on human experience has consistently been a key point of literary interest, the exact nature of this relationship, on a tangible rather than metaphysical level, is infrequently addressed. This has left critics unable to fully account for the link between objects and broader narrative trajectory because the influence of these objects on character experience and development is only inchoately

208 Jane Sullivan, “Lisa Gorton: Prize-Winning Poet Writes Her First Novel,” Sydney Morning Herald, April 18, 2015, http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/lisa-gorton-prizewinning-poet-writes-her- first-novel-20150411-1mhp1c.html. 209 There has been a plethora of critical investigations into these human/non-human relationships in literature, from those that dismiss their importance (such as John Ruskin) to those who see ‘anthropomorphism as an opportunity’ to understand more about both literature and human nature (see: Aaron Shackelford, “Dickinson’s Animals and Anthropomorphism,” The Emily Dickinson Journal 19, no. 2 (2010): 47.) There are also several sociological approaches which see anthropomorphism in literature as evidence of ‘the dynamic interplay of human and nonhuman forces’ in human experience. (Jennifer Mason, Civilized Creatures: Urban Animals, Sentimental Culture, and American Literature, 1850–1900 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2005), 21.) However there have been few specifically cognitive approaches. Cognitive literary critics working in theory of mind, for example Zunshine or Vincent, have made peripheral contributions through the recognition that inherent Theory of Mind capacities lead to widespread anthropomorphic perception: ‘It turns out that human beings find it difficult not to attribute a ‘mind’ to almost anything’. (Vincent, “Sex on the Mind: Queer Theory Meets Cognitive Theory,” 204.) Conceptual theory also touches on anthropomorphism in literature, as it identifies many of the common metaphors in language as anthropomorphically founded. (For example, Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By and Philosophy in the Flesh). Despite these intersections, a methodology exploring anthropomorphism as a cognitive phenomenon, and the neuropsychological ramifications of this, has not been established in literary criticism. For further information on the cognitive bases of anthropomorphism, see Urquiza Haas et al.’s discussion of the implicit and explicit cognitive mechanisms thought to underpin both interpretative and imaginative anthropomorphism: Esmeralda G. Urquiza-Haas and Kurt Kotrschal, “The Mind behind Anthropomorphic Thinking: Attribution of Mental States to Other Species,” Animal Behaviour 109 (2015): 167–76, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2015.08.011. 66

articulated. A cognitive perspective can productively frame this inquiry, as the feeling of being somehow connected to, or influenced by, inanimate objects has a specific neurophysiological dimension. Far from purely psychic, relationships with the objects in our world can produce a number of effects on the embodied mind: including, as this chapter will attest, a subtle influence on the experience of subjective time. Dispensing with the ill-defined or metaphysical terms in which object relations are usually couched, the following analysis deploys both literary and cognitive theory to more precisely understand the intersection of bodies, minds and external objects through the prism of subjective time.

This critical frame is founded on two areas of research in cognitive science. Firstly, it draws on discoveries, detailed above, of how the speed of passing time that we feel, our ‘internal clocks’, sometimes align with those of the people around us, effecting a synchronisation of time experience. Secondly, it builds on research detailing anthropomorphic perception of objects, and how this can, to an extent, cognitively parallel apprehension of other human beings. There is an intersection between these two areas of research which has not fully been explored in cognitive science, yet which has, I argue, been portrayed in literary representations of humans and the objects around them. I aim to demonstrate this through an analysis of narrative time in Lisa Gorton’s 2015 Australian novel, The Life of Houses, showing how the narrative traces the indelible lines between houses and their inhabitants.210 The novel follows a mother and daughter – Anna and Kit – who are both, in different ways, confronted by the quiet chill of their family history as Kit, the teenage daughter, visits her grandparents in their coastal estate: the Sea House. My analysis takes particular interest in Kit’s week at her grandparent’s property. During her visit she is physically and psychologically enveloped by the historic house, with its dark, unfriendly presence, its muffled echoes of the past. I argue that Kit’s character trajectory – a central part of the novel – hinges on her relationship with the Sea House, and the way in which the old family home alters her sense of passing time. The present chapter uses a cognitive critical analysis of narrative time to understand the intersection of time and place in Kit’s personal development. Viewed through this lens, micro-syntactic focus on stylistic features can be linked to larger structural patterns of literary discourse in the unfolding of the protagonist’s identity. However, committing a new interpretation to the novel is only part of the aim of this chapter:

210 Lisa Gorton, The Life of Houses (Sydney: Giramondo, 2015); Lisa Gorton, The Life of Houses. Large Print (Sydney: Giramondo, 2015). 67

more broadly, this research suggests a new approach with which to think about time and objects, and how the two can impact both fictional and real-life experience.

This approach contributes to cognitive literary theory in two ways. Firstly, it offers a new methodology with which to understand questions of character, style and plot within novels preoccupied by the influence of objects on human experience. This is relevant not only to a reading of The Life of Houses, but also to the study of many other novels, as I gesture towards in my brief analysis of a number of secondary texts, both in this chapter and in the chapters to come. Secondly, it broadens our understanding of the influences on our subjective time, as a temporal synchronisation between humans and nonhumans has not been properly established by cognitive science.

Notably, my approach did not spring from a theoretical framework but through close reading of a number of literary texts: particularly those depicting a relationship between characters and anthropomorphised houses, such as Gorton’s novel. In these works, the influence of the characters’ relationship with their house strays increasingly into the realm of subjective time, in a trajectory which resonates with the process of human-human temporal synchronisation. This suggests an interaction between the experience of objects and changes in our ‘internal clock’ – an aspect of temporal synchronisation which is not only unaccounted for as a literary phenomenon, but not yet adequately explored by neuroscience. Essentially, as played out in these literary narratives, an individual develops an anthropomorphised conception of an object, and then their body responds to this conception as if it were, in some ways, an actual person. This means that human-human resonance activation – such as temporal synchronisation – may take place, potentially causing a subtle alignment with the object’s perceived temporal mode. I contend that this temporal influence between character and object is not mere literary artifice nor poetic licence, but a literary rendering of a neurophysiological process. As a real-life example, if a person anthropomorphised an old house, perceiving it as ancient, dignified, frail etc. (with the kinaesthetic connotation of slowness or stillness that this personification inheres), it is possible for this to affect their internal clock in the same way that, as I explained in my earlier chapter, spending time with or looking at a photo of an older person does. It is an interaction I term – for want of a catchier name – anthropomorphic temporal synchronisation (ATS).

Essentially, ATS means that the relationships we form with inanimate things can affect our experience of time. Just as we attribute temporal modes to people, we may also attribute these to objects, as a result of their appearance, age, our knowledge of their history, or any number of other factors. When we anthropomorphize an object – be it a house, tree, car etc.– our brains and bodies then recognise this object as at least partially human, and synchronise our internal clock to our perception of how that object itself experiences time. This would present one psychophysiological basis for what is often treated as a metaphysical connection between humans and the objects in their lives, and allow a more precise discussion of how inanimate objects – such as a house – can shape the trajectory of a character’s identity development.

In the following, I will first contextualise ATS within literary and cognitive scientific theory. I will then analyse Gorton’s The Life of Houses through the lens of this temporal phenomenon, and look to the various implications of this framework, both within the novel and more broadly.

1.1 Critical lineage of objects and literature

There is a rich genealogy of critical approaches to human-object relationships in literature. Various themes and theories – anthropomorphism, object-relations, thing theory – have been brought to bear on literary texts throughout the years. This preoccupation is perhaps to be expected, considering that these relationships permeate literary history. In particular, literature is full of anthropomorphic accounts of the object world. As anthropologist Guthrie explains, ‘few writers, and few people, do not animate their environments’.211 From Homer’s rosy-fingered dawn to Woolf’s geraniums in To the Lighthouse, anthropomorphism has been a key feature of literary history. As both these examples suggest, the literary imagination shows that our animation of objects can be deeply tied to our sense of time: Homer uses this figure to observe the passing from night to day, a passage also watched by Woolf’s ‘eyeless’212 geraniums in the middle section, ‘Time Passes’, of To the Lighthouse. Although these themes – minds and bodies interacting with objects – can be located within the domain of cognitive science, literary representations of them are not commonly analysed through a cognitive lens.

211 Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds, 2. 212 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989), 209. 69

This is perhaps due to an abiding suspicion of the validity of anthropomorphism itself, as entrenched by John Ruskin’s pathetic fallacy, which sees anthropomorphic perceptions as a ‘falseness’ generated by a mind ‘over-clouded’ with emotion.213 This suspicion remains within several branches of literary theory: for example, Inglesby noted in 2007 that many critics see animism and anthropomorphism as ‘robust flights of fancy’.214 Since this denigrates the interpersonal relationship often felt between humans and objects, historically criticism of objects in literature has focused on concepts of consumption, commodity and culture.215 Though anthropomorphic relationships are present within literary narrative, their influence is generally figured in a symbolic or metaphysical rather than physical sense. A number of genres evidence this, simultaneously thematizing anthropomorphic relationships and relegating them to a symbolic interaction: for example, the gothic, which is linked to The Life of Houses through the quasi-gothic house at the centre of the narrative. The gothic almost invariably anthropomorphizes its objects and settings (notably of course, the malignant gothic dwelling), yet in doing so renders them symbols for pathological mind- states, disintegrated families or tensions within the social order.216 This is evident in the critical interpretation of the titular dwellings in Mark Z. Danielewski’s The House of Leaves, Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland, Franz Kafka’s The Castle, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper and Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Like other gothic houses, the Sea House is anthropomorphised as sinister, as well as being the site of a haunting. However, as I will explain throughout the chapter, it operates as more than simply a metaphor for the unhappy family. A cognitive framework reveals new implications of the influential relationship between subject and object, delineating the tangible interaction between time, mind/bodies and things.

Despite this reluctance to focus on anthropomorphism in and of itself, within the last two decades a new space for the discussion of the relationship between humans and objects has

213 John Ruskin, Selections and Essays (New York: Palala Press, 2016), 117–30. 214 Elizabeth C Inglesby, “‘Expressive Objects’: Elizabeth Bowen’s Narrative Materializes,” Modern Fiction Studies 53, no. 2 (2007): 306, https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2007.0041. 215 See, for example Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 216 Cristina Ferreira-Pinto, “The Fantastic, the Gothic, and the Grotesque in Contemporary Brazilian Women’s Novels,” Chasqui 25, no. 2 (1996): 71–72, https://doi.org/10.2307/29741285. 70

emerged. A new ‘material turn’ has opened up the theoretical landscape, encompassing the social and cultural lives embedded in and emanating from objects.217 This has involved a pivot away from sharp distinctions between animate and inanimate, subject and object, which asks ‘why and how we use objects to make meaning, to make or remake ourselves’.218 In particular, my research has benefitted greatly from Brown’s thing theory, which considers social, emotional, and psychological relationships between humans and things, and reads subject-object interactions as relational.219 Broadly, scholars of the new material turn such as Brown have created a paradigm which sees objects as more than cultural signifiers, more than sociological tools, more than furnishings for individual identity.

Other critical works have informed my theoretical approach through their exploration of the connection between time and objects. Bakhtin’s seminal work on the chronotope explores ‘the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature’.220 Bakhtin underlines the importance of this connectedness for the analysis of literary works, positing the chronotope as formally constitutive of literary genres. However, despite asserting the ‘temporal and spatial determinations are inseparable from one another’221, this connection is not fully unpacked in Bakhtin’s work. Indeed, Bakhtin acknowledges this in The Dialogic Imagination: ‘We do not pretend to completeness or precision in our theoretical formulations and definitions’.222 In other areas of literary criticism, scholars who address the human-object relationship through spiritual or metaphysical (such as Tischleder, Turkle, and Inglesby223), or even psychoanalytical

217 See: Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Isobel Armstrong, “Bodily Things and Thingly Bodies: Circumventing the Subject- Object Binary,” in Bodies and Things in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, ed. Katharina Boehm (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Bill Brown, “The Bodies of Things,” in Bodies and Things in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, ed. Katharina Boehm (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Sherry Turkle, Evocative Objects: Things We Think With (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011); Katharina Boehm, Bodies and Things in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Babette Bärbel Tischleder, The Literary Life of Things: Case Studies in American Fiction (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2014). 218 Brown, A Sense of Things, 4. 219 Brown, “The Bodies of Things.” 220 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 15. 221 Bakhtin, 2. 222 Bakhtin, 3. 223 Turkle, Evocative Objects; Inglesby, “Expressive Objects”; Tischleder, The Literary Life of Things. 71

(Papapetros and Orlando224) frameworks are in sympathy with ATS’s notion of the myriad, subtle and often unconscious ways in which objects can influence and change us. However, again these approaches leave the human/physical world relationship only partially defined: they are not specific about the mechanisms through which objects act on the embodied mind, and therefore present object-influence in unspecific terms. My research zeroes in on a particular aspect of the subject-object relation – the connection between subjective time and anthropomorphised objects.

Such a focus benefits more than simply the text discussed in this chapter: while ATS – a biological process of a mind embodied, enacted and embedded within variable circumstances, cultures and societies – could certainly not be expected to appear in a uniform manner nor in all literary texts, it does provide an interesting perspective on the human-object relations in a variety of novels, spanning genres and contexts. Though within the scope of this chapter I can mention them only in passing, ATS is present in many narrative arcs. As a biological phenomenon, ATS is common to humans rather than specific cultures or contexts. However, for obvious reasons it is most relevant to novels that share thematic interest in time, consciousness, and anthropomorphism. As examples of novels that explore this thematic intersection, throughout my analysis I will briefly mention two other Australian novels preoccupied with time and mutable identity, Patrick White’s The Twyborn Affair225 and Sumner Locke Elliott’s Careful, He Might Hear You.226 I will also continue a discussion of the gothic tradition that foreground anthropomorphic relations between character and object. Yet while the gothic traffics in extreme emotional states and pathological minds, ATS is an everyday phenomenon equally at home in realist fiction. This is why I have focused my argument through a realist work: to emphasize the everyday quality of ATS, illustrating that it requires no extreme circumstance or poetic mode to be present. Gorton’s The Life of Houses, as a realist novel with a modernist interest in subjective time, objects, and their role in conscious experience, is conducive to this project in many ways. Indeed, its modernist sensibilities place the novel within the context of another genre particularly congenial to

224 Francesco Orlando, Obsolete Objects in the Literary Imagination: Ruins, Relics, Rarities, Rubbish, Uninhabited Places, and Hidden Treasures, trans. Daniel Seidel and Gabriel Pihas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016); Spyros Papapetros, On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 225 Patrick White, The Twyborn Affair (Sydney: Random House Australia, 2011). 226 Sumner Locke Elliott, Careful, He Might Hear You (Sydney: Picador, 1997). 72

exploration of internal experiences and external influences. In To the Lighthouse – a novel to which The Life of Houses is often linked227 – Woolf explicitly muses on the relationships between humans and objects:

It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational tenderness thus… as for oneself. (87)

This resonates with the premise of ATS: the animation of the inanimate lends an experience of confluence between individual and object. Such a sense of affinity, even synonymy with inanimate objects is delicately woven through Lisa Gorton’s The Life of Houses. The novel’s Woolfian preoccupation with interiors – both of minds and houses – is signalled in not only the title’s anthropomorphism but its allusion to Woolf herself. A recent biography entitled

The Lives of Houses: Woolf and Biography228 details the various homes and spaces in which Woolf lived during her creative life, an interest clearly contiguous with Gorton’s exploration of ‘property, and how people’s feelings for the places that they inhabit can shape their

lives’.229 Filtering through the essential human experiences bound up in time, objects and identity, The Life of Houses thematically resonates with a complex genealogy of literary tradition. A cognitive lens which foregrounds and unpacks the novel’s treatment of these issues highlights how the novel negotiates its own generic relationship to a number of literary modes, from the gothic through to modernism.

As well as this generic positioning, certain aspects of plot place The Life of Houses in dialogue with a number of other texts: particularly the movement of a protagonist into a new home or location. Focusing on Kit’s stay at her grandparents’ house – the sudden inhabiting of a new space – in the context of ATS draws links between Gorton’s novel and Patrick White’s The Twyborn Affair, when, during the middle section of the novel, the protagonist, Eddie/Edith, moves out to the outback to work as a farmhand. Continuing the theme of Australian contemporary literature, Careful, He Might Hear You tells another story about a

227 John Kinsella, “The Collapse of Space: On Lisa Gorton’s The Life of Houses,” Cordite Poetry Review (blog), October 31, 2015, 1, http://cordite.org.au/reviews/kinsella-gorton/. 228 Alison Booth, “The Lives of Houses: Woolf and Biography,” in A Companion to Virginia Woolf, ed. Jessica Berman (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2016), 11–26, https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118457917.ch1. 229 Lisa Gorton, “Back Cover,” in The Life of Houses (Sydney: Giramondo, 2015). 73

young person – nicknamed PS – staying in a relative’s large, unfriendly house, who in fact experiences a similar kind of time distortion to Kit in The Life of Houses. Other aspects of plot may make these texts conducive to the representation of ATS, linking them in a constellation of related narratives. The fact that the protagonist – the individual experiencing ATS – is a female in The Life of Houses is consistent with many of the other texts already mentioned in this thesis, such as those of The Body Artist and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, (in White’s novel the protagonist, Eddie/Edith, is genderqueer), and those in the following chapters, such as Alba in La casa de los espíritus. Socially constructed gender has real-life relevance to anthropomorphism: findings have suggested that ‘women might, in fact, be more likely, relative to men, to anthropomorphize… and then form close relationships with these anthropomorphized entities’.230

However, the valence of such a relationship – in each chosen text – is not necessarily straightforward, borne as it often is from a feeling of loneliness and isolation. Indeed, loneliness provides one of the motivational states which increases ‘the extent to which people either seek humanlike agency or use themselves or the concept ‘human’ as an inductive base when reasoning about other agents,’231 a driving force behind the anthropomorphic connections derived by the protagonists of these novels: Eddie/Edith, PS and especially Kit, for whom ‘solitude made a vacancy’ (37). A final, and perhaps most significant, similarity between these novels is that this anthropomorphic connection plays a role in the characters’ development and subsequently the trajectory of the plot. Though operating in different ways, the characters’ connection with their environment and the subsequent shift in their sense of time deeply affects their navigation of events, other characters and their own relational identity. In The Life of Houses, Kit’s developing identity is one of the narrative axes, and the novel insightfully sketches the effects of ATS on this development. This is made particularly evident by the narrative style, which distils fluctuating subjective experience, lucidly depicting both object relations and internal sensations of time in a way that enhances the novel’s aesthetic effects. Though many texts present the problem of how to understand the links between time, objects and identity, The Life of Houses is aptly positioned – generically, diegetically and stylistically – for the project of exploring ATS in literature.

230 Susan Fournier, Michael J. Breazeale, and Jill Avery, Strong Brands, Strong Relationships (London: Routledge, 2015), 215. 231 Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds, 59. 74

The unfolding of ATS and the ripples it creates in the lives of those who experience it is poignantly rendered in this narrative, deeply concerned as it is with the contours of human relationships – social, temporal, and spatial. Kit, staying in her grandparents’ large Sea House, finds that the ‘patient, unkind, immense’ (187) character of the decaying building is not only shaped by the interactions and relationships that unfold there, but seems to influence those relationships and interactions itself. An uneasy relationship is established between Kit and the house. Kit imputes anthropomorphic individuality to the property founded on physical, emotional and stereotyped influences, including a sense of its long history, its role within the collective memory of her own family, stereotypical conceptions of old and haunted houses, and Kit’s own physical and emotional experiences within it. This complex anthropomorphised identity has, both implicitly and explicitly, temporal properties, lending the house a feeling of temporal stagnation or suspension. It is imbued with a pastness that is not just historically situated but also ostensibly impervious to standard chronology, stalled in a liminal, uncertain temporal position out of place both in the present moment and in the past. This strange temporal tenor comes to shape Kit’s own sense of passing time while she’s in the house: her subjective time subtly synchronizes with that of the property, inducing a glacial sense of passing time which, for Kit, scarcely seems to progress, her hours ‘endless’ (130) and ‘vacant’ (114).

A cognitive perspective sensitive to the anthropomorphic relations and temporal changes in The Life of Houses reveals how the protagonist’s sense of time is tied to objects, and how this temporality is embedded in, and shapes, the narrative. However, this chapter has implications broader than any single text: one reason that the following method is significant is that anthropomorphic temporal synchronisation has not yet been adequately established by cognitive science. Indeed, it suggests that literary procedures uniquely articulate this phenomenon of ATS in their representation of anthropomorphism, their rendering of the experience of time, and their sensitivity to the flux between extra-bodily and intra-bodily influences on human subjectivity. Furthermore, my analytical animus moves beyond simply observing this phenomenon – the conservative aim of cognitive science – to observing how this phenomenon might unfold in the world and affect the social, emotional and existential aspects of our lives. 75

Such phenomenological approaches to literary texts which seek to capture something important about subjective experiences are well established, from Heidegger to Poulet and beyond. More recently, several critics have brought a cognitive materialist perspective to bear on literary interpretation, in doing so furthering our understanding of cognitive processes. Among others, Mary Thomas Crane finds evidence of an embodied linguistic-conceptual system in a number of Shakespeare’s works232; Ellen Spolsky looks to revenge tragedy to draw links between concepts of balance and a possible embodied motivation233; Patrick Colm Hogan examines how literature can influence our understanding of universals, for example romantic love234; and Nicola Shaughnessy’s studies of theatre have intervened in assumptions posited by neuropsychology about autism.235 However, though the motivations behind these studies resonates with my own, they are significantly different in kind. None use literature to propose a new cognitive phenomenon; none explicitly examine the cognitive unconscious; and, finally, none are researching in my specific area – temporal synchronisation between humans and objects.

1.2 Underpinnings of ATS in cognitive science

This chapter presents the process of transference between Kit and the house as potentially reflective of real-life relationships between humans and objects, demonstrating ATS as a neuropsychological mechanism. As explained in my introduction, the essential process

Animism and anthropomorphism are deeply embedded in our perceptions, interpretations and representations of our surroundings. Anthropomorphism, defined as ‘the attribution of human characteristics or behaviour to any other nonhuman entity in the environment’,236 is

232 Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain. 233 Ellen Spolsky, “The Biology of Failure, the Forms of Rage, and the Equity of Revenge,” in The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 34–54. 234 Patrick Colm Hogan, “Literary Universals,” in Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2010), 37. 235 Nicola Shaughnessy, Affective Performance and Cognitive Science: Body, Brain and Being (London: A&C Black Publishers, 2013). See also Johnson’s thesis on the representation of brain-mind states in contemporary novels, which affirms ‘the power of Literature not just as evidence for the knowledge generated by the processes of Cognitive Science, but as a process that itself generates potent and relevant knowledge about the brain and mind that must be included in our understandings of cognition’.Alex Johnson, “Literature and Cognitive Science” (Master of Arts, Victoria University of Wellington, 2012), 7, http://researcharchive.vuw.ac.nz/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10063/2148/thesis.pdf?sequence=2. 236 Urquiza-Haas and Kotrschal, “The Mind behind Anthropomorphic Thinking,” 167. 76

‘involuntary, mostly unconscious,’237 yet pervasive. However, anthropomorphism is often demoted to mere metaphoric expression, ‘solely as a phenomenon of language and especially of rhetoric’.238 It has been particularly unfairly treated by literary criticism, where it is largely ‘artificial’; a contrived ‘technique’,239 or the false perception declared by Ruskin’s pathetic fallacy. Yet cognitive scientific approaches underline the physical and psychological impact of objects. Using robots, Gazzola and his colleagues demonstrated in 2007 that similar brain regions are involved when reasoning about the behaviour of both human and nonhuman agents.240 As Robert Hart explains in his monograph A New Look at Humanism: In Architecture, Landscapes, and Urban Design,

What’s happening is that we explore, interpret, and come to understand [objects] with the same sensory systems, brain structures, experience, memories, and reasoning that we use to detect the qualities and inner thoughts of people. Our encounters may be far less intense, but we respond with the same innate structures of mind, body, and language, to what’s out-there.241

This parallel between human-human and human-object interactions holds broad possibilities for the influence of anthropomorphism, posing the question: what can current knowledge about human relationships reveal about human-object relationships? Vittorio Gallese, one of the discoverers of mirror neurons, suggests that the mirror neuron system’s role in embodied simulation provides one possible answer to this question. In 2015, he wrote ‘embodied simulation not only connects us to others, it connects us to our world—a world inhabited by natural and manmade objects’.242 Many other recent works – for example, Malgrave’s Architecture and Embodiment, are interested in exploring the ways in which our bodies ‘simulate’ the physical spaces around us. These simulation bodily systems are generally used

237 Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds, v. 238 Guthrie, 124. 239 ‘Anthropomorphism - Definition and Examples’; See also ‘Anthropomorphism | Literary Devices’; ‘Anthropomorphism Examples and Definition’. 240 Valeria Gazzola et al., “The Anthropomorphic Brain: The Mirror Neuron System Responds to Human and Robotic Actions,” NeuroImage 35, no. 4 (2007): 1674–84, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2007.02.003. 241 Robert Lamb Hart, A New Look at Humanism: In Architecture, Landscapes, and Urban Design (New York: Oro Editions, 2016), 25. 242 Vittorio Gallese, “Architectural Space from Within,” in Architecture and Empathy (London: Routledge, 2015), 39. 77

to promote social synchrony between humans – however, our experience of places and spaces can also stimulate them. Here, the actual likeness of these non-human objects to humans – that is, whether they truly possess person-like traits – is ‘orthogonal to the psychological processes leading people to make such inferences in some circumstances and not in others’.243 In their studies of human interactions with robots, Chaminade et al. conclude that only ‘anthropomorphic rendering of the body is necessary to induce mirror system activity’,244 which means that any object, human-like or not, can bring about an internal simulation in the observer, as long as it is perceived anthropomorphically.

Though I use the general term ‘object’ to refer to the anthropomorphised houses in my texts, ‘house’ and ‘home’ are also, in the words of Coolen and Meesters, ‘subsystems of the environment’.245 They have emotional resonances and affordances that are specific to the nature of dwelling and homemaking: houses are multidimensional, both ‘concepts, spaces, and objects’.246 The following chapter takes account of the specificity of houses through my spatial analysis and exploration of the psychological dimensions of inhabiting. However, cognitively speaking, it is not clear that there are significant differences in the way that we anthropomorphise objects, environments, or other entities, organic or manmade. As anthropologist Guthrie outlines, individuals ‘animate houses, furniture, clothing and portraits;… no object is too large or too small’.247 The various targets of our anthropomorphism - be it a robot, house, or piece of technology - all engage the same neural network: the ‘social-information processing’ centre, in the words of Watson et al.248 Key to anthropomorphism is that, of course, an anthropomorphised target is no longer a lifeless object, but rather a humanoid body - regardless of its actual material form.

243 Waytz, Epley, and Cacioppo, “Social Cognition Unbound,” 59. 244 Chaminade, Hodgins, and Kawato, “Anthropomorphism Influences Perception of Computer-Animated Characters’ Actions,” 211. 245 Henny Coolen and Janine Meesters, “Editorial Special Issue: House, Home and Dwelling,” Journal of Housing and the Built Environment 27, no. 1 (April 1, 2012): 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10901-011-9247- 4. 246 Brette Gabel, “Abandoned Homes and Haunted Houses” (Master of Arts, OCAD University, 2014), 1. 247 Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds, 58. 248 Rebecca Watson et al., “People-Selectivity, Audiovisual Integration and Heteromodality in the Superior Temporal Sulcus,” Cortex 50 (January 1, 2014): 125, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2013.07.011. 78

In Gorton’s novel, (and, as I will look at later, Allende’s and Castagnet’s work), what is occurring is a blend of ‘interpretive’ anthropomorphism, or the attribution of human intentions and emotions to non-human agents based on their behaviour, and ‘imaginative’ anthropomorphism, which represents imaginary characters as human-like. Since houses are not animate, and do not exhibit behaviour, the expressions, postures, perceptions and emotional stances that are perceived in the houses are not based on actual movements or actions, but rather imagined ones. However, this imaginary behaviour is sometimes (though not always) an interpretation of the house’s mechanical movements (such as doors opening) and physical state (disrepair, orderliness, etc), and the perceptive abilities ascribed to the house sometimes rest on actual or implicit functions of the house and furniture: e.g. a room full of mirrors seems to watch its inhabitants. Movement, perception and action (both actual and imaginatively implied), are all interpreted as biological in an anthropomorphised object. The literature on anthropomorphism doesn’t generally distinguish between motion, perception and action, considering them all to be intrinsically linked in the areas of the brain which deal with social cognition.249 According to Wheatley, Milleville and Martin, this posterior superior temporal sulcus, part of the social processing networks in the brain, is activated by the perception of moving shapes as ‘animate’.250

This neural activation has wider implications – including, notably, in the realm of time perception. Author of The Literary Life of Things, Babette Tischleder suggests literature’s innate congeniality to such a project: literary texts ‘spotlight the cultural, ecological, psychological, affective, perceptive and aesthetic dimensions of how people relate to inanimate objects and envision these relations’.251 The sensitivity of literary works to the complexity of both material and human engagement allows them to explore such interactions between time, humans and the objects in our environment as those involved in ATS.

Part 2. Analysis of time in The Life of Houses

249 Urquiza-Haas and Kotrschal, “The Mind behind Anthropomorphic Thinking.” 250 Thalia Wheatley, Shawn C. Milleville, and Alex Martin, “Understanding Animate Agents: Distinct Roles for the Social Network and Mirror System,” Psychological Science 18, no. 6 (June 1, 2007): 469–74, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01923.x. 251 Tischleder, The Literary Life of Things, 18. 79

Speaking to the Sydney Morning Herald, poet and author of The Life of Houses, Lisa Gorton, gives insight into the foundations of her novel, revealing her fascination with ‘a strong feeling for possession, property, which can be a trap for children born into that obsession with the past’.252 These topics provide the scaffolding for the following analysis: a strong feeling (both in the physical and emotional senses of the word) for property and strong ties to the past are the defining themes of my reading of ATS within the novel. As I have already outlined, as she visits her grandparent’s house during a time of family crisis, the co- protagonist Kit forges a complex, ambivalent relationship with the house, based on an anthropomorphic conception constructed from physical, emotional and stereotyped influences. The house’s anthropomorphised identity has, both implicitly and explicitly, temporal properties: time, for the house, slows to the point where it sometimes appears to stop, failing to progress altogether. This temporal mode begins to imbue Kit’s own experience of passing time, a shift which, far from trivial, resounds deeply across her own unsteady sense of self.

The Life of Houses was published in 2015, and as a result has not yet garnered broad critical response. Reviews have lauded the novel’s treatment of space, property, and place: Jane Sullivan writes that Gorton is ‘not so much interested in telling a straightforward story as in constructing spaces: houses, rooms, places where people search for a self’.253 In his review, John Kinsella takes a socio-political approach to the spatial tensions within the narrative254; in another, Geoff Page focuses on the emotional valences of the novel’s treatment of space.255 There is also an acknowledgement of the significance of time in the story: Kinsella describes the narrative as unfolding ‘in a simulacrum of real time’, a history of ‘lives that can’t be finished’.256 Kerryn Goldsworthy, in the Sydney Review of Books, speaks of ‘the interminable family history of Sea House’.257 These explicitly temporal sensations – of a time outside of time, a sense of moving through chronology without progressing – is, according to

252 Sullivan, “Lisa Gorton: Prize-Winning Poet Writes Her First Novel.” 253 Sullivan. 254 Kinsella, “The Collapse of Space,” 1. 255 Geoff Page, “Book Review: The Life of Houses, by Lisa Gorton,” The Sydney Morning Herald, May 8, 2015, http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/book-review-the-life-of-houses-by-lisa-gorton- 20150509-1mubpc.html. 256 Kinsella, “The Collapse of Space.” 257 Kerryn Goldsworthy, “The Life of Houses | Lisa Gorton | Review |,” Sydney Review of Books, September 25, 2015, http://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/the-life-of-houses-lisa-gorton/. 80

Kinsella and Goldsworthy, both experienced by the family and seemingly bound to the property itself. But what remains to be addressed is specifically how the house – the space, the objects within it – influence the characters, from either a physical or psychological point of view. An unanswered question lingers: why is Kit’s experience of time linked to her sense of place? I propose that cognitive criticism is uniquely poised to examine this question, able to clarify the way that our experience of time, place and people are inextricably linked within the embodied mind.

‘Embodied’ is a key descriptor here, as it underpins the highly body-based nature of the relationship that Kit develops with the house. In animating and anthropomorphising the building, Kit subconsciously begins to see the house as a person, which stimulates the physical response of motor empathy: the first step in temporal synchronisation. Early evidence of the process begins as we see, through Kit’s perspective, the similes and symbolism with which the house is endowed its own biological anatomy: ‘chairs with legs like solid calves’ (40); its ornaments marked by the ‘dried out residue of veins’ (39). The reciprocal effect of this mapping is also evident – not only is the house analogous to a human body, but a human body becomes analogous to a house, as Kit sees as she describes a portrait hanging in the halls: ‘The enormous bosom was upholstered: the body like furniture, solid as the hair she sat so straight-backed on’ (42). In Kit’s mind, her grandparents’ bodies have also become more edifice than human, an extension of the house. Just as the house is unmoving, ‘patient’, ‘immense’ (187), and ‘vast’ (19), Kit gazes at her grandmother and is shocked by ‘more than her weight, the passivity of Audrey’s body’ (94); ‘Audrey’s flesh was solid: massive; it walled her in’ (22, my italics). Audrey is part of the décor: the roses on the carpet match her ‘rose-printed nighty’ (91), the wallpaper of ‘faded green roses’ (27) matches her dress of ‘green and brown flowers’ (22). Equally, Kit’s grandfather Patrick is, like the heritage house itself, ‘consciously obsolete’ (25). Just as the house is impersonal, its careful decorations and ornaments ‘evidence that made no pattern, told her nothing’ (39), Kit describes how her grandfather’s ‘impassive politeness, his withdrawn and elaborate courtesy, left only his looks to impress themselves’ (23). Her grandparents are indelibly bound to the house, fixed within its walls: ‘Kit could not picture them elsewhere – felt, against reason, that they had lived in this kitchen always’ (26). Indeed, the grandparents rarely leave, living the same daily routine amongst the dusty stories of the house. The long history of the family is irrevocably tied to the history of the house, to the extent that they are indistinguishable – highlighted as Kit struggles to sort through her grandmother’s archives: ‘She pasted this onto 81

the sheet marked Family, early history of, and then wondered whether she should have pasted it onto Furniture, proper care of’ (96). There are similarities here with Sumner’s Careful, He Might Hear You, in which an orphan, PS, is taken by his rich English aunt, Vanessa, to live with her in her home: the Big House. Despite a very different storyline, there are familiar moments in both Life of Houses and Careful, He Might Hear You, with the two imposing buildings – the Sea House and the Big House – operating as both stage and central characters in the stories. As in Gorton’s novel, the Big House is anthropomorphised, conceptualised along similar lines as its inhabitants: ‘As they pushed open the iron gate and stood in a circular red-gravel driveway, looking up at the house, Lila thought that in an extraordinary way it looked like Vanessa. It had her look!’258 This sense, as poetically clarified by these novels, that the inhabitants are almost an extension of the house itself speaks to the complex interactions between humans and the objects in our environment. It is not simply a unidirectional relationship, with the inhabitants of the house changing the spaces in which they live, but also the inhabitants influenced by the very objects with which they have surrounded themselves. This interrelation has recently been recognised by sociology and psychology. Sherry Turkle notes in Evocative Objects: Things We Think With that ‘some objects are experienced as part of the self’.259 However literature has long been aware of the subtle blending over time between object and subject, how material things can shape the lives of individuals.

That Kit perceives the property as more than a simple inanimate object is further revealed by the proliferation of anthropomorphic metaphors: ‘Kit imagined the house beside them settling back into its own shape in the dark’ (19). Biological movements and active verbs animate the house: ‘the house grown vast’ (19); ‘it loomed, as if on a hill’ (130); ‘the brown-shadowed hall, lit with glass lamps on chains, led past rooms of an almost touchable darkness’ (27); ‘corrugated iron curved to meet iron lace and iron pillars’ (38). Parts of the house – the rooms and objects – have their own life, history and character. They are often attributed a sense of self, (‘light had returned the room to itself’ [36]) and agency (‘as if by its own mechanism, the door was swinging open’ [138]). Ornaments have secrets, ‘each with its swallowed treasure’ (39). Interestingly, the Sea House’s role in the staging and preserving of the family history is not merely passive – the house actively obfuscates the past: ‘the house kept the

258 Elliott, Careful, He Might Hear You, 111. 259 Turkle, Evocative Objects, 1. 82

unreality of her mother’s childhood’ (19). Nor is its inheritance into the hands of the next generation a passive act, as hinted in the repetition of the semantically ambiguous ‘this house will come to you’ (43; 94). Indeed the house is not only animate but sentient: when Kit thinks back on her time in the house, she reflects, ‘that first morning at Sea House things had not known her: chairs, boxes, little tables’ (215). Following Turner and Lakoff’s conceptual metaphor theory, such metaphors are not simply poetic devices, but can shape and reveal perceptual experience.260 Considered as a constellation, these anthropomorphic metaphors are not mere literary flourishes but revealing of Kit’s conscious and unconscious apprehension of the house as a living being.

This anthropomorphic perception is the grounding point for the relationship that develops between the house and Kit, and for the complex influence that it comes to wield over her experiences. As I mentioned earlier, three main dimensions – physical, emotional and stereotypical – influence this relationship, specifically forging Kit’s anthropomorphised concept of the house as a being which subjectively experiences time in a certain way. The following analysis foregrounds metaphoric and linguistic patterns which reveal these three dimensions, and how this sense of the ‘house’s time’ shapes Kit’s own experience of time during her stay.

2.1 The Sea House’s physical influence

The relationship between Kit and her grandparent’s Sea House starts with the body, as the house exerts a physical influence on Kit while she is enclosed within its walls: ‘Those shadows the iron lace cast across the rug of enormous roses: she felt them imprint themselves in her’ (93). She is physically encompassed by its mass: ‘Kit stood in the house’s long shadow’ (38), almost as if Kit is now one of its ‘swallowed treasures’. A strong aspect of the house’s presence, as felt by Kit, is a sense of immobility more profound than the simple inaction of an inanimate object. Despite its decay, the house seems to have an enduring stillness, an immutability partly born from its persistence throughout the years. Even after leaving, Kit reflects that the furniture and ornaments ‘were there still. They had not changed’ (215). Its material composition reflects this sense of obdurate permanency: Kit frequently

260 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, “The Metaphorical Structure of the Human Conceptual System,” Cognitive Science 4, no. 1 (1980): 195–208. 83

focuses on ‘iron balustrades’ (19); the ‘wrought iron chairs and benches’ (38); ‘wrought iron table’ (124); ‘corrugated iron curved to meet iron lace and iron pillars’ (38); bare concrete steps’ (37); ‘furniture she would not be able to move an inch’ (27). As its influence over Kit deepens, a subtle bodily synchronisation begins. Kit soon adopts the property’s uneasy, tense stillness. Just as ‘the place was so still’ (130), the garden ‘stopped and uncalm’ (125), the surrounding tea tree dunes ‘a stopped grey sea’ (37), we find Kit often paused, a static figure, tensely watching: ‘she felt so stopped – past all response’ (122); ‘Kit sat very still’ (128); ‘Kit found herself stopped, scissors halfway across the paper’ (95). ‘Kit said nothing. She sat motionless’ (122). The repetition of ‘stopped’ (highlighted by the unusual use of its adjectival form) draws a semantic thread between descriptions of the property and descriptions of Kit, inviting an anthropomorphic analogy between their physical forms. This is underlined by the recurrent motif of photographs or pictures that runs through the novel: just as the house’s rooms seem ‘stagey, silent, flat as pictures’ (39), Kit feels ‘like the picture of somebody enjoying a view’ (37), both symbolically and literally rendering the physical parallel in their static postures.

Key to my argument about the nature of the relationship between Kit and the house is that there are striking parallels between this synchronisation and the motor resonance that occurs between people, or what some cognitive scientists such as Cullen have termed ‘motor anthropomorphization’,261 where the mirror neuron system is activated by an anthropomorphised sense of an object as another human body. The impassive stillness that Kit attributes to the house’s animated nature is subconsciously simulated within her own body. Like the house, she is still but not relaxed: self-consciously tense and alert, watching: ‘standing rigid’ (153); at night she spends ‘hours rigidly waiting’ (127); ‘Kit lay rigid’ (159). Her movements are ‘deliberate’ (126), marked by ‘unnatural care’ (127).262 This has some similarities with psychologists Bueno and Nather’s studies, in which participants observe photographs of people in various postures. When viewing tense yet static postures,

261 Cullen et al., “Individual Differences in Anthropomorphic Attributions and Human Brain Structure.” 262 The feeling is contributed to by the proximity of Kit’s grandparents. Her grandfather, Patrick, ‘moved with a precision that made Kit think of elbows and knees’ (127); ‘courtly, so fastidious’ (126). As mentioned above, in many ways the grandparents are figured as a part of the house. Although Kit doesn’t seem spend the majority of her visit actually with her grandparents, their presence and personalities help to shape the nature of the house itself, in her perception. The blurring of house and grandparents in Kit’s mind means that both work together to shape her sense of time. I have not focused on the latter, however, as I do not believe they are as crucial as the Sea House is to Kit’s shift in time sense and internal development. 84

participants experienced a slowing of their internal clocks, which was attributed to their unconsciously and imperceptibly simulating these postures.263 This parallels Kit’s own experience of simulating the house’s tense immobility: as I will explore below, this leads to a slowing, almost to the point of suspension, in her sense of time. Lexical continuities again draw this to the forefront of the narrative: just as the property, and then Kit’s body, are described as ‘stopped’ (37, 122, 125), so too the time that Kit spends in the house also seems to consist of ‘stopped hours’ (98).

However, Kit’s perception of the ‘house’s time’ (the subjective temporality associated with the house), is constructed from more than this intuitive feeling of the house’s stillness and immutability. The effect is reinforced by another aspect of the property’s physical reality – its darkness, a space where ‘morning itself was out of place’ (92). The overwhelming number of descriptions of this aspect of the house reveal that its darkness is not just a physical fact but has also seeped into Kit’s concept of the house’s nature. Kit’s emphasis of ‘utter darkness’ (36), ‘dark halls’ (46), ‘so much dark’ (31), ‘almost touchable darkness’ (31), ‘the damp- smelling sudden dimness’ (127), ‘ceilings and corners lost in shadows’ (39), where ‘all the furniture had been painted black’ (40), ‘a dark that was not empty but pricklingly alive’ (36), underlines darkness as an essential part of the house’s nature. Here the Sea House again corresponds with the Big House in Careful, He Might Hear You, which is repeatedly depicted as dark or poorly lit: the narrative describes ‘the shadowy house’,264 where:

Thick wisteria vines clung to the columned side porch and gave the drawing room an eerie, marine light which touched the walls and ceiling with a greenish tinge and, moving in the breeze, created rippling pools of shadows where light and shade moved like seaweed over the carpet, glimmering and darkening so that the room could have been underwater and they divers, exploring a sunken liner.265

Interestingly, this description of the Big House parallels one of the Sea House:

263 Nather and Bueno, “Static Images with Different Induced Intensities of Human Body Movements Affect Subjective Time.” 264 Elliott, Careful, He Might Hear You, 147. 265 Elliott, 114. 85

The blinds were drawn in these rooms. The half-light gave them an underwater look. The tasselled curtains, the silver candlesticks, even the furniture seemed suspended in a watery dimness. (36)

This affects the sense of time that the characters associate with these houses. The two young people staying in them intuitively attribute ‘the common [human] experience that subjective time seems to pass slower in darkness than in bright light’266 to these houses, anthropomorphically using human experience of subjective time to map the temporal contours of the properties’ character. Since humans perceive time as passing more slowly in dim lighting, and as Kit anthropomorphically perceives the house as a structure analogous to the human, she intuitively transfers this temporal tendency to her understanding of the house’s own subjective experience of time. The house’s time is slowed, suspended like its furniture in the dimness.

The effect is also constructed phonologically: as linguist Sadowski describes, ‘there is a sub- type of synaesthetic iconicity in which perception of light or colour is evoked transmodally through sound, as in iconizing brightness and light colours by high or front vowels (e.g. gleam, glitter, glimmer) and darkness or dark colours by lower back vowels (as in gloom)’.267 In other words, there is an analogy between the use of back vowels (vowels that are articulated near the rear of the vocal cavity268) and the sensation of darkness.269 From Kit’s perspective, the language of the novel harnesses the association between darkness and back vowels, as descriptions of the house are coupled with repeated dark or back vowels, such as the open-mid back rounded vowel [ɔ] as in ‘ornate’ (38), wrought (22, 38, 124), haunted (27, 40, 79, 133), underwater (38), ‘the room was full of days indoors’ (92), it had a ‘layered indoorness: it absorbed sound’ (127). This is again seen in the open- mid back unrounded vowel [ʌ], as in ‘dusky’ or ‘dusk-coloured’ (45, 22) ‘dust’ (27, 128, 139), ‘crumbling’ (184) and ‘rust’ (38, 39), as well as the open back rounded vowel [ɒ] as in

266 Jurgen Aschoff and Serge Daan, “Human Time Perception in Temporal Isolation: Effects of Illumination Intensity,” Chronobiology International 14, no. 6 (1997): 586. 267 Piotr Sadowski, From Interaction to Symbol: A Systems View of the Evolution of Signs and Communication (New York: John Benjamins Publishing, 2009), 220. 268 “Back Vowels,” accessed May 25, 2016, http://facweb.furman.edu/~wrogers/phonemes/phono/back.htm. 269 Ivan Fónagy, Languages Within Language: An Evolutive Approach (Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 2001), 342. 86

‘dark’ (20, 21, 22, 29, 36, 41, etc.) or ‘vast’ (19), the close back vowel [u] or the elongated [u:], both found in ‘the cool dark of Kit’s room was a pool of water’ (136). This phonological patterning articulates Kit’s half-conscious impression of the house as characterised by darkness rather than light. This perception of the house as a living entity which, like humans, experiences time slowly in darkness influences Kit’s perception of time during her stay, despite the fact that she herself spends equal time in bright light. Highlighting this linguistic patterning suggests the ability of literary prose to represent the nuances in the perceptions we have of the surrounding world through non-lexical forms of meaning, perhaps showing literature’s congeniality to investigations of these subtle aspects of cognition.

The combination of embodied simulation of the house’s tense stillness, and the sense of slowed time that the house’s darkness invokes, leads Kit to synchronise with the house’s ‘sense of time’ as the relationship develops between them. Her subjective time slows to a crawl. Glumly, she feels the newfound weight of the elongated, seemingly interminable hours: ‘the seven days stretched ahead of her’ (45); she despairingly repeats ‘An hour to wait’ (113), ‘An hour to wait…’ (114); ‘Midday, said her phone. Hours still: what should she do with hours?’ (191); ‘this was every loose-end hour’ (114). Time moves so slowly that its progress seems to have suspended: ‘Kit had a frozen sense of them all’ (85). This resonates with PS’s experience in the Big House: ‘The morning dragged on endlessly’.270 He worries, ‘suppose he had to spend the night again, spend all the long tomorrow and the next day and – ’.271 For both PS and Kit, the houses seem to leave them ‘suspended’ (36) in this stretched time. For PS, ‘everything had come to a full stop’.272 With Kit, this sense of suspension is also evoked through the motif of portraits and photographs. This symbolically depicts the house and its inhabitants as captured in a snapshot, a moment that has already passed. Just as the rooms of the house are ‘stagey, silent, flat as pictures’, with corridors ‘measured out with family photos’ (39), Kit feels ‘like the picture of somebody view’ (37). Being in the house was ‘like glimpsing her mother through a camera lens: not young – impossible to think of her as young – but distant and reduced’ (38). Later, as she stands with her grandmother and her mother’s friend, Scott, ‘Kit saw all three of them facing each other like people in a photograph, an instant exposed and final’ (139). In this light, reality seems artificial: a flimsy

270 Elliott, Careful, He Might Hear You, 130. 271 Elliott, 146. 272 Elliott, 82. 87

pretence at true presence: ‘Her despair extended to everything she looked at: useless, immense, a painted scene’ (114). This motif is reflected in the narrative time, at the level of individual scenes, which often are described as still-shots rather than moving picture: ‘That moment, she saw the scene as if from above. This ground where they were closed in the curve of the drive. There, the bright rectangle of the roof… A scene like a map’ (135). Such an experience of being anchored to a past moment, rather than a present that moves freely through time, is reflected linguistically in expressions of Kit’s temporal frame of reference. She is linguistically positioned as a stationery observer of time’s passage: ‘the seven days stretched ahead of her’ (45); ‘The day was ahead of her, a blank’ (36); upon leaving the house, ‘Kit had been surprised by how far the day had gone ahead of her’ (98). In these expressions, the encoded deictic motion shows time’s trajectory progressing away from Kit as she seemingly remains a static observer, just as she sensed the house is frozen, ‘stopped’ in time.

Structurally, the glacial pace of the narrative reflects this shift in Kit’s time with its lack of external plot development: the story takes place over the space a week, which Kit largely spends walking through the house and surrounding areas, using the spare time on inner musing. To use Gérard Genette’s terms, there is an anisochrony of story/discourse relations.273 This is partly a result of ‘stretch’: the discourse-time, relative to the short story- time (the clock time of the narrative world), is long.274 In Popova and Cuffari’s typology of pacing in narrative, they describe this ‘decelerated temporal perspective’, where the discourse or ‘the verbal medium, in other words, slow[s] down the passage of time’.275 This is highlighted by the perspective of the secondary protagonist of the story, Kit’s mother, Anna. While the story follows Anna, the discourse time is full of ellipses: it jumps around in time and place, whereas Kit’s entire seven days are documented – she goes on long walks, explores the house, speaks to her grandparents and aunt. The narrative follows almost her every move, and the detailing of her thoughts and reflections further dilate the seconds and hours: there are many pauses, and the reader experiences the story minutely, the way that Kit does.276 The dilation of the discourse-time is partly effected through the micro-focus in scene

273 Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse (New York: Cornell University Press, 1980), 86. 274 Here I use a term developed by Chatman in the analysis of film time. See: Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (London: Cornell University Press, 1980), 68. 275 Popova and Cuffari, “Temporality of Sense-Making in Narrative Interactions,” 42. 276 Notably, when we speak of discourse time, often this refers to a metonymic substitution of reading time: as Genette notes, ‘we must first take [this] displacement for granted, since it forms part of the 88

descriptions, rendering Kit’s sensory perceptions in magnified focus. For example, under a tree out the front of the house, Kit

lay on her back in the grass. Over her the seed heads of the grasses filled with pale light… Down here in the grass the noise of insects was immense. She could hear a sort of creaking of branches and, as if from far off, the rush of wind. Under her head she felt the edges of crooked and broken grass stalks and was conscious first of a general itchiness and then of an ant tracking through her hair (135).

This dilation is also achieved syntactically through the accumulation of clauses: ‘Crochet antimacassars on the armchairs, tasselled Persian rugs the size of doormats: the room had a layered indoorness: it absorbed sound’ (127); ‘The room was full of days indoors: loose scraps of paper on the filing boxes; Reader’s Digests stacked on the floor; knick-knacks and pill bottles on the bedside table’ (92). Here, both the slowed time and the house’s cluttered insularity is syntactically symbolised: noun phrases are stacked like the ornaments, odds and ends – each colon a doorway. The effect stretches out the narrative pace, and although Kit’s and the narration’s perspective are not reducible to one another, as I will discuss later, the two are woven together.

As the time goes slowly by, Kit is forced to fill the creeping moments with observation, both of the world around her, and of herself: ‘Kit was instantly conscious of… herself: freckled, pale, indistinct, standing there in her old T-shirt’ (82); she feels ‘a nervy self-consciousness’ (39); ‘painfully conscious of her hands’ (26). She minutely observes the people around her. She watches her aunt Treen:

consciously relaxing, she lay in her low cane armchair and wiggled her toes. Her shins, beneath knee-length khaki shorts, were tracked with veins that opened on one shin into a bruise the colour of her navy socks (124).

Scott, her mother’s friend, is also subjected to this intense scrutiny:

narrative game, and therefore accept literally the quasi-fiction of Erzählzeit’ (1980, 34). However, within the scope of this chapter I will not discuss the precise relation between discourse time and reading time. 89

He walked with his chin up, shoulders back. Sweat had run down the back of his neck, darkening his shirt. Seeing him from behind exaggerated the difference between his broad torso and the short legs that with rolling steps, knees working sideways, ankles turned in, propelled him over the sand (117).

It is not simply other people that Kit watches, but herself. The effect is isolating, disassociating her from the present moment to the point where Kit feels ‘at a distance even from herself’ (81), invoking a sense of third-person observation which is structurally reflected by the free-indirect narrative mode. The dilation of Kit’s experience of time and the heightened awareness it induces become important in her identity development. The spatial remove from Kit’s immediate perspective – both stylistically and diegetically – means that she ‘sees’ herself as from outside herself, ‘uneasily conscious’ (112) of her own body, watching her actions as if they were another’s. Though at the time this makes her feel unable to relate to other characters, it actually affords her a deep level of self-analysis. This helps her to navigate her family’s, and her own, expectations of who she should be, while dealing with the complex emotional shifts that come with growing up and finding one’s place within the world.

2.2 Emotional influences

The relationship Kit develops with the house is also partially wrought by the property’s emotionally charged context within the history of her family. The unspoken anger, sadness and long absences within the family have leaked into the sombre, resentful mood of the property itself. Notably, from Kit’s perspective we find out about the house’s affective characteristics before the family’s, as if the house’s nature had shaped, rather than been shaped by, the dynamics of the family relationships. It seems as if the house had played a hand in its inhabitant’s tragedies and dysfunction, starting with Kit’s distant antecedents, George and Katie: ‘Four children, they had. Two died – sad story… it was Katie who left the house to your grandmother… Audrey was born the year the first daughter died, you see. Audrey’s brother was always very angry about it, thought it was unfair’ (42). These undercurrents of loss and anger stalk the later generations: Kit’s grandparents are chilly and unaffectionate, even towards each other; Kit’s aunt Treen miscarried, lost her first love and now lives in the house taking care of her parents; and Kit’s mother is almost entirely 90

estranged from her family, carrying her own scars from the childhood she spent in the house. Resonating with Mark Turner’s explanation that ‘we often feel when we look at a physical object that it ‘speaks’ to us of its history, that is, what we know of its history is ‘expressed’ by the object’,277 for Kit this history comes to imbue the nature of the property. In the narrative, Kit’s personification of the house is not a simple projection: the property is depicted not as a passive stage for these negative emotions but as an entity which both experiences and even perpetuates them. The house’s presence is ‘patient, unkind’ (187), the ‘cool’ of the rooms (136) both physical and emotional, and this ambience is embedded in the family dynamics: ‘If the atmosphere of the house was thick with feeling it was not their feeling for her – not for each other, either’ (80). The dark, uncomfortable house maintains an unwelcoming distance, confronting its guests with ‘rooms full of silence’ (27); it is solitary and ‘private’ (38), actively holding itself apart from its inhabitants, ‘keeping itself back’ from visitors (184). Kit recognises this, and anthropomorphically attributes emotive and emotional stances to the house: ‘The quiet of the house, now, was against her. There under the coathooks she felt a gathered antagonism’ (40-41); ‘Feeling for the light switch, she felt the house as a single presence: patient, opposed’ (159). Like the Sea House, the Big House in Careful, He Might Hear You is explicitly animated and openly hostile: ‘Remote and withdrawn, it sat on a rise of ground, admiring itself, rearing up with sharp tiled roofs and tall chimneys, in dark-red brick; the windows, hooded by canvas blinds, expressing nothing but mild surprise at the gall of this woman and child daring to come up the drive; defying them to come a step farther’278; ‘The big house was staring at them angrily with all its light son, as they went up the long driveway. You’re late, it said’.279 This is echoed in The Life of Houses: ‘She sensed the wardrobe and the bright mirror watching her as if with an amused contempt’ (45). The house, like its inhabitants, seems discontent: ‘Only the tattiness of the wallpaper, cream, scattered with faded green roses, only the curtains, sun-bleached past any name for green, recalled the sea; a dissatisfied murmur, an uneasy damp smell haunting the room’ (27). These excerpts illustrate the complex nature of the relationship Kit develops with the house: it is both familiar and unfamiliar, part of her history and yet foreign and privately sombre.

277 Mark Turner, “The Cognitive Study of Art, Language, and Literature,” Poetics Today 23, no. 1 (2002): 10. 278 Elliott, Careful, He Might Hear You, 111. 279 Elliott, 244. 91

That Kit perceives the affective mood of the house illustrates not only that she relates to it as an anthropomorphised entity, but provides a further explanation for the associated temporal mode that she associates with the property. As previously described, through Kit’s perspective, the reader senses that the house is held in a time that is so slow-moving it even seems ‘stopped’. The subdued mood of the house is causally linked to this temporal profile, again through an analogy to human experiences of time during certain emotions. As Droit- Volet et al. explain, ‘when we are sad and depressed we have the feeling that the flow of time slows down. Every hour seems like an eternity, as if time had stopped’.280 The depressive emotional valence of the house – the lingering sadness of the past, the isolation and loneliness, the quiet resentment and disappointment – could, in a human being, potentially cause this sensation of hours dilating, ‘as if time had stopped’. As the house is anthropomorphically conceptualised as a being analogous to human, it follows that Kit subconsciously uses human experience of time as a reference point in attributing a subjective time to the property. Thus, the hours that pass within the house’s walls feel suspended, almost illegitimate in the world of linearity and progress: in Kinsella’s terms existing in ‘a simulacrum of real time’.281

The human perception of time as metaphorically spatial – foregrounded in conceptual metaphor theory – is important to the way in which Kit’s experience of time is represented in the novel.282 This sense of temporal unreality is metonymically depicted in the vague sense of architectural impossibility, as seen in descriptions of the halls opening endlessly, intricacies extending, secret drawers and unseen rooms – ‘so many walls, so many rooms full of silence’ (27). In this place, for Kit, time’s significance sometimes seems entirely lost: ‘In that shut-off room her breathing stood in for time itself’ (95); even the mechanisms of time-keeping in the house are outdated, belonging to history: ‘The makers of this clock went out of business in 1784 and the original case was destroyed in a sailing ship on the way here from England’ (95). Several expressions reveal the non-progressing temporality as paralleled in Kit’s own experience. Hours in the house are interminable: she thought ‘nothing, nothing to do. The place was so still… The afternoon was endless’ (130). Indeed this imagery carries a semantic

280 Droit-Volet, Fayolle, and Gil, “Emotion and Time Perception”; Shaun Gallagher, “Time, Emotion, and Depression,” Emotion Review 4, no. 2 (2012): 127–32. 281 Kinsella, “The Collapse of Space,” 3. 282 Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, 137. 92

continuity between descriptions of the house itself and of Kit’s experience of time. Just as her afternoon seems endless, the house has ‘dark halls opening endlessly out’ (19). Through Kit’s eyes the house’s corridors and passageways form ‘an intricacy extending in all directions’ (27), as another afternoon is ‘a stunned passivity extending in all directions’ (130). Just as the house’s ‘rooms were everywhere crowded and vacant’ (39), the property’s ‘paddocks not desolate but vacant’ (18), Kit describes her experience of time periods with the hypallage, ‘the day’s vacancy’ (131); again, ‘everything crowded and vacant: this every loose-end hour’ (114). This semantic repetition describing both Kit’s perception of the house and Kit’s perception of her own passing time explicitly yokes the two, inviting consideration of the link between Kit’s relationship with the house and her experience of time.

Although I don’t have the space in this chapter to explore Kit’s mother Anna’s own experiences of the Sea House, I will briefly mention that she too, as a child, felt the house’s temporal unreality, its inability to progress in time. When Anna thinks about Kit in her family home, it seems incongruous; impossible: ‘but that place was years ago…’ (73). Reflecting on her childhood, Anna recalls ‘… hours and hours. I used to spend whole afternoons on that bed, bored beyond anything… back then it was time touching itself’ (55). It is precisely this feeling that the time of the house scarcely progresses which comes to influence Kit’s own experience of time during her stay in the Sea House. A critical lens cognizant of both anthropomorphism and temporal synchronisation offers a framework with which to understand the similarities of Kit and Anna’s subjective time during their stays in the Sea House, without relegating their experiences to mere literary device, or dismissing it with vague or metaphysical explanations.

2.3 The influence of stereotyping

Stereotype activation also plays a role both the anthropomorphic conception of the house that Kit develops and the way it influences her. Though controversial, studies in social psychology on priming – pioneered by Meyer and Schvaneveldt – have shown that merely looking at a photograph or hearing words connotative of an elderly person can activate an embodied simulation of the stereotypically slow movements of that person.283 Chambon,

283 David Meyer and Roger Schvaneveldt, “Facilitation in Recognizing Pairs of Words: Evidence of a Dependence between Retrieval Operations,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 90, no. 2 (1971): 227– 34. 93

Droit-Volet and Niedenthal conducted a study which showed ‘a slowing down of the speed of the internal clock’ of participants while being shown photographs of elderly faces, concluding that ‘this finding is quite consistent with embodied cognition approaches to information processing’.284 In this example, the participant’s internal clocks were synchronising with an assumed or stereotyped idea of those older people’s movements, rather than any direct observation of reality. Subconscious stereotyping made the participants assume that they were stiff and slow moving, and it was this perception that they synchronised with. Such an effect could be reproduced, I argue, by the activation of the stereotype of an old, broken-down house. The age and extensive history of the family house locates the property within Kit’s stereotypical conception of historical edifices more broadly: ‘everywhere the smell of dust and mice’ (183); her grandparents repeatedly reminding her that ‘it’s got quite a history, this house’ (24); ‘it reminded her most of the heritage house that her class had visited on a school excursion’ (39). However, stereotyping the house as frail or elderly does not properly characterise the sense that Kit has of the Sea House. As explained above, it is its permanence throughout the years, its essential immutability, separate to its physical decay, which is crucial to Kit’s anthropomorphic sense of the house’s ontology: it exists throughout the years (Anna reflecting when she walks into her old bedroom that ‘the room itself was unchanged’ [183]); a static figure of the past. Through this, the house is pushed into the realm of the American gothic trope of the ‘haunted house’, affirmed by the its sinister presence and rumours of a resident ghost. Kit is frightened of the Sea House: ‘she would not look at the house. It loomed, as if on a hill’ (130); ‘shadows had crept out from under doors’ (130); ‘The quiet of the house, now, was against her’ (40). Kit’s grandfather Patrick explains, ‘It’s haunted, you know… Man called Winters built it. Not a nice man. Got a girl pregnant. She came and told him. He got his men to beat her’ (40). The activation of this gothic stereotype combines with Kit’s empirical knowledge of the house, resulting in a dynamic conception animated by descriptions which oscillate between both the specific (magnified close-ups, ‘in one corner, the wall-paper sagged loose’ [45], detail-crammed itemisations ‘chaise lounges, nesting tables, intricate decorative boxes, tapestried firescreens, sideboards, glass-fronted cabinets’ [38]) and the abstract (‘the half-light gave them an underwater look’ [38]; the pieces of the house are ‘evidence that made no pattern, told her nothing’ [39]). Like the ghost that haunts its halls, the Sea House is ‘a soft-edged pale shape, yes, but less a shape than a presence’ (186). Such a figuring of the house as both immanent

284 Chambon, Droit-Volet, and Niedenthal, “The Effect of Embodying the Elderly on Time Perception.” 94

and generalised points towards the multifaceted sense of the property within Kit’s mind, based on present sensations and perceptions as well as memory and imagination. This conception strongly influences Kit’s changing time: the stereotype of gothic hauntings activates a sense of temporal suspension. Like the ghost, the house is caught in limbo, unable to live simply in the present, instead existing within some uncertain moment in the past. Just as Patrick’s tales of the ghost constantly replay the same events (‘her grandfather’s stories were like wind-up mechanisms: they went a certain way and then stopped entirely’ [42]), the house is unable to move beyond a certain point in time. As mentioned above, the amorphous ‘plasticity’285 of the physical structure itself (as befits a stereotyped conception) feeds into the depiction of the property as outside natural laws of place and time:

Kit had never had what her father called a sense of direction and now was only aware of corners, many doors, an intricacy extending in all directions – an impression exaggerated, perhaps, by the childhood memory that had come back to her in the car. Still, she was not used to old houses: this one had so many walls, so many rooms full of silence… It seemed impossible that she would find her way about in it. (27)

Conceptual metaphor theory is again useful in accounting for the link between time and space, exploring the homologies between physical structures or spaces and the contours of the characters’ changing temporal experiences. The connection has been developed in a number of disciplines, including psychology (in the words of William James, ‘we see that in that time-world and the space-world alike’286) and also literary theorists such as Mikhail Bakhtin, who stresses that, ‘in the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible’.287 Anna, Kit’s mother, having lived in the house herself as a child, is familiar with the house’s position outside of chronology. When Kit enters into this space, her embodiment of the Sea House’s liminal place in time, outside of normal chronology, makes her mother feel as though they no longer occupy the same moment: ‘It seemed almost impossible that this was the same hour where Kit was’ (73). This unreality is

285 Kinsella, “The Collapse of Space.” 286 William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Holt, 2016), 622. 287 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 84. 95

reflected spatially in the narration’s paradoxical deictic positioning: it ‘made her feel this was happening nowhere’ (27). Her mother Anna instinctively senses this as she hears Kit’s voice on the phone: it ‘had made Anna feel that Kit was not anywhere’ (154). On the train home, Kit reflects on the spatial and temporal aporia of the house, trying to locate it in place and time: ‘This week had happened–where? In another week it would be Christmas’ (215). There are several other signs of spatial and temporal paradox surrounding the house. Kit, looking around the Sea House expecting to sense some evidence of the childhood that her mother had spent there, feels instead that ‘her mother was not here, had never been here’ (22). Anna, musing about the fact that Kit is staying at the Sea House of her childhood, mixes spatial and temporal markers: ‘Kit is there now… She has gone back to where I was’ (55). These subtle contradictions again manifest in the paradox perceived by Kit’s mother as she revisits the house at the end of the novel: ‘In one way, the house was exactly as she remembered it, everything in the same place; and yet it was not as it had ever seemed’ (184). These observations illustrate the house’s physical and temporal liminality: it is in itself a kind of ghost, visible in the present yet tethered to an indeterminate place in the past, both haunted and haunting.

The sense of time as seemingly outside of normal chronology is echoed in Kit’s subjective feeling of time as barely progressing at all: ‘Those hours on the floor of Audrey’s room had been stopped hours’ (98). This is also narratologically depicted in the story-discourse relations. There are several instances of narrative pause, where the discourse time continues but the narrative time of the fictional world does not. Often this digressive pause is achieved through descriptive passages. For example, a description of Kit’s bedroom discursively interrupts the discussion she is having with her aunt Treen:

It was a room where no one could ever have been comfortable. Its ceiling was higher than the room was wide. Here Kit stood at the wrong end of a telescope: reduced, far off. The furniture, too, was on the wrong scale: mahogany, humourlessly florid. The wooden four-poster bed stood so high it had a step built into one side. This was furniture she would not be able to move an inch. A dressing table dominated the corner by the window. Its three mirrors, passing light back and forth between them, emphasized the inwardness of the room. (27)

The narrative time is also interrupted by another kind of pause: those which occur when one story line interrupts another. This is a common feature of The Life of Houses because Kit’s narrative is repeatedly paused while the perspective switches to Kit’s mother, Anna, who is in another city, thinking about Kit and her own childhood in the Sea House, her relationships with the grandparents that are still living there, and her own life.

Although these are pauses in the narrative discourse rather than Kit’s stream of consciousness, they, and other stylistic choices in the novel, still provide crucial evidence of Kit’s subjective experience. Though the narrative is in third-person, the distinction between discourse and Kit’s interiority is blurred. In part this happens through occasional representations of Kit’s direct thoughts, either through mental verbs such as ‘Kit thought’, ‘she mused’, or free indirect discourse. For example a chapter opens with Kit’s panicked inner voice as she wakes up: ‘What time was it?’ (36). In fact these interspersions of her thoughts in the discourse often revolve around questions of time: ‘Had she ever been awake this early? She thought about calling her father. What time was it in London?’ (37). However, more importantly, the third-person narrative voice actually enacts part of Kit’s psychological experience during her stay in the house. As mentioned above, while in the house Kit undertakes new self-observation from previously unexplored points of view, creating an internalised third-person perspective. The house’s temporal sense, its ‘pastness’ shifts Kit’s perspective in various ways, forcing her to consider herself from different vantage points – even from the perspective of her own childhood: ‘All the furniture was oversized; the ceiling was high. Cross-legged, she entered again into the underworld of childhood. She had forgotten this viewpoint, the shadows under chairs and beds, the closeness to patterns on the rug’ (95). The same morning, sitting on her grandmother’s floor and going through the house’s records, ‘she saw herself not exactly from outside but from the long perspective of History. The feeling was so new that she felt startled’ (97). Here again the conflation of spatial and temporal perspectives becomes important: the house’s fixity in a past moment creates an observational distance for Kit, as she sees herself from the perspective of the house’s history: both temporally and spatially, from behind. The narrative style enacts this, blending the two epistemic orientations of time, the figural perspective of the characters and the narratorial perspective (to use terminology from narratologist Wolf Schmid288). In watching herself, Kit experiences her own perspective as well as the ‘analytical and

288 Wolf Schmid, Narratology: An Introduction (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), 105. 97

retrospective perspective’ of the third-person narrator. (I return to this internalised third- person perspective below in the context of Kit’s identity development.) The house is instrumental in constructing this temporality, as it pulls her point of view into the past, into its own frozen moment in time, so that she, too, inhabits this ‘retrospective perspective’: She finds herself drawn inexorably back in time, not a specific moment but simply to a time before – back to her grandmother’s, mother’s and own childhood:

That body had belonged to a child once, frightened in the hall… Kit imagined her grandmother – lighter, a ghost of thought – stepping from room to room through the sleeping house, opening trunks and cabinets, wardrobes and sideboards, lifting each fact – spoons, forks, knives, books in their shelves, clocks, chairs and beds, curios and mementoes – out of a smell of damp, infestations of silverfish and mothers, and setting it in the unshadowed light of the page. (96)

At last, a picture of the child her mother had once been rose whole in Kit’s mind. Pinch–faced, strands of hair hanging over her shoulders, the girl stared down at Kit (119).

As soon as she spoke, Kit remembered stepping out from a room where she had been sleeping into an unlit hall. The door handle had been at eye level – ceramic, with a painted wreath of blue roses. Light from her room had angled across dark floorboards, and a strip of carpet, and met absolute darkness’. (19)

Kit is not the only one seemingly caught within the house’s temporal limbo – Kinsella sees the novel as ‘the history of a place and its lives that can’t be finished’,289 and indeed the lives of the other inhabitants have an unfinished savour, as exemplified by Audrey and her interminably unfinished writings on the house’s history. Kit herself seems aware of not only the role of the house as a not only the locus of this temporal suspension (‘still no sound from that room; the day’s fixity spread from there’ [136]), but as an active instigator of it. As she stands in her bedroom with her grandmother and her mother’s friend, Scott, who has come to visit, she sees

289 Kinsella, “The Collapse of Space.” 98

The room, its dust-thickened half-light, held them in its own stillness. They each separately waited: an instant when Kit saw all three of them facing each other like people in a photograph, an instant exposed and final. It was a mark of how far out of time she had gone [that she did not notice the telephone ringing]. (139)

The account of this frozen moment – this ‘fixity’ (136) – also demonstrates the extent to which Kit feels physically and temporally under the house’s thrall – it holds her, a tangible demonstration of a key thematic drive of the novel: the ability of objects and places to ‘shape’290 the lives of people in a myriad of ways. In this odd temporal space, Kit observes the irrelevance of linear time: ‘now, the things in the room looked different… here they were and here they would be, waiting for her’ (45). The sentience implied in this excerpt also points towards the house’s nature, in Kit’s eyes, as a living being that can experience such things as ‘waiting’. It is through a synchronisation with this ‘being’s’ sense of time that influences Kit’s own experience. As the examples given above indicate, Kit’s own place in time has slipped into the virtually suspended temporal mode associated with her conception of the old, unhappily haunted house.

2.4 Kit’s character development

The changes wielded by the house in Kit’s experience of time are far from trivial: the complex influence of the house propels Kit’s self-exploration and discovery and confronts her with her own uncertain identity. In this way, ATS pits itself against plot as a motivating narrative function, illustrating how a seemingly subtle aspect of the human/object relationship can have far-reaching effects. Kit comes to the Sea House in a time of family crisis; her sense of herself as an individual is inchoate, undefined: ‘She was ludicrous even to herself: freckled, pale, indistinct’ (82, my italics). Her identity at this point is very much tied to that of her parents, particularly her mother, which is figured as Kit reflects on the creation of her first signature: ‘Kit had settled on her name in capitals with a circle around it. She had been surreptitiously proud of that until she found the primary school lunch box on which her mother had written her name in just that way’ (160). This week at her grandparents’ home is pivotal in her search to define herself. As the story unfolds through the seven days Kit spends at the Sea House, the house’s influence mediates this inner development. Indeed the role of

290 Gorton, “Back Cover,” back cover. 99

the house as the active instigator of Kit’s deeper self-reflection is frequently symbolised: ‘The mirror was vigilant at the end of the hall’ (130); ‘her reflection wavered in the mirrored hall table’ (38). Underpinning this aesthetic rendering, I argue that the impact of the house on Kit’s development models real-life connections between humans and physical objects, and the subtle yet powerful influence objects have on our lives.

As I have discussed, the multifaceted, ambivalent relationship that Kit develops with the house produces a temporal shift within Kit’s subjective time: a shift that slows time almost to the point that it feels it has stopped, holding the house in a static moment in the past. Initially, the temporal dilation produces a heightened self-awareness: she notes ‘how strange she felt’ (36); ‘what was strange for her here was to be noticing so much’ (39); ‘She was unnaturally aware’ (41). Her self-consciousness produces a sense of vulnerability: ‘Everything, like her pale toes, felt pink and exposed’ (37). In this temporal mode, Kit becomes hyper-conscious of every passing moment, using the time to observe herself, her family, and her role within it, in meticulous detail. This is one major effect of the time-sense created by the Sea House. However, there are other aspects to this influence. At first, the house’s pastness is a kind of trap; Kit is suffocated by the family’s inability to move beyond the past. The house both symbolically and physically induces this trapped, claustrophobic feeling:

the room had a layered indoorness: it absorbed sound… Even the gold-framed landscapes opened no vistas out: the picture glass was thick with dust. Kit looked longingly at the windows. Between heavy curtains there was the veranda’s trim of iron lace. A frame outside a frame, it shrank the garden to a picture. (128)

This excerpt draws upon the motif, mentioned previously, of photographs and pictures, depicting the house and its grounds as a freeze frame, outside of time’s dynamic flow. As Kit comes to experience this anchorage in the past – an effect of her perception of the house’s suspended temporal space – a deictic shift is imposed upon her, as she is forced to re- evaluate herself from the perspective of the past, from before or, in a metaphorically spatial sense, behind. This is not only illustrated in the two excerpts given above during Kit’s reflections while sitting on her grandmother’s floor (seeing herself from the perspectives of her childhood and her family’s broader history), but iterated many times throughout her stay. On Kit’s first night, the house’s mirrors show her ‘for the first time that bluish-pale hollow at the back of her neck, which other people saw all the time’ (29). The theme of seeing things as 100

they appear from the back – from behind – presents a visual motif, as illustrated in ‘a sign readable backwards from where they sat’ (148). In the time of crisis while the family waited for her grandfather at the hospital, Kit looks out the window and sees ‘the back of Scott’s head’ (145). The motif is particularly emphasized towards the end of the novel: ‘Backyards, the backs of houses. Back, she thought’ (215). The gaze of Audrey, whose body – as I discussed earlier – is almost seen as an extension of the house, enacts this shift in perspective: When she first sees her grandmother, it is from behind: ‘her grandmother was sitting with her back to the door’ (22). ‘Audrey was so long-sighted that her eyes… went out of focus, as though she saw at the back of you, blank depths. Meeting that look, Kit had a sense of tipping slowly backwards’ (93). The sense of third-person observation, propelled by the deictic pull of the house’s pastness, is rendered symbolically and directly. Kit describes feeling ‘at a distance even from herself’ (81). Sitting on the house’s roof, she ‘sees’ herself in this new third-person perspective, viewing herself as ‘a picture of somebody enjoying a view’ (37). It becomes an intense experience of constant observation: ‘making her aware in turn of her forehead, the scab on her cheek were she’d scratched a pimple, the skin above her singlet, the inside curve of her arm’ (59); ‘Kit walked into the hall, feeling their eyes on her back’ (44); ‘[it was] impossible to walk without feeling conscious of their eyes on her back’ (60). The experience ‘set Kit on a blank stage, isolated, painfully conscious of her[self]’ (26). The scrutiny that she senses as coming from outside herself is internalised: she tensely watches herself, analysing each moment. Close, personal observation becomes a motif of the novel: reified in the mirrors and life portraits of the novel – in particular a sketch of Kit drawn by her mother’s friend, Scott. Earlier in the novel Kit attends a nude life drawing class; however, it is Kit who feels the most exposed: ‘she could not look at the model’s body without feeling the model’s eyes on her, watching what it was she saw’ (85). Earlier that day, Kit meets the vain, pretty Miranda, one of those ‘long-haired shining girls… fatalistic in the expectation that they will be looked at’ (82), her every movement marked by ‘the severe alertness of someone who expects to be looked at’ (104). Again, however, it is Kit who feels the most scrutinised in Miranda’s company: ‘picturing how she would look to them, Kit was conscious of the glare, the sky immense overhead’ (105). This self-observation disassociates Kit from the present moment: she does things ‘detachedly’ (131), ‘as if she were acting it in a play’ (41). In this way, the narrative stages the performative aspect, the self-other duality of self- actualization.

101

This internalised third-person perspective compels her to navigate the various intersections of individuality and family. While in the grasp of the house’s arrested temporal mode, Kit is forced to pause and see herself ‘as from the outside’, from the past’s perspective, shaping her own identity as she navigates her role within the family. When she meets with her mother at the end of the week, Anna can see the change that the house has wrought in her daughter: ‘Impossible that Kit had grown in just these past few days and yet Anna was startled by how grown up she looked, closed in her thoughts, staring straight ahead’ (174). We see that now, at the end of her stay at the Sea House, the direction of Kit’s gaze – straight ahead – is in significant defiance to the house’s focus on the past, on behind. This change becomes clearer after Kit leaves the house, as she actively shakes off the property’s temporal aporia, defining herself in opposition to the house and its suspended place in history. Though her stay in the Sea House has been productive in navigating her identity within its familial context, Kit must begin to construct a distinction between herself and ‘the history of a place and its lives that can’t be finished,’ reclaiming her independent agency and escaping the ‘trap for children born into that obsession with the past’.291 Resisting the ‘sense of tipping slowly backwards’ (93), Kit breaks free of the house’s pull into its slowed, marginal temporal position between the past and present, boarding a train which physically and symbolically transports her into the freely moving chronology of outside life. The fast-moving train escapes the house’s darkness, leaving behind the past’s backwards perspective and the ‘shadow that was thrown out’ (80) by the house’s history: ‘The train was going fast enough for the shadows on the road to look as though they were flowing backwards’ (215). In the novel’s final moments, Kit herself recognises the changes that her time in the house have initiated, shown through a final invocation of the photo/picture-motif. Though during her stay at the property, Kit felt like a static, passive figure of a past moment, ‘a picture of a girl enjoying the view’, on the train home she scans the portrait that was sketched of her by her mother’s friend, Scott, and has a different perspective of herself. She recognises the significance of this portrait as Scott draws it: ‘She never had been able to work out what she looked like and felt that more certain knowledge of herself growing under his hands on the page’ (199). This comes to fruition when she examines the picture again, on the train home, ultimately coming to the realisation that this, yet another third-person observer perspective of herself, is insufficient, and must be superseded by her own self-knowledge. Out of the house’s shadows, observing the portrait on

291 Sullivan, “Lisa Gorton: Prize-Winning Poet Writes Her First Novel.” 102

the train, she sees ‘the picture in full daylight’ (215) and is able to recognise ‘all at once, with certainty and impersonal happiness… that it was not like her. It was not like her at all’. (215)

Embodying, to a degree, the subjective time of another enabled a crucial shift in perspective, facilitating the navigation of self which Kit needed at this time of crossroads in her life. Kit’s inner trajectory illustrates how the temporal shifts induced by anthropomorphic relationships with places and spaces can deeply influence an individual. This is visible in other novels which explore temporal synchronisation, as the changes in time perception, wrought variously in linguistic, thematic and structural ways, have a significant impact on the novels’ character arcs. Kit’s experience is similar in some ways to Lauren’s in the previous chapter: after a period of synchronisation with another’s temporal mode, it is now the renewed ‘flow of time in her body’ (as DeLillo puts it) which helps Kit and Lauren re-evaluate their own identities. Readers are left with the suggestion of possibility: both characters reach this moment of self-realisation at the end of the novel, and after navigating these shifts in their sense of time, the final step – refiguring their own independent temporality and sense of self – takes place after the final page.

An Australian novel which is often brought up in conversations about The Life of Houses is Patrick White’s The Twyborn Affair (1979). The two novels are thematically linked through an abiding modernist interest in time, consciousness and identity, but also diegetically, as their characters also undergo the process of suddenly moving to a new location. For the protagonist, who identifies at this point in the novel as Eddie, not only the people with which he cohabits after his move to the country, but the landscape itself which becomes a prominent figure in his experiences during his stint on a rural homestead. The landscape is specifically anthropomorphised, and Eddie consciously forms a relationship with it: ‘As he continued thumping automatically at his wholly unresponsive mount, loss of faith in himself was replaced by an affinity with the landscape surrounding him. It happened very gradually, in spite of a sadistic wind, the sour grass, deformed trees, rocks crouching like great animals petrified by time’.292 This excerpt also reveals the sense of time that the landscape, for Eddie, carries – imbued with deep history, an unhurried chronology dictated by geological formation, the growth of trees and plants, where human life-spans are almost irrelevant. In his sense of affinity with the landscape, Eddie’s time is also slowed, leading to a heightened

292 White, The Twyborn Affair, 195. 103

physical self-consciousness just as Kit experienced in the Sea House. In both White and Gorton’s novels, the slowed time with which the protagonists have synchronised dilates the present moment, allowing for an intimate self-awareness and extended self-reflection, both of which prove integral to their identity development. In The Twyborn Affair, this is revealed both diegetically through direct descriptions of Eddie’s time sense (‘lulled by suspension in time, he felt comforted’293), and structurally, as the narrative pace slows to detail laden descriptions and extended close ups: ‘After stalking through clumps of horehound, he seated himself on one half of the two-seater dunny, among the faded smells of wood-ash, lime, hen- shit, and old yellowed newsprint’.294 This leads Eddie closer to a reclamation of one of the key sources of identity complex: his body. As well as Eddie’s increased self-observations during this time, the change is symbolised by his nudity: ‘suddenly the warmth, the light, the glistening flow of brown water, moved him to take off his clothes. He lay awhile, exposing his vertebrae to the sun’.295 Though the relationship remains complex, the new self-scrutiny to which his body is exposed during this slowing of his perception of time leads towards a form of acceptance: ‘he was coming to terms with his body’.296 Like Gorton’s novel, The Twyborn Affair intimates the potential influences of changes in subjective time on an individual’s self-concept.

Concluding Thoughts

In many different permutations, such novels reveal ATS as inducing significant emotional and social effects. For Kit, aligning with the glacial pace of the house creates a temporal space in which to scrutinise her own self and feelings, and its irrevocable pull to the past creates a tension against which she develops her own individual sense of identity. As literary critic Tischleder notes, the ‘object world has long played a vital role’297 in the literary imagination. ‘Literary texts invite us to imagine physical objects in active roles that enable and shape people’s actions, social relations, self-fashioning, emotional states… as well as the

293 White, 192. 294 White, 192. 295 White, 252. 296 White, 203. 297 Tischleder, The Literary Life of Things, 17. 104

texts’ own narrative and aesthetic expressions’.298 Considered within the context of modern cognitive science, the human/object relationship which many literary works depict becomes much more than a simple fallacy or a misperception, but rather an integral aspect of the human mind.

Although it is true that the physical fact of the house itself stimulates Kit’s memories, in a more profound sense the altered time of the house that she aligns with facilitates, rather than simply stimulates, thoughts and feelings that she experiences. The house is not just a metaphor for Kit’s interiority, but rather plays an active role in shaping this interiority. In realizing the protagonist’s identity exploration within the slowed or suspended time of the Sea House, the narrative shows how an emotional journey can be actualized via the influence of objects. Understood in this way, the novel paints a portrait of the mind as both body-based and environmentally scaffolded. In harmony with archaeologist Sarah Robinson’s claim, the ATS represented in The Life of Houses suggests that

we need to shift our preoccupation with internal realities outward enough to notice the myriad and subtle ways that the external world constantly shapes us. Fully coming to terms with this profound interdependence demands that we overcome the dualities that have long separated mind from body, nature from nurture, culture from biology and the built environment from its natural source.299

This new understanding of mind offers a productive space in which to examine the development of identity, allowing for the consideration of new elements – such as the objects around us – in the analysis of selfhood, both within literature and real life.

Viewing The Life of Houses through a lens cognizant of the neurophysiological reality of ATS reveals how Kit’s sense of time is shaped by her sense of place: both time and place work together in the Sea House’s mediation of Kit’s identity at a crucial time in her development. Using ATS as an analytical frame allows us to understand the character trajectories of the novel, as well as weaving an explanatory link between formal, diegetic and

298 Tischleder, 18. 299 Sarah Robinson, “Boundaries of Skin: John Dewey, Didier Anzieu and Architectural Possibility,” in Architecture and Empathy (Helsinki: Peripheral Projects, 2015), 24. 105

thematic elements of narrative. Looking forward, this not only offers a new framework with which to understand texts, but suggests avenues for genuine reciprocal dialogue between literary criticism and cognitive science. The Life of Houses presents an example of how literature can afford a dynamic stage in which to observe the complex ecologies of human- object relationships, able to pinpoint – in aesthetically and emotionally powerful ways – where our experiences of time and place intersect. 106

Time Across Worlds: Isabel Allende’s La casa de los espíritus

‘I feel as if The House of the Spirits is the size and form of a brick to show the world what was my house’. Isabel Allende, 1995300

Part 1. ATS, chronemics, and Latin American magic realism

In her novel La casa de los espíritus (1985),301 Isabel Allende constructs, brick by brick, word by word, the interlocking spaces of mind and dwelling. The narrative – the intergenerational tale of the Trueba women – is a tapestry of interiors and exteriors, all tangled together by time’s passage. Though the novel hasn’t been approached through a cognitive critical lens, its preoccupation with the intertwining of minds, home and time invites a frame which – like the cognitive narrative of ATS that I have been developing – incorporates cognition, houses and subjective time. To borrow Deonne Parker’s words, ‘the fact that [Allende’s] is one of the first magic realist novels in woman’s fiction which establishes the theme of the house as the pivotal space of the dynamics of one’s being and inter-being with others’,302 makes the novel an important addition to my study. As in the preceding chapter, I will be exploring the diegetic, thematic and linguistic structures in the novel as they sketch an outline of the relationship between the characters’ sense of home and time. However, in contrast to my previous chapters, I move away from Western literature, to examine ATS as represented in a different continent, in a different language, in a different time-culture. Informing my approach are cultural orientations towards time developed by anthropologist Edward T. Hall, a spectrum from ‘monochronicity’ to ‘polychronicity’.303

300 Quoted in: Gabrielle Foreman, “Past-On Stories: History and the Magically Real, Morrison and Allende on Call,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 300. 301 Isabel Allende, La Casa de Los Espíritus, 3rd ed. (Barcelona: Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, 2015). 302 Deonne Parker, “Haunted Dwellings, Haunted Beings: The Image of House and Home in Allende, MacDonald, and Morrison” (Ph.D., McGill University, 2003), 17. 303 Edward T Hall, “Monochronic and Polychronic Time,” in Intercultural Communication: A Reader, ed. Larry Samovar and et al (Massachusettts: Cengage Learning, 2011). 107

These terms provide a loose taxonomy of time, a way of talking about how different people experience and conceptualise temporality. Though they have been defined in various ways, essentially monochronic societies conceptualise time as linear, moving forward in regular intervals in a straight line, independent of the events it encapsulates.304 Polychronic time, by contrast, is conceptualised as circular. Though time does not repeat itself, it does play out in cyclical patterns, and there is a holistic concept of the present moment as incorporating past and future, as well as multiple events from a multitude of individual perspectives. As I will detail later, monochronicity is associated with Western societies and polychronicity with Latin American societies. In Allende’s novel, the process of ATS is deeply tied to its polychronic context, which differs from the monochronic cultures of the American and Australian novels I have previously analysed. Examining texts from different linguo-cultural regions allows me to look at the differences in how ATS can manifest, while affirming its potential status as a universal, biological phenomenon. Here cognitive approaches intersect with cultural interpretation, constructing a multidimensional portrait of temporal synchronisation and locating cognitive literary criticism within a sociological and global context. The project takes up the credo of cognitive cultural studies – advanced by cognitive literary critics such as Isabel Jaen, Mary Thomas-Crane, Lisa Zunshine, Alan Richardson, Ellen Spolsky and many others – in foregrounding the brain’s embeddedness in a cultural context. Obviously much more work needs to be done – the potential of this methodology is wide, and my scope limited – but it does gesture towards an approach which can shed light on the nuances of time perception, and its importance in narratives both in and outside of Western culture.305

304 Richard West and Lynn H. Turner, Understanding Interpersonal Communication: Making Choices in Changing Times (Boston: Cengage Learning, 2008); Thomas J. Bruneau, “Time, Change, and Sociocultural Communication: A Chronemic Perspective,” Σημειωτκή - Sign Systems Studies, no. 1–2 (2007): 89–117; Jeremy Rifkin, Time Wars: The Primary Conflict in Human History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989); Robert N. Levine, A Geography Of Time: On Tempo, Culture, And The Pace Of Life (New York: Basic Books, 2008); C. M. Bradshaw and E. Szabadi, eds., Time and Behaviour: Psychological and Neurobehavioural Analyses (North Holland: Elsevier, 1997); Douwe Tiemersma and Henk Oosterling, Time and Temporality in Intercultural Perspective (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996); Amy Todd, “From Polychronicity to Multitasking: The Warping of Time Across Disciplinary Boundaries,” Anthropology of Work Review 30 (2009): 49–54. 305 I understand that the Eurocentric ‘West versus the rest’ dichotomy is problematic. I use it here only to contrast the following texts from the Western texts of my earlier chapters, as well as to emphasize that Western cultures are considered to have, in general, a different prevailing time culture to the majority of other cultures. 108

My analysis of La casa de los espíritus (from now on, La casa) not only presents a crucial step in my cognitive critical exploration of temporal synchronisation in literature, but also addresses unexplained aspects of the novel: in particular, the role of the eponymous house in the character development and style of the narrative. The story follows the lives of three generations of the Trueba family: we first meet Clara, a precocious and spiritually endowed child who grows up to marry Esteban Trueba, eventually becoming the matriarch of their family home, ‘The Big House on the Corner’,306 a space which operates as an anchor for the rest of the narrative. In it, Clara gives birth to Blanca, who in turn has Alba, the youngest link in this intergenerational narrative, and, as we eventually discover, the narrator of the story.307 The narrative is preoccupied with the subjective experience of time and space, implicitly inviting a cognitive reading. However, critics have tended to examine the relationship between house and inhabitants in symbolic and metaphysical rather than cognitive terms. A cognitive approach reveals that, for Alba, the experience of passing time is deeply related to her feelings about home, ‘The Big House on the Corner’. This great house, lived in by three generations of the Trueba family, plays a crucial role in the narrative, shaping the characters’ subjective experience during their days within its walls.

The argument for La casa that I will develop in this chapter is as follows. The novel conducts a nuanced exploration of the different philosophies of time (from monochronic to polychronic), through the process of ATS, where the house is pivotal in shaping the characters’ temporal experience. In doing so, it reveals specific insights about how individuals are neurophysiologically influenced by the spaces in which they live, and how important time and space are for subjective experience. However, this is a magical realist novel, a genre which begins, according to key theorist and classic magic realist author, Alejo Carpentier, from ‘an unexpected alteration of reality, a privileged insight… an amplification of the scales and categories of reality, perceived with a particular intensity’.308 In this amplified world, everything is exaggerated – the house is not just anthropomorphised but actually alive, the temporal modes that it confers to its inhabitants are extremes, and the different stages that the house goes through create dramatic changes in the characters’ lives.

306 This, and all other translations from the novel, are my own. 307 Alba’s tale, derived from Clara’s notes on the family history, is interspersed with first-hand accounts from her grandfather, Esteban. For the sake of the unity of my argument, I have chosen to focus on Alba’s accounts only. 308 Alejo Carpentier, El reino de este mundo (Santiago: Andres Bello, 1992), 13. 109

For the majority of the novel, the house’s inhabitants feel time as polychronic, where time is cyclical and fluid, shaped by events and relationships rather than uniform units of time. However, while the house is ‘dormant’, the relentless progress of monochronic time begins to control them: aging and entropy overtake the house and characters as time’s irrevocable linear trajectory makes itself felt. It isn’t until the reawakening of the house’s ‘spirit’ and its circular, holistic sense of time that Alba re-embodies the polychronic temporal mode traditionally held by the Chilean society, and passes through the next stage in her maturation, finding inner peace through acceptance of her self, family and society. Though polychronicity is figured as the more natural state, La casa stages a nuanced examination of time-cultures, both a Westernised monochronicity and a Latin American polychronicity. This articulates a cultural divide in the novel, an expression of a Latin American country in a globalised world, influenced by Western social and political interventions.

However, my main focus will not be on the geo-political commentary of the novel but rather on the individual experience of these changes in time perception and conceptualisation. Using cognitive linguistics and close reading of the text – and particularly of Alba’s experience – I suggest that the house’s influence on the subjective time of its inhabitants represents a real- life cognitive process. It is, of course, not a one-to-one representation: the magic realist genre transmutes reality into a fantastical world. However, its fantasy elements do not disqualify the novel’s links to reality. As Forman points out in her chapter in Lois Zamora and Wendy Faris’ edited collection on the genre, magic realism ‘does not explore another or second reality, but rather amplifies the parameters of our present reality’.309 Though the genre has been conceptually expanded since Carpentier’s writing, these quotes suggest how magic realist literature might offer a fertile space in which to explore the subtle entanglements of time, bodies and objects, in whatever fantastical forms they may present themselves. Magic realism may also be specifically appropriate to explorations of anthropomorphic perceptions: as already mentioned, The Big House on the Corner not only seems alive to its inhabitants, but actually is alive, animated by its own spiritual life force, thus reifying the anthropomorphism which pervades individuals’ perception. Magic realism ‘empowers those subjective distortions’,310 so that in these representations, anthropomorphism and its effects

309 Foreman, “Past-On Stories: History and the Magically Real, Morrison and Allende on Call,” 298. 310 Foreman, 341. 110

are rendered more visible. As Carpentier writes, ‘the marvellously real’ can reveal ‘the marvellous truth’.311

Though I will I briefly touch upon other magic realist authors such as Jorge Borges, Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie, I chose to focus this chapter on Allende’s La casa because of the central relationship between the Big House on the Corner and its inhabitants. As the epigraph to this chapter shows, Allende’s relationship with homes and houses informed the novel’s creation. In an interview with Magdalena García Pinto, Allende says ‘the only autobiographical element in La casa de los espíritus is the whole household’.312 In a preface to La casa, Allende likens the novel’s Big House on the Corner to the home of her grandparents – el hogar de los abuelos (16). Speaking with Marjorie Agosín of her broader oeuvre, Allende says, ‘For me it is difficult to draw a line between fiction and reality in literature… Daily life is brimful of fantasy and at the same time books are saturated with reality’.313 In a similar vein, Patrick McLaughlin writes that, for Allende, writing ‘is also an intrasubjective experience whereby the author may imaginatively refashion life experience to discover its “truth” value and utility’.314 Of course, Allende’s fiction is not simply a manifestation of her experience; rather, literary representations of her experiences or observations may be represented in her fiction, through an imaginative transformation.315 As I will unpack further in my later analysis, this can dissimulate and distort aspects of subjective experience – such as the perception of time and object relations – but can also represent them in new and insightful ways.

1.1 ATS and Cognitive Cultural Studies

As the previous chapter explained, incorporating ATS in an analytical lens offers a neuropsychological basis for the temporal influence between house and character, and in

311 Carpentier, El reino de este mundo, 12. 312 Isabel Allende and John Rodden, Conversations with Isabel Allende: Revised Edition (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 67. 313 Allende and Rodden, 48. 314 Patrick McLaughlin, “Narrative Structure and Narrative Sense: Women’s Writing and Identity in the Works of Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Drabble, and Isabel Allende” (Ph.D., Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 1994), 195. 315 For a closer discussion of authorial intention in the representation of ATS, see my previous chapter, and specifically the theoretical stances of Mary Thomas Crane and Blakey Vermeule. 111

doing so allows the insights of literature to suggest new directions in the science of subjective time. As a brief reminder, the theorising of ATS involves juxtaposing two areas of research: firstly, recent research in neuropsychology which indicates that empathy mechanisms, such as motor mimicry, can lead to an individual synchronising with the time perception of another person; secondly, growing evidence that objects, when perceived anthropomorphically, can stimulate the same empathy mechanisms as people. If other people can influence our experience of time, and we can encounter objects as if they were other people, then it is possible that objects also influence our sense of time. This process, which I have been referring to as anthropomorphic temporal synchronisation, has not been established by the scientific community. However, there is much work – in mirror neuron research (e.g. Chaminade, Gazzola, Gallese316) in architecture (Derix and Izaki, Gallese, Hart, Mallgrave, Pallasmaa317), and philosophy (Heidegger, Botton, Bachelard318) which similarly explores the profound neurophysiological responses that humans have to the objects around them and the spaces in which they live. Following this theme within criticism of La casa, Rojas notes the significance of the novel’s houses in the family narrative development:

[The] magical atmosphere of the household of Clara’s childhood impregnates the majority of the novel, whose principal actions happen in the Versallesca mansion that the patriarch Esteban Trueba constructs upon marrying… the house becomes a joyful Bachelardian space, where the supernatural and irrational is confused with daily happenings.319

316 Chaminade et al., “Brain Response to a Humanoid Robot in Areas Implicated in the Perception of Human Emotional Gestures”; Gazzola et al., “The Anthropomorphic Brain”; Vittorio Gallese, “The Roots of Empathy: The Shared Manifold Hypothesis and the Neural Basis of Intersubjectivity,” Psychopathology 36, no. 4 (2003): 171–80, https://doi.org/72786. 317 Christian Derix and Asmund Izaki, eds., Empathic Space: The Computation of Human-Centric Architecture (New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2014); Gallese, “Architectural Space from Within”; Hart, A New Look at Humanism; Harry Francis Mallgrave, Architecture and Embodiment: The Implications of the New Sciences and Humanities for Design (London: Routledge, 2013); Juhani Pallasmaa, “Empathic and Embodied Imagination: Intuiting Experience and Life in Architecture,” in Architecture and Empathy (London: Routledge, 2015), 1–11. 318 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: State University of New York Press, 2010); Alain De Botton, The Architecture of Happiness (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2008); Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (London: Penguin, 2014). 319 Mario Rojas, “La Casa de Los Espiritus de Isabel Allende: Un Caleidoscopio de Espejos Desordenados,” in Los Libros Tienen Sus Propios Espiritus (Veracruz: Universidad Veracruzana, 1987), 84. 112

In the anthology Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature, Reed reminds us that ‘if we accept that human neurology remains similar across time periods (despite cultural differences), cognitive studies may allow us a glimpse in to the dynamics of how people internalize, react to, and ultimately think about changing culture’.320 Literature can offer insight into how cognitive processes enact differently not only in different cultures, but also in different languages. This is important because, as cognitive linguist Evans puts it, ‘language reflects and provides (albeit indirect) access to human cognitive function’.321 This is particularly true when it comes to such nuanced aspects of perception and experience as subjective time: ‘diversity in the linguistic encoding of time reflects, ultimately, diversity in types of temporal experience’.322 An important part of this diversity, for my own research, is time-culture. This is why I chose a text from a Latin American country, which, as I will outline below, has been described as having very different concept of time than the previous novels I have examined.

1.2 Chronemics: polychronicity and monochronicity

In 1959, Edward Hall coined the terms polychronic and monochronic to describe two ends of the time-culture spectrum, the study of which would be later described as chronemics.323 Though they have been defined in various ways, essentially monochronic societies conceptualise time as linear (moving forward in a straight line) and unbounded (having no definite end). 324 In contrast, polychronic societies conceptualise time as circular, rather than a straight line. Though time does not exactly repeat itself, it does go through cycles, and there is a holistic concept of the present moment as incorporating past and future since it is part of

320 Cory Reed, “Embodiment and Empathy in Early Modern Drama: The Case of Cervantes’ El Trato de Argel,” in Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature, ed. Isabel Jaen and Julien Jacques Simon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 198. 321 Evans, Language and Time, 11. 322 Evans, 11. 323 Hall, “Monochronic and Polychronic Time”; Bruneau, “Time, Change, and Sociocultural Communication.” 324 West and Turner, Understanding Interpersonal Communication; Bruneau, “Time, Change, and Sociocultural Communication”; Rifkin, Time Wars; Levine, A Geography Of Time; Bradshaw and Szabadi, Time and Behaviour; Tiemersma and Oosterling, Time and Temporality in Intercultural Perspective; Todd, “From Polychronicity to Multitasking.” 113

a cycle which has come before and will recur again.325 Importantly, the divisions of time are more linked to events and relationships, rather than uniform units. This is why it is also sometimes called ‘qualitative’ time, as opposed to monochronic ‘quantitative’ time, measured more uniformly by clocks and calendars.326 The difference between monochronicity and polychronicity can be considered historically. Some scholars (e.g. Rifkin, or Han and Pöppel) see monochronicity as produced by developments such as industrialisation and Newtonian physics. Note, though, that there is overlap in the two orientations: as Tiemersma and Oosterling write,

a widespread misunderstanding that the linear and cyclic views of time contradict each other, because the former makes room for progress and novelty whereas the latter does not. … [But this is based on] a too strong and narrow understanding of the cyclic view of time.327

The cycles of polychronicity are not identical repetition, and the present is not simply a copy of the past and future. These temporal cycles are more ‘structural patterns’.328

According to ethnographers and anthropologists such as Hall,329 business researchers such as Bluedorn,330 psychologists such as Levine,331 neuroscientists such as Han and Pöppel, historians such as Rifkin332 and journalists like West and Turner,333 so-called Western societies (such as the UK, white Australia and America) are largely monochronic, and societies in Latin America are largely polychronic. These are not, of course, hard and fast

325 Hall, “Monochronic and Polychronic Time”; Todd, “From Polychronicity to Multitasking”; Allen C. Bluedorn, The Human Organization of Time: Temporal Realities and Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). 326 Shihui Han and Ernst Pöppel, Culture and Neural Frames of Cognition and Communication (Berlin: Springer Science & Business Media, 2011), 128. 327 Tiemersma and Oosterling, Time and Temporality in Intercultural Perspective, 67. 328 Tiemersma and Oosterling, 67. 329 Hall, “Monochronic and Polychronic Time”; Edward Twitchell Hall, The Silent Language (Minnesota: Fawcett Publications, Incorporated, 1963). 330 Bluedorn, The Human Organization of Time. 331 Levine, A Geography Of Time. 332 Rifkin, Time Wars. 333 West and Turner, Understanding Interpersonal Communication. 114

distinctions. As Todd points out, ‘time is not a singularity in any culture. Thus, even members of quintessentially monochronic cultures (or culture areas) move in and out of polychronic and monochronic moments’.334 There is also ‘great individual difference’.335 Applying these terms does not imply invariant distinctions between places. However, in the words of Levine, ‘…while it may be careless to overgeneralize about the people from a single place, it would be naive to deny the existence of significant, overall differences between places and cultures’.336 Both La casa and Allende herself explicitly affirm a polychronic perception of time. In an interview about the novel, Allende says ‘I also wanted to show that life goes in a circle, that events are intertwined, and that history repeats itself’.337 As my analysis will highlight, this conceptualisation underpins all aspects of La casa, which shows that, for the Trueba women, the authentic experience of time is one ‘ordered by events and not by chronological order’ (454). Time is connected to experiences and events, rather than independent and fixed to the progress of clocks.

The way that the narrative affirms polychronicity as a prevailing experience of time is bound up with the Big House on the Corner’s profound influence on our protagonist-narrator, Alba. The house is anthropomorphised, endowed with an animate and independent life force, and is an active and influential member of the Trueba family. As I will explain in my analysis, the magical house carries its own sense of time, one marked by cycle patterning, radical fluidity, and disregard for the intransigent march of ‘clock time’. The various physical and psychological influences that the house wields over its inhabitants mean that Alba grows up with this polychronic time, perceiving it as the natural state of things. However, after the death of Alba’s grandmother, Clara, the house goes into a state of mourning and dormancy, its life force no longer present or perceivable. Though Clara’s death saddens the family, in itself this event does not explain the change that befalls the household: Clara’s children are grown, and her granddaughter, Alba, is precociously philosophical about death, having been taught that it is a natural part of life’s cycles. However, the house itself is drastically affected: it loses its radical polychronicity, and enters into a period of radical monochronicity, afflicted by the linear progress of standardized clock time, almost entirely succumbing to entropy. Its

334 Todd, “From Polychronicity to Multitasking,” 53. 335 Todd, 51. 336 Levine, A Geography Of Time, xvii. 337 Allende and Rodden, Conversations with Isabel Allende, 49. 115

inhabitants soon synchronize with this new sense of temporal progression, a shift evident both diegetically and linguistically in the text. It isn’t until the house’s ‘rebirth’ late in the novel that it re-joins its ‘natural’ polychronicity, and, finally, in the last pages of the novel, we see that Alba too has once again internalized this cyclical sense of time. This narrative of the house’s time influences both the plot trajectory and Alba’s character development, which literarily demonstrates the importance of the novel’s exploration of different time orientations. These conceptions of time are not simply abstractions, relevant only to ethnographers or philosophers, but, as anthropologist Amy Todd explains, have ‘both behavioural and experiential dimensions’.338 They influence social and economic life, individual interactions, and even, as Han and Pöppel note, ‘the construction of self identity’.339 Tracing La casa’s representation of monochronicity and polychronicity through the phenomenon of ATS highlights an unexplored nuance in the novel’s representation of time: how it can be shaped by relationships with the objects in our lives, and how far reaching the effects of this temporal relationship can be in terms of individual experience and development.

1.3 Critical reception of La casa de los espíritus

The narrative of ATS that I am pointing to in La casa is, however, not the only one which the story develops. The novel is also ‘the history of a Latin American country, scourged by the tyranny of a monstrous dictatorship’.340 The Trueba women’s story wraps around and through the modern history of Chile, from the end of the last century to the horror contemporaneous with the novels’ publication – Pinochet’s dictatorship. Many critics have examined this aspect of the novel, both the politics of Chile (e.g. Alice Nelson’s Political Bodies341) and the dynamics of power (e.g. Karen Martin’s Narrative Geographies342). Even more have focused on the gender struggle. Patricia Hart claims that Allende’s work operates outside magic realism in responding to specifically female concerns, and should be more

338 Todd, “From Polychronicity to Multitasking,” 51. 339 Han and Pöppel, Culture and Neural Frames of Cognition and Communication, 126. 340 Allende and Rodden, Conversations with Isabel Allende, 45. 341 Alice A. Nelson, Political Bodies: Gender, History, and the Struggle for Narrative Power in Recent Chilean Literature (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2002), 193–219. 342 Karen Wooley Martin, Isabel Allende’s House of the Spirits Trilogy: Narrative Geographies (Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2010). 116

properly termed ‘magical feminism’.343 For Karen Cox, the novel is an attempt to ‘overturn common assumptions about gender roles or mythologies regarding either sex’.344 Kavita Panjabi speaks of La casa’s women and their ‘rejection of the patriarchal and capitalist structures of society’345; Foreman describes the novel as harnessing ‘a feminized magic realism as a technique to pull the reader into a political-historical novel’.346 Marcelo Coddou, Nora Glickman, Sarah Eaton, Deonne Parker, and Gabriela Mora are just a handful of others to examine ‘the dimension of feminism in Isabel Allende’.347 Allende herself sees much of her work as articulating the unique power wielded by women in patriarchal worlds.348 These are all important and productive approaches; however, they do not fully account for the multidimensional insights offered by the novel. A lacuna still surrounds the relationship in the novel between person, house, and time, at both thematic and cognitive critical registers. This is the scope of my own analysis. Though my approach does not exclude political and feminist critiques, I put them to the side in this chapter, instead zooming in on the cognitive narrative that La casa constructs around subjective time.

Martin’s work in Narrative Geographies, as well as a swathe of other spatial analyses of the novel, champion the significance of the house in the narrative. However, these are generally either wholly metaphysical (e.g. Attie de Lange et al.’s Heideggerian analysis of the novel349), or subsumed into the (often gender) politics of the novel. García-Johnson claims,

343 Patricia Hart, Narrative Magic in the Fiction of Isabel Allende (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1989), 29. 344 Karen Castellucci Cox, Isabel Allende: A Critical Companion (Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2003), 152. 345 Kavita Panjabi, “‘The House of the Spirits’, Tránsito Soto: From Periphery to Power,” in Critical Approaches to Isabel Allende’s Novels, ed. Sonia Riquelme Rojas and Edna Rehbein Aguirre (New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc, 1991), 12. 346 Foreman, “Past-On Stories: History and the Magically Real, Morrison and Allende on Call,” 295. 347 Marcelo Coddou, “Dimension Del Feminismo En Isabel Allende,” in Los Libros Tienen Sus Propios Espiritus (Veracruz: Universidad Veracruzana, 1987), 29–53; Nora Glickman, “Los Personajes Femeninos En La Casa de Los Espiritus,” in Los Libros Tienen Sus Propios Espiritus, ed. Marcelo Coddou (Veracruz: Universidad Veracruzana, 1987), 54–60; Sarah Eaton, “Silence and the New Science: Isabel Allende in a Quantum Age” (Gender Symposium, Calgary: University of Calgary, 1996), 1–14; Parker, “Haunted Dwellings, Haunted Beings: The Image of House and Home in Allende, MacDonald, and Morrison”; Gabriela Mora, “Ruptura Y Perseverancia de Estereotipos En La Casa de Los Espiritus,” in Los Libros Tienen Sus Propios Espiritus (Veracruz: Universidad Veracruzana, 1987), 71–78. 348 Allende and Rodden, Conversations with Isabel Allende. 349 Attie De Lange et al., Literary Landscapes: From Modernism to Postcolonialism (New York: Springer, 2008), 143–60. 117

‘the battle of the sexes is cleverly manifested in the continuous struggle for space in the house… Allende utilized spatial symbolism to emphasize and parallel the actions of female characters as the sought to overcome the tyranny of patriarchy’.350 In Martin’s work, the significance of space in the narrative is predicated on ‘socio-political, socio-ethnic, and socio-sexual power structures’.351 In these accounts of the novel, the connection between house and inhabitant is generally figured as symbolic, allegorical or metaphoric, rather than literal. This is explicitly expressed by García-Johnson: ‘in [Allende’s] novel, structures, and the spaces they contain, serve as metaphors for or symbols of social and political barriers’.352 In Parker’s words, ‘the house becomes a symbol of resistance to socio-political norms’.353 These are valid approaches, but they eschew the cognitive insights offered by the narrative, mechanizing the relationship between character and home.

The house, I argue, operates both at a metaphoric and phenomenological level, meaning that both political and cognitive approaches can be simultaneously applicable. The house’s role as a political symbol shouldn’t detract from the house’s status as an, in Turkle’s words, ‘evocative object’354 which wields physical and psychological influences over its inhabitants. Interestingly, though there haven’t been many cognitive approaches to La casa, let alone cognitive accounts of the anthropomorphism or temporality in the narrative, Allende’s novel has been used by cognitive scientists to illustrate principles of cognition. It was deployed by psychologist Henry Wellman to illustrate Theory of Mind principles, for example in his article ‘Cognición social y educación: teoría de la mente’355; by psycholinguists Judith Kroll and Annette de Groot in their paper on the ‘consequences of bilingualism for cognition and

350 Ronie-Richele García-Johnson, “The Struggle for Space: Feminism and Freedom in ‘The House of the Spirits,’” Revista Hispánica Moderna 47, no. 1 (1994): 185. 351 Martin, Isabel Allende’s House of the Spirits Trilogy, 25. 352 García-Johnson, “The Struggle for Space,” 184. 353 Parker, “Haunted Dwellings, Haunted Beings: The Image of House and Home in Allende, MacDonald, and Morrison,” 12. 354 Turkle, Evocative Objects. 355 Henry Wellman, “Cognición Social y Educación: Teoría de La Mente,” Revista de Investigacíon Educacional Latinoamericana 53, no. 1 (2016): 1–23. 118

for language and thought’356; by Dan Slobin in his report on motion imagery in language357; by Catherine Wallace in demonstrating ‘the cognitive characteristic of schemas’358; and by Maya Hickmann and Stephanie Robert in investigating mental imagery in their monograph on space, language and cognitive categories.359 The use of the novel in a range of cognitive research illustrates the congeniality of La casa to explorations of cognition. Yet despite this congeniality, and the vast range of critical analyses of La casa, literary critics have not approached the central house-character relationship with a cognitive perspective.

The fact that this Latin American classic novel hasn’t been addressed by cognitive criticism does not, however, mean that cognitive criticism has not been expanding, in exciting directions, within Spanish literary criticism. Indeed, cognitive criticism of Spanish literature has made compelling advances within the last decade. In some ways, this has developed within broader patterns of cognitive literary theory, with a focus on the reader, or ‘the dynamics between readers and texts’, as Reed explains in his chapter on embodiment and empathy in Cervantes’ readers.360 Similarly, audience response is highlighted by Bruce Burningham and Elizabeth Cruz Peterson in their discussions of embodied spectatorship on the early modern Spanish stage.361 Within this interest in the dynamic of text and reader, there is a focus on various aspects of cognition, such as Domingo Rodenas de Moya and Jose Valenzuela’s discussion of ‘transportation’ to fictional worlds362; Ryan Schmitz’s inquiry

356 Judith Kroll and Annette Groot, Handbook of Bilingualism: Psycholinguistic Approaches (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 442. 357 Dan Slobin, “Verbalized Events: A Dynamic Approach to Linguistic Relativity and Determinism,” in Evidence for Linguistic Relativity, ed. Susanne Niemeler and René Dirven (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 2000), 200. 358 Catherine Wallace, Reading (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1992), 33. 359 Maya Hickmann and Stéphane Robert, Space in Languages: Linguistic Systems and Cognitive Categories (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 2006), 73. 360 Reed, “Embodiment and Empathy in Early Modern Drama: The Case of Cervantes’ El Trato de Argel,” 183. 361 Elizabeth M Cruz Peterson, “A Mindful Audience: Embodied Spectatorship in Early Modern Madrid,” in Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature, ed. Isabel Jaen and Julien Jacques Simon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 111–30; Bruce Burningham, “Cognitive Theatricality: Jongleuresque Imagination on the Early Spanish Stage,” in Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature, ed. Isabel Jaen and Julien Jacques Simon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 93–110. 362 Domingo Rodenas de Moya and Jose Valenzuela, “Don Quixote’s Response to Fiction in Maese Pedro’s Puppet Show: Madman or Transported Reader?,” in Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature, ed. Isabel Jaen and Julien Jacques Simon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 148. 119

into theory of mind and mind-models in early modern Spanish manuals363; or autopoiesis, as explored in Cervantes’ works by Catherine Connor-Swietlicki.364 There is, however, a distinction between such approaches and my own, as these scholars are largely invested in understanding ‘how literary fiction works’,365 rather than investigating a wider variety of human cognition.

That said, there are certainly resonances between my approach and other endeavours in cognitive literary criticism of Spanish literature. Useful in my theoretical positioning has been the work of Howard Mancing, which affirms that ‘[l]iterary characters are not simply word masses, mere language or discourse, subject positions, or debiologized subjects. Literary characters are virtual human beings with virtual bodies and minds’.366 Discussing autopoiesis in Cervantes’ metafiction, Mancing takes ‘important notions from biology that can help literary scholars explore literary representations of consciousness’,367 which also describes a key part of my own investigation. Julia Dominguez discusses the possibility, as I do, of authors intuitively representing aspects of real-life cognition in her discussion of Cervantes’ representation of memory.368 Judith Caballero employs the same cognitive historicist approach which has influenced my own chapter in her investigation into gender identification in the Spanish Comedia.369 In her discussion of Theory of Mind and various kinds of social intelligences in the context of Early Modern Spanish literature, Barbara Simerka notes the connection between an understanding of the contextualised mind and the

363 Ryan Schmitz, “Theory of Mind in Early Modern Spanish Manuals of Courtly Conduct,” in Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature, ed. Isabel Jaen and Julien Jacques Simon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 164–82. 364 Catherine Connor-Swietlicki, “Why Autopoeises and Memory Matter to Cervantes, Don Quixote, and the Humanities,” in Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature, ed. Isabel Jaen and Julien Jacques Simon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 38–53. 365 Rodenas de Moya and Valenzuela, “Don Quixote’s Response to Fiction in Maese Pedro’s Puppet Show: Madman or Transported Reader?,” 148. 366 Howard Mancing, “Embodied Cognition and Autopoiesis in Don Quixote,” in Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature, ed. Isabel Jaen and Julien Jacques Simon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 42. 367 Mancing, 6. 368 Julia Dominguez, “The Janus Hypothesis in Don Quixote: Memory and Imagination in Cervantes,” in Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature, ed. Isabel Jaen and Julien Jacques Simon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 54–74. 369 Judith Caballero, “Wearing Gender on One’s Sleeve: Cross-Dressing in Angela de Azevedo’s El Muerto Disimulado,” in Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature, ed. Isabel Jaen and Julien Jacques Simon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 131–47. 120

embodied mind, linking cultural studies with cognitive theories of embodied cognition, as this chapter gestures towards.370 However, these are very broad correspondences between my analysis and other ventures in cognitive criticism of Spanish language texts; the actual specifics of my approach differ significantly. Perhaps most notably, other cognitive critics do not use literature to propose a new cognitive phenomenon, as this and the previous chapter do. In so doing, I hope to show how literature can offer insights into subjective time and object relations, and how revelations in cognitive science can deepen our understanding of La casa de los espíritus.

Part 2. ATS within La casa de los espíritus

Though I do not argue that Allende consciously represented the phenomenon of ATS, the novel does seem aware of the connection between home and time. The link is signalled early on in the novel in recounts of Clara’s childhood home:

Clara passed through her childhood and entered into youth inside the walls of her house, in a world of shadowy histories, calm silences, where time was not marked with clocks nor calendars and where objects had their own life. (94)

This shows the link between the experience of home and time, as well as the exaggeration characteristic of this magic realist tale. Objects are not only anthropomorphised but have their own distinct life force, and non-linear time is not simply an abstract concept but a daily reality far removed from standard clock time. Later, both dimensions reappear in The Big House on the Corner – the home of the next generations of the Trueba family.371 Indeed, the influence of the house on the progress of time is directly referenced: the house is animated by ‘a cheerful, beneficent spirit, at whose slightest footfall the clocks began to wind themselves’ (140, my italics). I argue that this explicit connection between home and time ought to be examined through a frame cognizant of the cognitive aspects of anthropomorphism and subjective time, in order to access La casa’s insights on how dwellings influence experience.

370 Barbara Simerka, Knowing Subjects: Cognitive Cultural Studies and Early Modern Spanish Literature (Indiana: Purdue University Press, 2013), 139. 371 There is opportunity for a similar study of the other key residence of the Trueba family, the rural Las Tres Marias. However, for sake of streamlining my argument, I have chosen to focus only on The Big House on the Corner. 121

In the following, I will sketch an outline of how ATS operates in the novel. First, I establish The Big House on the Corner as an anthropomorphised being, then I illustrate how the text shows the time ‘felt’ by the house, and, finally, I demonstrate how this affects the characters – in particular, Alba. This will show how a cognitive perspective sensitive to ATS can open up a text in new ways, and gain a specific, tangible answer as to how a house can influence its inhabitants.

2.1 The Big House on the Corner anthropomorphised

As anthropomorphism is, as I have discussed in the last chapter, a perceptual strategy employed by people across cultures, it is unsurprising that it would instantiate in literature across different continents. It may be considered a human universal to anthropomorphize the relevant subjects and objects in one’s environment.372 Indeed, it has been a noted feature of Latin American literature for a long time, ‘modulated through myth’, according to literary critics Mark Anderson and Zelia Bora.373 For example, Andrés Bello deployed poignant and sustained anthropomorphism in his apostrophe to the jungle, ‘Silva a la agricultura de la zona tórrida/Ode to Tropical Agriculture’ (1826), both praising and directly addressing the flora of the tropics: ‘Hail fecund zone…/you sew your wreath of pomegranate thorns to summer’.374 In Allende’s novel, however, anthropomorphic perception is amplified, until the house isn’t just perceived as alive, but is alive in a much more literal way, with pieces of furniture moving seemingly of their own accord. It is the source of much of the spiritualism in the novel: the figure of the anthropomorphic house develops through a magical lens, in which an otherworldly spirit is animating the building. It is not, however, an otherworldly entity existing independently, but rather is spiritually and anatomically linked to the Trueba family, and particularly to Alba and her grandmother Clara, who operate as the house’s heart and spiritual motor. The Big House’s life force is also tied to its physical structure. As Foreman points out, the novel shows ‘an emphasis on the Trueba family’s coexistence within an unquestioned magical realm that grows within and arises out of their solid geometrically

372 Urquiza-Haas and Kotrschal, “The Mind behind Anthropomorphic Thinking,” 167. 373 Mark Anderson and Zelia Bora, Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America: Ecocritical Perspectives on Art, Film, and Literature (New York: Lexington Books, 2016), 47. 374 Andrés Bello, “Silva a La Agricultura de La Zona Tórrida,” Biblioteca Virtual Universal, 2003. Original text: ‘Salve, fecunda zona, Tú tejes al verano su guirnalda de granadas espigas’. 122

structured house’.375 The fact that the house’s life force has both material and emotional bases means that despite the magical exaggeration, it still effectively models human anthropomorphic perception, exploring the conceptions that humans often develop of their homes.

Early evidence of the anthropomorphic perception Alba has of the house arises in the frequent animated descriptions. The house and its furniture seem to be alive, with both psychological and physical agency. The subjunctive and conditional grammatical moods are often used to describe the house: it is driven ‘as if by a hidden motor [un motor oculto]’ (282), ‘as if’ there were a spirit animating the house itself. Objects move, ‘without any trick, known energy or lever’ (297). This kind of ‘intentional motion’, according to biological anthropologist Urquiza-Haas et al., triggers both anthropomorphic perception of an object, and the ‘motor matching mechanisms’ that this perception can engage.376 This motor matching is particularly stimulated by a perceived similarity between the house and its human viewer: ‘The anatomical configuration of [the] nonhuman… could also be of great importance for the involvement of motor matching mechanisms as triggers of mental state attribution’.377 This indicates why it is important to my account of motor resonance – and its associated temporal effects – that The Big House on the Corner’s ontology is explicitly linked with the human: mind, body and spirit. Though Clara ‘was the soul of the house’ [el alma de la casa] (298), its heart rests in Alba’s room, where she has ‘painted a big pink heart on the last free space of the walls’ (335). The house has an implicit gender, something observed by Parker, García-Johnson,378 and René Campos. It is figured as female, a maternal presence watching over the matricircular line of the Trueba women: in Campos’ words, the house is the space of ‘the mother’.379 The Big House is also endowed with affective stances and changes, variously described as ‘cheerful’ [animada] (229), ‘sad’ [lúgubre] (223), [triste] (444), etc. Along with this human psychology, the house is embodied with human anatomy. It has sensory organs similar to human beings: the house can hear – its winding staircase

375 Foreman, “Past-On Stories: History and the Magically Real, Morrison and Allende on Call,” 31. 376 Urquiza-Haas and Kotrschal, “The Mind behind Anthropomorphic Thinking,” 169. 377 Urquiza-Haas and Kotrschal, 169. 378 García-Johnson, “The Struggle for Space,” 184. 379 René Campos, “La Casa de Los Espiritus: Mirada, Espacio, Discurso de La Otra Historia,” in Los Libros Tienen Sus Propios Espiritus (Veracruz: Universidad Veracruzana, 1987), 21. 123

follows the whorl of an ear’s cochlear [una escalera de caracol] (300)380; the windows are described as ‘eyes’ [‘ojos de buey’] (105), given in English editions as ‘portholes’ but translated literally ‘ox eyes’; and the house watches its inhabitants with a ‘beneficent’ (140) gaze. Not only can it sense, but also communicate, as suggested through double-meanings in descriptions of the connected rooms. The line ‘corredores torcidos y ojos de buey que comunicaban los cuartos para hablarse a la hora de la siesta’ (105) has been translated as ‘twisting corridors and portholes that linked the rooms so that people could speak during the hour of the siesta’.381 However, in the original, the grammatical subject of ‘hablarse/speak’ could equally be the rooms themselves, and so ‘communicaban’ could be used in the sense of both linking and communicating, as if the rooms themselves were the ones holding conversations during the hours of siesta.

The Big House has other human body parts: Allende herself has stated that the house’s basement is a womb, an anthropomorphism echoed by many critics. García-Johnson states, ‘the basement is… the womb… the most intimate of spaces, the space where life (and text, in the cases of Clara and Alba) is created’.382 The attic is also described in human terms. As Campos notes, in interestingly cognitive terminology, this ‘is the space of the unconscious and of the imagination’.383 In terms of anatomical analogy with the human body, the focus on the house’s upper and lower – its basement and its attic – is also significant. The importance of verticality in human self-conception has been noted by a number of cognitive linguists, including Johnson and Lakoff.384 Bachelard also saw the importance of this in his philosophical analysis of the influences of space and dwelling: ‘I believe that we should consider two principal connecting themes: 1) A house is imagined as a vertical being… 2) A house is imagined as a concentrated being. It appeals to our consciousness of centrality’.385 This is particularly emphasized in La casa: the human anatomy of up/down is replicated in the house’s vertical polarity – the attic, like the human head, is the space of imagination and the unconscious, and sits at the top of the structure, whereas the basement, like the womb, the

380 ‘Caracol’ can refer either to a snail or the ‘caracol del oído’; the cochlear. 381 Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits, trans. Magda Bodin (New York: Random House, 2011), 115. 382 García-Johnson, “The Struggle for Space,” 190. 383 Campos, “La Casa de Los Espiritus: Mirada, Espacio, Discurso de La Otra Historia,” 24. 384 Lakoff and Johnson, “The Metaphorical Structure of the Human Conceptual System,” 205; Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By. 385 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 36. 124

space of creation, is positioned lower down, replicating the verticality so important to the human self.

So, physically, spiritually and psychologically, the house is anthropomorphised. However, in this magic realist novel, the natural, subtle anthropomorphic perception of day to day experience is exaggerated. In everyday anthropomorphism, as Robert Hart explains, we realise that objects, such as houses, are not actually alive, and do not ‘themselves have human feelings or qualities. What’s happening is that we explore, interpret, and come to understand them with the same sensory systems, brain structures, experience, memories, and reasoning that we use to detect the qualities and inner thoughts of people’. In this scenario, our encounters with anthropomorphised beings are ‘less intense’ than with actual people.386 However, in the novel, this ontological distinction is not so certain: The Big House on the Corner actually seems to be an animate entity, with its own subjective experience. The creative licence of magic realism means that our anthropomorphic conception is externalised, rendered real. This is seen elsewhere: Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria transfuses Indigenous Australian ways of knowing with postcolonial realities of the northern coast of the country, through a sea-borne, transcultural magic realism.387 In this narrative, as with La casa, the anthropomorphic perception of characters is figured as really existing in the (fictional) world. In Carpentaria, a protagonist, Norm Phantom, speaks of his house as alive, with biological body and anthropomorphic agency: ‘he told them that every house had a spirit, and in his house, the spirit’s brain lived in the fishroom’388; ‘a house made its own life’.389 (The land and sea are both also animated in this way.) This lends the characters’ relationship with the house in these novels a profound depth, and, in La casa, particularly explains why it is such an important figure in the lives of the Trueba family.

386 Robert Hart, “Architectural Empathy: Why Our Brains Experience Places Like People,” Metropolis, June 30, 2016, http://www.metropolismag.com/architecture/architectural-empathy-why-our-brains- experience-places-like-people/. 387 Although this is a controversial claim as many see Magic Realism as a specifically Latin American literary tradition, many critics read Wright in this way. See: Ben Holgate, “Unsettling Narratives: Re- Evaluating Magical Realism as Postcolonial Discourse through Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria and The Swan Book,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 51, no. 6 (2015): 634–47, https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2015.1105856. 388 Alexis Wright, Carpentaria (Sydney: Giramondo, 2007), 208. 389 Wright, 111. 125

Indeed, the Big House on the Corner is figured as a key family member. With the passing of generations and the development of family members, the house itself grows and develops, renovated and redecorated, growing in size, adding new rooms and corridors. As Parker claims, for ‘Clara, Blanca and Alba, this weaving from one epoch to another is connected to the “furniture” of the house’.390 This becomes particularly important for the emotional and temporal relationship between Alba and the house. Alba grows up not just inside the house, but alongside it and even through it, the house’s changes facilitating and manifesting Alba’s own changes:

Over the years, Alba would fill the walls of her bedroom with an immense fresco, where, through the Venusian flora and impossible fauna of imaginary beasts… appeared the desires, the memories, the sadness and the joys of her childhood. (285)

In the precise moment that she became a woman, Alba enclosed herself in her old room, where still on the walls was the mural that she had started many years ago. She searched in the old tins of paint until she found a little of red and white that were still fresh, she mixed them carefully and then she painted… afterwards, she threw the jars of paint and the brushes into the bin and sat a long while contemplating the drawings, reviewing the history of her hardships and happiness. (335)

The family’s history is deposited throughout the house: Alba’s murals; the notebooks in which Clara annotates the events of the family, hidden in ‘lost corners’ (304); the body parts of family members (the decapitated head of Clara’s mother, the pelt of Clara’s magical pet, Barrabás); albums and portraits buried in ‘secret forgotten corners’ (451), until the house and family’s stories are almost seen as one single history. As Cabrera elegantly expresses, ‘Façade [fachada] and back make the novel, the house and the family’.391 It is certainly no coincidence for Allende that the secondary meaning of ‘house/casa’ is ‘a family including

390 Parker, “Haunted Dwellings, Haunted Beings: The Image of House and Home in Allende, MacDonald, and Morrison,” 43. 391 Vicente Cabrera, “Modalidades Textuales En ‘La Casa de Los Espiritus,’” Chasqui 20, no. 2 (1991): 39. My translation. 126

ancestors, descendants and kindred’392 – a semantic ambiguity which neatly girds the novel’s thematic investigation of the relationship between people, houses and the passing of time.

2.2 The Temporality of The Big House on the Corner

It is the sense of passing time inside The Big House on the Corner which, I argue, becomes crucially important in the role of the Trueba home. As in the childhood home of Clara (a previous iteration in a series of magical houses in La casa’s world), within The Big House, ‘time was not marked by clocks nor calendars and objects had their own life… the past and the future were part of the same thing’ (94). In the happy years of the house, ‘the time of the spirits’ (115), while Alba’s grandmother Clara is still alive, the house’s tempo, or subjective time, has a liminal tenor, existing outside linear chronology. Rather than the standardised clock time of monochronicity, the house operates in a radical polychronicity: time is circular or cyclical, its units of time non-identical, fixed to events rather than clocks. Inside the house’s walls, clocks are less inanimate objects of time-keeping than animate beings who can alter their position at will. As quoted above, responding to the footsteps of the house’s animating spirit, ‘the clocks began to wind themselves’ (140). As such examples show, in this magic realist novel, the standard sense of polychronicity is stretched from an abstract method of conceptualising time to a reality where, within the house’s walls, the normal laws of time are almost irrelevant. This shut-off world ‘provoked a sense of emergency and shock in the laws of physics and logic’ (282). The simultaneous, circular sense of time becomes hyperbolic, amplified into a day to day reality far outside the reader’s concept of ‘normal time’.

In this way, it is very culturally connected to its South American context, a continent dominated by so-called ‘polychronic’ societies. According to Edward T Hall, ‘individuals from P-time [polychronic] cultures, such as those in Africa and South America, operate near the P-time end of the continuum’.393 Around this position in the time-culture spectrum, individuals see time holistically rather than linearly. They are more concerned with relationships and people than with schedules, and ‘believe that they are in command of time

392 Merriam Webster, “House | Definition,” accessed March 8, 2019, https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/house. 393 Hall, The Silent Language, 313. 127

rather than being controlled by it’.394 Most importantly, they conceive of time as cyclical, a circle rather than a straight line.395 Several indigenous cultures around the world are often spoken of as being polychronic.396 This is represented in some literature from and about Aboriginal Australia, for example Carpentaria, which focuses on the circular nature of time. In this novel, ‘the natural cycle of things’397 governs the temporality of the land, as well as of the characters: a protagonist speaks of ‘the rhythms of his life’.398 This is often explored in Latin American literature. García Marquez’s classic of Latin American magic realism, One Hundred Years of Solitude (a cultural and generic antecedent to Allende’s La casa, with which a comparison is almost ‘inevitable’399) depicts another intergenerational tale marked by distinct cycles – clearly symbolised by the recursive naming of characters within the extended Buendía family. This is echoed in the repetitive naming of La casa’s female lineage: Nívea, Clara, Blanca and Alba400, all roughly translating to similar shades of whiteness. Alba’s name is, as Clara explains, ‘the last of a chain of luminous words that express the same thing’ (278). Interestingly, ‘Alba’ also means ‘dawn’ in Spanish, which indicates the significance of the new beginning that she represents.

Like the chronicles of family history that Clara writes into her notebooks, the house’s sense of time is ‘separated by events and not by chronological order’ (454), rejecting Western linearity in favour of a socio-emotionally based time which continuously loops back around in recurring patterns. The house itself goes through distinct cycles. As García-Johnson notes with tellingly biological terminology, the house is ‘born and reborn’401, both linked to and mirroring the ‘matricircularity’402 of the family’s intergenerational tale. Using the animate terms in which the novel couches the house, the mansion goes through periods of both

394 Hall, “Monochronic and Polychronic Time,” 313. 395 Tiemersma and Oosterling, Time and Temporality in Intercultural Perspective. 396 Evgeny Suntsova, “Science, Education, Innovation: Priority Directions of Development,” in Kyzygz State Technical University, vol. 316 (Scientific and Technical Conference, Bishkek, 2009), 2. 397 Wright, Carpentaria, 259. 398 Wright, 496. 399 Allende and Rodden, Conversations with Isabel Allende, 46. 400 Roughly translating to Snow-white, Clear, White and (latin) White 401 García-Johnson, “The Struggle for Space,” 190. 402 Nelly Martinez, “The Politics of the Woman Artist in Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits,” in Writing the Woman Artist: Essays on Poetics, Politics, and Portraiture, ed. Suzanne Whitmore Jones (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 293. 128

vibrant wakefulness, and dormancy. This is clearly shown during a cycle before Alba’s birth – her mother, Blanca, and Clara return to the house, to find it ‘as empty and lugubrious as a mausoleum’ (223). After the death of their beloved Nana, the house had gone into a mourning period403: ‘The deterioration was so obvious that Clara decided to close the house and dismiss everyone’ (181). The Big House even adorns mourning attire: ‘she and Blanca undertook the task of covering the furniture with sheets and putting mothballs [naftalina] everywhere’ (181). What follows after a period of several weeks is a reawakening of the house: Clara ‘insisted that her daughter help her in hiring new servants, opening the shutters, removing the sheets that had been draped over the furniture and lampshades, unlocking the padlocks on the doors, shaking off the dust, and letting in light and air’ (223), until ‘within two weeks… Clara brought life back to the house’ (224, my emphasis). As the house heals and is reanimated, Blanca and Clara themselves are finally able to heal, illustrating the psychological and physical link between house and inhabitants: ‘… the mother and daughter recovered from the bruises of body and soul’ (223). As Parker explains, ‘by means of the interrelations and co-dependence of the Trueba women working and cultivating from within the house… the acts of re-building, re-forming, and re-creation become a bringing- consciousness [of the dwelling]’.404 The acts of refurbishing change much more than the decor: they represent the cycles that the family and house, as an animate being, go through.

However, though the house’s prevailing time-sense is cyclical, it offers a space in which the full spectrum of time conceptualisation is explored. In this way, La casa rejects simplistic explanations: its treatment of time cannot be explained solely by the polychronicity of its South American society and the literary antecedents of this continent. In this reductive account, the novel’s polychronic context has led to an intergenerational, circular tale in which the house is simply a prop in this over-arching cycle. Complicating this account means recognising the different temporal phases of The Big House on the Corner, and its effects on inhabitants, showing La casa’s nuanced exploration of the spectrum of chronemics. Though the house’s prevailing temporal state seems to be cyclical, it undergoes a period of dormancy, in which it seems to join the linear, straight-line progression of monochronicity. This shift

403 I could have focused more on this period of the house’s lifecycle, and how it affected the inhabitants, but for the sake of clarity I have focused my argument largely through Alba, and at this stage of the novel she is yet to be born. 404 Parker, “Haunted Dwellings, Haunted Beings: The Image of House and Home in Allende, MacDonald, and Morrison,” 25. 129

has far-reaching influences on its inhabitants, particularly Alba, through a flow-on effect which mirrors the anthropomorphic temporal synchronisation which I have explored in other novels.

In exploring both ends of the time-culture spectrum, La casa offers a dialectic of the complex sense of time experienced in a Chile influenced by a globalised world. Two other critics have noted the duality in Allende’s representation of time in the novel405: Martin observes that the novel is ‘tied to a span of decades of writing and a structure that is at once linear and circular’.406 In a brief note within his chapter on ‘nomenklatura’ and lineage in the novel, Richard McCallister mentions that ‘time is both linear, as seen in the Pedro García lineages (filiation), and circular, as in the case of Esteban Trueba (affiliation)’.407 However these critics don’t discuss this duality in depth, nor in terms of internal, experienced time. An analytical framework cognizant of ATS shows the significance of these two modes of conceiving and experiencing time at the level of individual subjectivity, highlighting the influences of different modes of time on character and plot development.

I’ll begin this analysis by establishing how the house’s mode of time is constructed by its psychological and physical presence – its architecture, decor, the dialectics of inside and outside, and its sense of connectivity, movement and infinite expansion. During the house’s happy years, while Alba is young, the house creates its own temporal space, a world cut off from the relentless succession of events occurring outside its walls – particularly the Western cultural and political interventions that were taking place: ‘in the time that Clara was alive, when Alba was still a child, the big house on the corner was a closed world, where she grew up protected even from her own nightmares’ (281). Dates and months are not mentioned, but rather time is organised by cycles, from generational to seasonal and daily cycles. ‘During this time, daily the table was set for the family, the guests, and a place leftover for whoever might arrive without notice’ (282); guests ‘constantly appear, disappear and reappear’ (284);

405 Though I don’t want to delve too deeply into biography, one specific reason that the ATS in the novel is used to explore this duality, both Western and non-Western time, is articulated by Martin: Allende ‘struggled to carve out her own space in an adopted homeland and a literary culture that both embraced and marginalized her’. (44) 406 Martin, Isabel Allende’s House of the Spirits Trilogy, 43. 407 Richard McCallister, “Nomenklatura in La Casa de Los Espíritus,” in Critical Approaches to Isabel Allende’s Novels, ed. Sonia Riquelme Rojas and Edna Rehbein Aguirre (New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc, 1991), 30. 130

family members are born and die, with the comfort that the present moment is in constant dialogue with both the past and future. This removes the surprise of such family events: while in labour with Alba, her mother Blanca runs away from her husband, back to her family home, The Big House. Although her arrival was unannounced, she finds Clara calmly waiting for her, putting the finishing touches on a dress for her future granddaughter. When Clara dies, Alba does not ‘lose her calm’ (305), understanding that death is not a permanent goodbye. Sitting at her grandmother’s deathbed, Alba has the following comforting words for her grandmother:

“I’m going to die, is that true, little one?” “Yes, grandma, but it doesn’t matter, because I’m with you.” (306)

As Martinez notes, there is an implicit ‘cyclical understanding of reality’,408 and as the following will show, the Big House on the Corner is crucial in constructing this understanding of time. In the narrative world, the house enables a space within which the polychronicity of Latin America’s pre-colonised history can reign, ‘closed off’ from its surrounding 1970’s Chilean society, which was increasingly under the influence of a globalising, Western monochronicity: ‘The place was always in penumbra, preserved from time’s march, like a sealed pyramid’ (285). Its temporality, however, is not static, nor simply outside of normal time, but radically polychronic.

2.3 Physical Structure of The Big House on the Corner

There are homologies between the house’s geometry and its temporality. The house’s experience of time exists outside of linear chronology, part of infinite recurring cycles an extreme connectedness where the present moment is not isolated but rather in dialogue with past and future cycles. This sense of infiniteness and holistic connectivity has, for the house, both temporal and architectural aspects. The Big House grows, seemingly organically, from its original blueprint into a Borgesian, labyrinthine infiniteness, the house growing

408 Martinez, “The Politics of the Woman Artist in Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits,” 293. 131

protuberances and adhesions, with multiple twisted staircases that lead to indeterminate places, towers, windows that didn’t open, doors suspended in space, twisting hallways and portholes that linked the living quarters. (105)

The Big House on the Corner transcends standard geometry: it is a place where someone can enter and become entirely lost, then suddenly find themselves in the place where they began. As Parker observes, ‘the very house that [Esteban, Alba’s grandfather] built has become a type of inwardly growing and outwardly expanding … One thing is no longer separable from another, rooms no longer confine or isolate’.409 As well as expanding, the house repeats its own self-image in miniature – a domestic mise en abyme – through the little cubby houses that Alba constructs in its back rooms out of the mysterious flotsam and jetsam that lies around: ‘all served Alba as she constructed miniature houses in the corners’ (285). Furthermore, the house creates a sense of the infinite through the unending circularity of its structures, rendered in descriptions of the spiral staircases, the loops of corridors and hallways and the circular portholes connecting the rooms.

Though the world in which it encloses its inhabitants seems impervious to the influence of the outside society, at the same time the house’s contents and inhabitants are always in flux: ‘the main entrance was permanently open’ (282). The Big House on the Corner expands according to the guests that need to be accommodated. This contributes to the temporal world which the house creates for its inhabitants, in creating a sense of dynamism, of active movement. The sense of continual motion and the ebb and flow of this movement is part of the daily cycles through which the house goes. The house, though fixed in place, seems ambulatory, described as ‘that immense caravan filled with hallucinations that had become her home’ (283). It expands and contracts, like a set of lungs, to accommodate the cycles of ‘strange folk that constantly appeared, disappeared and reappeared in The Big House on the Corner’ (284). The movements of these inhabitants – both in/out and around the grand house – also influences the house’s sense of motion. Although The Big House itself is stationary, the flux of people coming in and out, as well as its organic expansion, means that Alba encounters the house as a moving entity, contributing to the sense that the house is a living, animate being, existing outside of linear time and space.

409 Parker, “Haunted Dwellings, Haunted Beings: The Image of House and Home in Allende, MacDonald, and Morrison,” 40. 132

Its magical capacity for expansion, and the cycles it undergoes, are part of ‘an unending history’ (453): the house is imbued with a sense of spatial and temporal infiniteness. In this it bears similarity to Borges’ ‘Library of Babel’410, or the Buendía house in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Like Allende’s, García Márquez’s novel seems cognizant of the link between the family Houses (genealogical lines) and family houses (architectural structures).411 Between the houses in La casa and One Hundred Years of Solitude there are notable similarities in the mode of time they endorse. Both attest to a prevailing polychronic time: Foreman speaks of ‘the historical form found in García Márquez, where time is measured not by dates but by generations of unlikely length; cyclical time is at odds with linear time’.412 This position outside of linear chronology, with time dictated by events rather than a standardized calendar, is reflected in García-Marquez’s novel – as it is in Allende’s – through the fantastical architecture of the family house. The Buendía house, like the Trueba house, has mutable boundaries which grow with the increase of inhabitants:

Ursula [matriarch of the Buendía family], realising that the house had become full of people… undertook the enlargement of the house. She had a formal parlour for visits built, another one that was more comfortable and cool for daily use, a dining room… nine bedrooms… a long porch… had the kitchen enlarged… the granary was torn down and another twice as large built… She had baths built in the courtyard… and in the rear a large stable, a fenced-in chicken yard, a shed… an aviary… [etc.]413

The house seems limitless, outside the understanding of normal laws:

Úrsula fixed the position of light and heat and distributed space without the least sense of its limitations… no one could see very well how from the bowels of the earth there was rising not only the largest house in the town, but the most hospitable and cool house that had ever existed in the region of the swamp.414

410 Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones (New York: Vintage Español, 2011), 86–100. 411 Indeed, according to The Sydney Review, García Márquez had intended to call his classic novel The House, indicating the importance between family and their dwelling. 412 Foreman, “Past-On Stories: History and the Magically Real, Morrison and Allende on Call,” 329. 413 Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (London: Penguin UK, 2014), 62. 414 Marquez, 62. 133

This tradition of unfinishable architecture, of a house that seems both spatially and temporally unending, is not only common in Latin American literature, but also a feature of many gothic novels from Anglo-authors. Perhaps, though, it’s notable that in Western iterations of these infinite houses, they are often vaguely malignant (e.g. The House of Leaves, The House on the Borderland, The Castle, and to a lesser extent the Sea House in The Life of Houses, analysed in the preceding chapter). These houses – structurally mutable, seemingly unbound by the laws of time and space – also influence their inhabitants’ sense of time, particularly in gothic horrors such as House of Leaves and The House on the Borderland. However, in these gothic novels, the temporal transference that the houses induce is unwelcome and disconcerting. In contradiction to physics, in The House on the Borderland, the old hermit’s house seems to extend infinitely through time and space: as he sits in his living room, the protagonist sees the house in its true extent: ‘I was staring through it, and through the wall beyond. It seemed to broaden and spread out, so that the eye failed to perceive any limitations’.415 This infiniteness has both spatial and temporal dimensions, which eventually transfers to its inhabitant, who becomes, like his house, unmoored in the passage of time. He looks in the mirror, and ‘instead of the great, hale man, who scarcely looked fifty, I was looking at a bent, decrepit man, whose shoulders stooped, and whose face was wrinkled with the years of a century’.416 He notes that it was ‘as though the governing quality of time had been held in abeyance, and the Machine of a Universe allowed to run down an eternity, in a few moments or hours’.417 The animated house’s violation of the laws of physics are horrifying to its inhabitant: ‘One thought there is, in closing, that impresses itself upon me, with ever growing insistence. It is, that I live in a very strange house; a very awful house’.418 In contrast, in the two novels from polychronic, Latin American contexts, the spatial and temporal transgressions of the houses of the Buendía and Trueba families are not monstrous, and their influence on their inhabitants do not distress or disturb. Members of the Buendía and Trueba families are explicitly described as, like their houses, existing outside of standard chronology, their age not defined by calendars or clocks. The Nana of the Trueba family, while living in the Big House on the Corner is described as ‘having become a woman

415 William Hope Hodgson, The House on the Borderland (Georgia: Charnia Chapbooks, 2015), 10. 416 Hodgson, 51. 417 Hodgson, 53. 418 Hodgson, 45. 134

without age, that conserved intact all the strength of her youth’ (93). Clara Trueba is also unnaturally youthful, with ‘the illusion of extreme youth’ (297). In this the women bear resemblance to the matriarch of the Buendía family, Ursula, who presides over the construction and extension of the family house over many, many years, with ‘a kind of supernatural vitality’.419 Rather than disturbing, this embodiment of their house’s radical temporality is normalised, even welcomed.

Others have alluded to the psychological power of The Big House on the Corner. García Johnson states that the house, with its ‘enchanted labyrinth’ of twisting staircases, secret passageways and eclectic decor, inhabits ‘the space of the past, of Imagination, and of myth’.420 As already mentioned, there has long been an awareness of the psychologically powerful nature of a dwelling’s architecture: in Richard Kearney’s words, ‘the poetic reimagining of stairs, passageways, porches or dressers brings together powers of memory, perception and fantasy that criss-cross in all kinds of surprising ways, sounding previously untapped “reverberations”’.421 However, observations such as Kearney’s are powerful but vague; García-Johnson’s are more metaphorical than cognitive, and neither seek to unpack this link between houses and subjective experience in specific, tangible terms. I argue that ATS adds a neuropsychological specificity to such accounts of houses’ influence on their inhabitants. From this viewpoint, The Big House on the Corner’s spatial and temporal connectedness, its cycles, and its perpetual dynamism, create a sense of a living being, an animate entity which lives in a radical polychronicity, outside the laws of Western chronology. Through resonance mechanisms explained in the previous chapter such as motor embodiment and emotional contagion, this radical sense of time comes to deeply influence those of the inhabitants, and particularly Alba’s, who is the only main character to fully grow up in the house. Through the analytical frame of ATS, this influence is not simply poetic artifice, a fantastical invention of the magic realist genre, but a literary representation of a real-world phenomenon.

419 Gabriel García Márquez, Cien Anos de Soledad/ One Hundred Years of Solitude (Madrid: Real Academía Española, 2007), 168. 420 García-Johnson, “The Struggle for Space,” 185. 421 Richard Kearney, “Introduction,” in The Poetics of Space (New York: Penguin Books, 2014), 11. 135

To briefly review the cognitive bases of ATS, as Mallgrave explains in Architecture and Embodiment, ‘our bodies respond very directly to the spatial conditions that we experience’.422 The objects around us can induce a mirroring, on a neuronal level, of the kinaesthetics (movement, posture, proprioception etc.) that we perceive, and the flow-on psychological effects that these physical changes induce. As researchers into architecture, motor resonance and empathy such as Gallese, Mallgrave, Hart and Hubert underline, there are many aspects which influence our embodiment of buildings and contribute ‘experience emotional qualities of space, to feel space through our bodies with a particular combination of touch and vision which so fascinated the theorists of Einfülung [empathy]’.423

To return to La casa, the novel imaginatively represents this embodied simulation between humans and houses. The close relationship that Alba develops with The Big House on the Corner – seeing the house as part of her close social sphere – means that she is profoundly influenced by its otherworldly architecture, its emotional resonances and her sense of the house as a personified being. Alba’s experience of the house – with its magical connectivity, the winding circles of its labyrinth, the radical non-linearity of its expansion – impacts her physically and psychologically. As in The Life of Houses, the perception of time as metaphorically spatial sheds light on how the house influences Alba. The house’s infiniteness and non-linearity are both spatial and temporal: it moves through polychronic cycles outside of the realm of Newtonian physics. Just as when embodied simulation occurs between two people, these aspects of the house shape Alba’s sense of time while living within its walls – creating a temporality radically outside of clock time, a circular polychronicity in which the present moment is connected to both past and future.

2.4 Alba’s Sense of Time

422 Mallgrave, Architecture and Embodiment, 144. 423 Christian Hubert, “Inside/Out” (lecture, August 11, 2001). The critical history of the term ‘einfülung’ cannot be entirely reduced to current usages of ‘empathy’, however the comparison is adequate for my purposes. See Rae Greiner, “‘1909: The Introduction of the Word “Empathy” into English,’” Britain, Representation and Nineteenth Century History (blog), accessed June 16, 2015, http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=rae-greiner-1909-the-introduction-of-the-word-empathy- into-english; Gustav Jahoda, “Theodor Lipps and the Shift from ‘Sympathy’ to ‘Empathy,’” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 41, no. 2 (2005): 151–63, https://doi.org/10.1002/jhbs.20080.

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Under the house’s influence, Alba lives out the simultaneity of past and future. Within its walls, Alba can visualise the (possible) future: ‘The girl… was able to visualize, as if she was watching it [como si lo estuviera viendo], the death of her mother’ (289). Alba also seems to be in unconscious commune with the past. Unwittingly, she ‘adopts the ideas of her mother’ (413), or recreates the fantastic beasts drawn by the aunt she never met as she paints the walls of her room, unconsciously embodying the next stage in the matricircularity of her family’s lineage (285). Much of the evidence of Alba’s sense of passing time is revealed by the narration, as Alba is revealed to be both the protagonist and narrator of the story. Her narrative idiom also shows this link between past, present and future held by a polychronic concept of circular, recurring time: the narration is filled with temporal deictic shifts, parallel timelines, digressions and connections, echoes of past moments and foreshadowing of future ones. The ordering of narrative is often interrupted by temporal shifts into the future, introduced by adverbial phrases such as ‘mucho tiempo despúes’ [a long time after] (282, 279, 312), ‘eso no fue hasta mucho más tarde’ [that wasn’t until much later] (140, 201), or ‘años más tarde’ [years later] (140, 297). The reader is often taken on a long tangent, detailing some event or development in a character’s life, only to be told ‘but all this occurred much later’ (281). Deictic shifts into the future often follow fluidly from accounts of Alba’s younger years. For example, during a story about Alba’s childhood understanding of her mother’s life, the perspective switches to an older, more mature Alba, to ‘[y]ears later, when Alba was old enough to analyse this aspect of her mother’s life’ (294). While reading about Alba’s relationship with her grandfather, we are told that ‘at the end of his life, when his ninety years had converted him into an old tree, twisted and fragile, Esteban Trueba would remember these moments with his granddaughter as the best in his life’ (290). There are many other examples of these temporal shifts: after detailing the beginning of Clara and her sister in law’s friendship, it is revealed that this ‘friendship would last for many years’ (107). Later, a portrait of Clara is painted by one of the house’s many guests, and we are told that, ‘long after, the miserable artist became a master and today the portrait is in a museum in London’ (282). Premonitions are frequent, as the future visibly manifests itself in the present. For example, aspects of Alba’s birth – which, significantly, takes place inside the Big House on the Corner – augur her future. She was born feet first, ‘which is a sign of good luck’ (277). Her grandmother Clara had foretold that Blanca would return to The Big House and that Alba would be born within its walls: ‘Without telling anyone, [Clara] fixed up one of the biggest, sunniest rooms of the house, to wait for her. There she installed a bronze crib, in which she had raised her three children’ (261). When Blanca finally returns, mid-labour, Alba is 137

pronounced to have been born ‘in the house of her grandparents, the day, hour and exact location most propitious for her horoscope’ (278). Clara ‘teaches her to… understand the premonitory signs of nature’ (298). In a significant monologue which I will return to later in my analysis, towards the end of the novel, Alba reflects on this connection between past, present and future, the ‘relation between events’ (453). She laments that ‘we believe in the fiction of time, in the present, the past and future’, concluding that ‘everything happens simultaneously’ (453) Though she is only able to consciously reflect on this concept of time after experiencing the twists and turns of her life, this mode of experiencing time has imbued her life since an early age, growing up in the magical polychronicity of The Big House.

As well as shifts in discourse time and deictic positioning, the narrative style represents the non-linearity of the time in which Alba grows up in other ways. As Bill Richardson writes, several aspects of literary texture – syntax, rhythm, morphological patterns, etc, can reveal ’the relationship between spatiality and symbolic expression’.424 Here once again the conflation, mediated by the house, of spatiality and temporality becomes visible. There is an almost geometrical imprecision to the syntax of Alba’s narration, with its endless coordinating conjunctions, embedded clauses, multiple digressions and tense shifts. Clauses are continuously added onto and inside sentences, much as the architecture of the house is mishmash of ‘protuberances’, ‘adhesions’ and ‘connections’, suggesting the significance of the house for the development of the time-sense of the narrative. Evidence of this parallel is found in descriptions of the house:

[Esteban] could not have known that that solemn, cubic, compact and pompous mansion, positioned like a hat in its green and geometric surroundings, would end up filled with protuberances and add-ons, multiple twisting staircases that led to unknown places, of towers, hatches that didn’t open, doors suspended in space, or twisting hallways and portholes that linked the bedrooms to allow communication during the hour of siesta, in accordance with the inspiration of Clara, who, each time that it was necessary to house a new guest, would order the construction of another room in whatever part of the house and if the spirits indicated that there was a hidden treasure or a body buried in the foundations, would have a wall torn down, until the

424 Bill Richardson, “Introduction,” in Spatiality and Symbolic Expression: On the Links between Place and Culture, ed. Bill Richardson, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 1, https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137488510_1. 138

mansion became an enchanted labyrinth impossible to clean, that defied numerous urban and municipal laws. (105)

Her grandmother Clara managed to keep rolling that immense caravan full of hallucinations that had become her home, even though she herself had no domestic ability and disdained the four operations of arithmetic to the point of forgetting how to add, so that the organisation of the house and the accounts fell natural to Blanca’s hands, who divided her time between the work of a butler of that miniature kingdom and her pottery workshop at the back of the patio, the last refuge for her sorrows, where she taught both students with Down Syndrome and little girls, and created her incredible monstrous creatures that, against all logic, sold like bread fresh out of the oven. (283)

In both passages, there is reference to the house as a microcosm, a world of its own set apart from conventional logic within the house: something stylistically represented in the defiance of conventional syntax. This seems to be a literary manifestation of the radical space/time that the house embodies: as McLaughlin states, ‘Allende oversteps that frontier, the neat ordered universe of temporality and conventional language structure’.425 As Martin claims, in La casa, the ‘literary structure itself reflects the spatial and temporal fluidity of border flows… through the author’s frequent reliance on prolepsis and analepsis to transcend the limits and meanings of the present’.426 In this way, the novel shows literature’s ability to explore, in various artistic and experimental ways, how language codifies temporal experience.

During this epoch in the Trueba family, the narration shows various other linguistic reflexes of polychronic time. The prevailing temporal frames of reference reflect that time-units in a polychronic culture are variable and dependent on the events they encapsulate.427 This resonates with Clara and Alba’s organisation of the family history, ‘separated by events and not by chronological order’ (454). Time in The Big House is seen as relative to events: ‘two events are being sequenced with respect to one another,’ divided by earlier/later rather than

425 McLaughlin, “Narrative Structure and Narrative Sense: Women’s Writing and Identity in the Works of Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Drabble, and Isabel Allende,” 211. 426 Martin, Isabel Allende’s House of the Spirits Trilogy, 43. 427 Han and Pöppel, Culture and Neural Frames of Cognition and Communication, 128. 139

the absolute future/past.428 This relational sequencing is particularly noticeable during the first phase of the house’s life: ‘Just as the big house on the corner was finished, Esteban Trueba and Clara del Valle were married in a modest ceremony’ (107). Births, deaths, arrivals and departures are all temporally positioned in relation to each other: these are the markers of time, rather than months or years. For example, we are introduced to Alba’s birth circuitously, relative to another arrival, that of family friends Amanda and Miguel:

And so it was that Amanda came to be part of the family for a while, and how Miguelito, by special circumstance, was present, hidden in a wardrobe, the day that Alba was born in the Trueba house. (258)

We are then told of Amanda’s exit in terms relative to Alba’s development: ‘Alba was not yet two weeks old when Amanda left the Big House on the Corner’ (281). This method of ordering events in relation to each other, rather than using calendar time, is not simply an aesthetic choice of narration but reveals the temporal experience of the narrator: as Evans explains, there is ‘compelling behavioural evidence which supports the view that… temporal reference strategies have psychological reality’.429

Furthermore, the linguistic repetition and recurring plot structure narratologically represent the circular quality of time in The Big House on the Corner. In Genette’s terms, the narrative uses both iterative (when multiple, similar occurrences are grouped together in a single mention) and repetitive (when the same occurrence is mentioned a number of times).430 Repetitive narration is particularly prominent in the novel: the use of foreshadowing, premonitions, prolepsis and analepsis means that an event is often retold several times throughout the novel. For example, in the telling of Alba’s birth: She is first mentioned in the above excerpt on page 258. On page 277 we are told ‘Alba was born standing, which is a sign of good luck’. The narrative then returns to her mother’s journey back from her husband to The Big House, leading up to the dramatic delivery:

428 Evans, Language and Time, 7. 429 Evans, 4. 430 Genette, Narrative Discourse, 143. 140

Amanda, who arrived running, drawn by the clamouring, pressed on Blanca’s stomach with all of her body weight and Clara, leaning over the suffering face of her daughter, brought a tea strainer covered with a rag to her nose with drops of distilled ether. Alba was born quickly. (278)

The repetition of motifs also creates this cyclical, recurring sense of time. For example the repeating theme in the name of the Trueba women, mentioned earlier, or the fantastic beasts which are embroidered, moulded and painted by three generations of the family – Aunt Rosa, Blanca and Alba (respectively). There is also repetition of several key phrases, such as ‘many years later’ (as above), or ‘separated by events and not chronological order’ (454, 304); and much of the first and last pages of the novel. A particularly significant recurring phrase shows the connection between the Trueba family and their houses: in Clara’s childhood home, ‘the past and the future were part of the same thing and reality of the present was a kaleidoscope of broken mirrors’ (94). This imagery of her grandmother’s house recurs in descriptions of Alba’s self-development: in the basement of The Big House, Alba ‘looks into the thousand pieces of broken mirror… she saw her face transform in the kaleidoscope of the mirror and accepted at last that it was the most beautiful of all the universe (348). This poetically expresses not only the iterative aspect of time in the novel, but the deep continuity between the Trueba family and the spaces which they inhabit.

Other temporal markers in the language during these years of the house are also, in Marcelo Coddou’s words, ‘markedly iterative’.431 Here the Spanish language is particularly conducive to conveying the polychronic sense of cycles. As Evans explains, ‘even genetically related languages utilise distinct lexical items to describe the semantic territory covered by the single lexical form’.432 For example, Spanish has three translations of the English word ‘time’: ‘hora’, ‘tiempo’ and ‘vez’. The word ‘vez’ explicitly articulates iterations, and so is conducive to the representations of temporal cycles, as illustrated in its use in the narration of the life of The Big House on the Corner. Through the use of the word, the expansion of the house is figured iteratively: ‘… each time [cada vez] that it was necessary [que necesitara] to install a new guest, she would order the construction of another room in some part of the

431 Marcelo Coddou, “La Casa de Los Espiritus: De La Historia a La Historia,” in Los Libros Tienen Sus Propios Espíritus (Veracruz: Universidad Veracruzana, 1987), 7. 432 Evans, Language and Time, 57. 141

house’ (105). This excerpt reveals another congeniality of Spanish to articulating cycles and recurrences: the imperfect tense. In their discussion of Spanish and English expressions of time and space, Slobin and Bocaz outline the key difference between the two main types – preterit and imperfect – of Spanish past tense, explaining that whereas the preterit is bound, denoting completed action, the imperfect is ‘iterative’.433 This allows the imperfect to denote recurring patterns more directly than the English simple past. This difference confirms Evans’ observation that, ‘given the variation that exists in the domain of spatial reference, variation is to be expected in the arena of temporal reference. And cross-linguistic divergence is likely to provide insight into non-linguistic matters, including the cultural and cognitive bases of time’.434 As might be expected from its cyclical, iterative mode of polychronic time, the imperfect is the prevailing tense in the narration of life in The Big House on the Corner.435 The descriptions of the house provided above attest to this, as do the following descriptions of daily life in the house:

Desde muy pequeña… Alba abría las ventanas para que entrara a raudales la luz y el aire pero las flores no alcanzaban a durar hasta la noche, porque el vozarrón de Esteban Trueba y sus bastonazos, tenían el poder de espantar a la naturaleza. A su paso huían los animales domésticos y las plantas se ponían mustias. Blanca criaba un gomero traído del Brasil, una mata escuálida y tímida cuya única gracia era su precio: se compraba por hojas. Cuando oían llegar al abuelo, el que estaba más cerca corría a poner el gomero a salvo en la terraza, porque apenas el viejo entraba a la pieza, la planta agachaba las hojas y empezaba a exhumar por el tallo un llanto blancuzco como lágrimas de leche. (283, imperfect verbs in bold)436

433 Slobin, “Verbalized Events: A Dynamic Approach to Linguistic Relativity and Determinism,” 5. 434 Evans, Language and Time, 12. 435 Obviously each of the sections isn’t exclusively iterative/imperfect or otherwise: due to the specific grammatical uses of the preterit and imperfect, it would be difficult to have exclusively one or the other. However, the predominance of the imperfect in this section makes the temporal dynamics clear. 436 From a young age… Alba would open the windows so that streams of light and air would enter but the flowers didn’t manage to last until the night, because the booming voice of Esteban Trueba and the blows of his cane had the power to frighten nature. At his passing, the domestic animals fled and the flowers withered. Blanca cared for a gum tree brought from Brasil, a squalid and timid bush whose only grace was its price. When they heard their grandfather approaching, whoever was closest ran to put the gum tree safely on the terrace, because as soon as the old man entered the room, the plant’s leaves wilted and began to exhume whitish tears like drops of milk. 142

En realidad Alba no se sentía sola, por el contrario, a veces habría sido muy feliz si hubiera podido eludir la clarividencia de su abuela, la intuición de su madre y el alboroto de gentes estrafalarias que constantemente aparecían, desaparecían y reaparecían en la gran casa de la esquina. (284)437

Alba se deslizaba de cabeza por una claraboya y aterrizaba sin ruido en aquel paraíso de los objetos olvidados. El lugar estaba siempre en penumbra, preservado del uso del tiempo, como una pirámide sellada. Allí se amontaban los muebles desechados… Todo le servía a Alba para construir casitas en los rincones. (285)438

Furthermore, this iterative narrative style conjures a sense of unreality: it helps to stage the confrontation between the mythical and the mundane, the daily life of the household with the Latin American magic which informs the radically recurring temporality of the narrative.

The cyclical time of the Big House on the Corner and its inhabitants is also visible in language through the periodicity-based temporal frames of reference used. The novel pointedly eschews referring to dates – years and months – despite the historical events which it depicts. Instead, as already mentioned, time is more properly divided into repeating cycles: the ‘matricircularity’ of the generations of Trueba women, births, deaths, seasons, special days such as Christmas, and so on. In Evans’ terms, these are known as

‘Repeatable event-reckoning’ frames of temporal reference, which facilitate the fixing of event iteration. This allows the identification of what might be referred to as cyclical time. In contrast, open-ended (or dating) event-reckoning systems relate to what we can informally refer to as linear time. Evidence for this distinction comes from language.439

437 In reality Alba never felt lonely, on the contrary: sometimes she would have been very happy if she could have evaded the clairvoyance of her grandmother, the intuition of her mother and the hubbub of bizarre people that constantly appeared, disappeared and reappeared in The Big House on the Corner. 438 Alba slid headlong through a skylight and landed noiselessly in that paradise of forgotten objects. The place was always in penumbra, preserved from time’s use, like a sealed pyramid. Here discarded furniture was shoved… everything served Alba for constructing little houses in the corners. 439 Evans, Language and Time, 133. 143

Events during this time in the house are not fixed in time with respect to a reference point, but are rather part of a repeatable sequence, such as the seasons: ‘Summer came to an end, autumn covered the fields with fire and gold, changing the landscape’ (118); ‘everything reverted to the way it had been the preceding summer’ (159). These repeatable events are referred to in general, as instalments in a sequence, rather than fixed to particular dates: ‘One Christmas Eve, Clara gave her granddaughter a fabulous present that came to replace on occasion the fascination of the basement’ (285); ‘a photograph taken on one of Blanca’s birthdays’ (121).

However, sadly these happy years of the house’s life, with its radical polychronicity, do not last forever. The series of cycles is interrupted after Alba’s grandmother, Clara, dies, and the house is, for the first time, opened to the forces of the outside world.

2.5 A New Phase in The Big House on the Corner

After Clara dies, the house loses its ‘spirit’ and goes into a state of mourning dormancy, deprived of ‘the spirits, the guests and that luminous happiness that was always present’ (310). Alba herself is at peace with her grandmother’s death (realising ‘dying is like being born: only a change’ [305]). However, The Big House on the Corner is dramatically altered, and this shift comes to deeply effect Alba’s life experiences. During this time, the magical polychronicity of the house is lost, replaced by an exaggerated monochronic time sense which relentlessly progresses forward. With significant word choice, Alba tells, ‘the death of Clara completely upended the life of the Big House on the Corner [la vida de la gran casa de la esquina]. The times changed [los tiempos cambiaron]’ (310). Through these blunt, clipped lines, Alba not only recognises that the vitality, the life force of The Big House has changed, but that this new state explicitly affects the house’s sense of time. As we come to see over the following pages, this new temporality is bound by the inflexibility of linear clock time: a monochronicity dictated by uniform units is now imposed upon the house, replacing the holistic polychronicity of a time relative to relationships and events. The shift is evident in the temporal frames of reference used by the characters: they become stationary spectators of time’s inexorable movement, helplessly observing, ‘Very bad times are coming’ (349); ‘atrocious times are coming’ (382). Chronology is no longer cyclical but marches forward endlessly: suddenly, the signs of entropy and aging appear everywhere in The Big House on the Corner. 144

The imposition of this new law of time is physically manifested: the house’s boundaries shrink and solidify. Its add-ons rooms and extensions, which previously shifted to fit the people and events that happened within it, are now closed off. The house is reduced to real world architecture: its labyrinth truncated, the back rooms abandoned, locked or no longer entered. For example, Alba’s grandfather ‘closed the rooms and occupied only the library’ (317). After her death, ‘Clara’s bedroom remained locked’ (329). The narration repeatedly emphasises ‘the abandonment of the back rooms, where noone entered’ (329). The house is now bounded by spatial – and temporal – boundaries. Paradoxically, this represents the infiltration of the outside world, the house no longer ‘a miniature kingdom’ or ‘closed world’ (282). This new opening of the house to the changing Chilean society is noted by Rojas: ‘upon Clara’s death, the house opened definitively to the world and Alba, the last of the saga, is thrown into this new ominous space’.440 It could be argued that, just as Chilean society is being shaped by intervening Western forces – as La casa itself notes in its detailing of the political collusion between Esteban and foreign political powers – the house is now infiltrated by a Westernised time culture. The Big House on the Corner, no longer a closed system, now reflects the outside Chilean society, which is increasingly shaped by Western influences – cultural, political and temporal. Rather than in a world of its own, the house is now open to the outside world, where ‘events were hurtling forwards [precipitándose], and the country was divided by ideological struggles’ (378).

Like the polychronic temporality which came before, this monochronicity is hyperbolised, with the forward march of time that is now imposed on the house more dramatic than in real life. It is not simply an abstract concept of time but an extreme day to day reality for the house’s inhabitants. The entropy and decay that accompanies linearly progressing time seems accelerated, and The Big House on the Corner falls into disrepair. This begins to happen very swiftly: ‘Alba noted the deterioration from the first days’ (310); ‘Cracks opened in the murals on the walls, the doors were chipped and splintered… Over the following years, the house became a ruin’ (311). Time’s markers are everywhere, from cobwebs and dust (312) to rotting plants: ‘the flowers shrivelled in their vases, impregnating the air with a sickly, nauseating sweetness, where they stayed until they dried, lost their petals and became

440 Rojas, “La Casa de Los Espiritus de Isabel Allende: Un Caleidoscopio de Espejos Desordenados,” 918. My translation. 145

withered stalks that no one threw away’ (311). The inhabitants lament the ‘rickety, dark house, almost empty and run through with currents of air, into which had degenerated the mansion of yesteryear’ (318) which their home has become. This is not simply due to neglect – Alba’s mother Blanca in particular ‘fought against the damage and decay with the ferocity of a lion, but it was evident that she would lose the fight against the advance of the deterioration’ (317). Nor does the house follow a natural course of deterioration: within only a few years, the garden’s pagolas have rotted and broken down, the curtains have decayed and fallen from their hangers, the statues are entirely covered by moss, dead leaves and bird poo, the kitchen covered in fat and soot, the furniture broken, their springs exposed (311- 312). Time’s march wreaks not only material decay, but emotional and psychological degeneration. It is described as living entity that had suddenly and terribly aged: ‘The Big House on the Corner was more sad and old than I could remember’ (444); ‘the curtains came loose from their hooks and hung like the petticoats of an old woman’ (311). The furniture loses its magical animation, becomes lifeless: ‘The furniture Alba had played with in her cubby houses transformed into cadavers, their springs open to the air’ (312). This change from the ever-renewing cycles of polychronicity to a monodirectional and inexorably advancing experience of time drastically changes life for The Big House on the Corner.

Once again, the inhabitants of The Big House on the Corner begin to embody, or synchronise with, this new temporality. Alba – having first noticed the change in the house – now begins to see the shift in her surrounding family. There is a sense of rapid ageing. The house’s inhabitants are now ‘chased by time [perseguidos por el tiempo]’ (362). Both Alba’s mother, Blanca, and her grandfather Esteban are shown to rapidly grow older. Here once again the magic realist text magnifies the process of ATS, as it spills from the realm of subjective time into biological and physical time. Esteban passes ‘from a healthy middle-aged man into an incipient old age, shrunken and stuttering’ (311): ‘[He] started to experience insomnia, the burden of the elderly’ (329). Blanca too suddenly begins to age: ‘time had started to wreak havoc upon her body [el tiempo comenzaba a devastarla] – she was fatter, sadder, her hands deformed by rheumatism’ (363). Alba herself embodies this shift into standard chronology, swiftly abandoning the childhood she inhabited in the house’s golden years. She is seen to ‘grow very rapidly’ (327), and ‘abandon the imprecise forms [las formas imprecisas] of adolescence’ (353). This way of phrasing her maturation is significant, because like the house Alba has lost her imprecise borders, the magical mutability of their early years, and solidified along the lines of the physical and temporal laws of linear chronology. 146

The polychronic space for fluid multiplicity, where ‘people tend to handle multiple things concurrently’ is lost441: the chaotic hubbub of interactions and activities quietens in The Big House. The rhyzomic connectivity, both of the house’s architecture and its inhabitants’ relationships, is pruned. Like the rooms of the house, once linked via portholes and corridors and now closed off and silent, family connectivity overall is hugely diminished. The predominance of familial relationships is a feature of polychronic time cultures: ‘Polychronic individuals are oriented toward people, human relationships, and the family, which is the core of their existence’442; time is shaped by human interaction rather than the other way around. When The Big House loses its polychronicity, the focus on human interaction is also diminished as its inhabitants busy themselves in the activities and schedules of their outside work: ‘they lived in the house because they didn’t have a more convenient place to eat and sleep, but they passed through like indifferent shadows, without stopping to see the mess’ (312). The sense of cohesive family unit is lost: ‘even Alba grew daily more remote’ (396). Alba’s grandfather realises, ‘it was simply that his family no longer interested him’ (335). As an Allende critic, Cox, observes, during this time ‘the Trueba household is set adrift’.443 The house, once a member of the family in its own right, becomes less integral to the lives of the characters. Without its anthropomorphic vitality, it has barely ‘an appearance of home’ (317). During this time came ‘the first time that Alba spent the night outside of her house’ (337). Alba’s uncles distance themselves from the family life: ‘Jaime and Nicolás lost the little interest that they had in the family and had no compassion for their father’ (312). Eventually, Alba’s grandfather expels Nicolás: ‘he chartered [the plane] overseas, with the order not to return for the rest of his life’ (315). Alba’s other uncle, Jaime, ‘decided that he couldn’t live under the same roof as his father, closed his tunnel [a hallway of books], took his clothes and went to sleep at the hospital’ (352). As the house deteriorated further, and more and more of its inhabitants left, ‘the pace of events seemed to escalate’ (372). Characters feel that the passing of time has sped up and is outstripping them: ‘Things had changed much over these last years, and Esteban felt that events were overtaking him’ (349).

There are also subtle changes in the temporal tenor of the narrative style, which become more pronounced as time goes on in this new phase of The Big House on the Corner. Overall, there

441 Suntsova, “Science, Education, Innovation: Priority Directions of Development,” 2. 442 Suntsova, 2. 443 Cox, Isabel Allende, 34. 147

is a subtle shortening of syntax: the flowing arabesques of embedded clauses truncate slightly or are less common. For example, during the previous phase of the house, a sample page (283) contains sentences of five to seven clauses on average. One hundred pages later (383), during the darker period of The Big House on the Corner after the death of Clara and the imposition of monochronic time, contains sentences of largely two to four clauses. This change is most notable in descriptions of the house: though the syntax is not succinct, it is choppier than in earlier, flowing descriptions of the house. Descriptions of the house which I provided earlier contrast with typical post-change passages:

Over the following years the house became a ruin. Noone went into the garden to water or prune it, until it seemed entirely swallowed by neglect, birds and weeds. The blind statues and the bubbling fountains became clogged with dry leaves, bird excrement and moss. The pergolas, broken and dirty, became a refuge for bugs and the trash of neighbours. (311)

Alba stopped cutting flowers to adorn the house. Later the plants died because no one remembered to water them or talk to them, like Clara used to do. The cats left quietly. (311)

He shut the drawing rooms and used only the library and his bedroom. He was deaf and blind to the needs of his house. (317)

These excerpts contrast not only with the engorged syntax of earlier descriptions of the house, but also the prevailing tense and aspect. In the sombre descriptions of the house’s changed state, the preterit (as opposed to the imperfect) is commonly used, with phrases and verb forms such as ‘se transformaron en cadávers’; ‘nadie volvió’; ‘la cocina se cubrió de grasa’; ‘Los habitantes de la casa se resignaron’; ‘perdió’; ‘se convirtió’; ‘se desprendieron’; ‘terminó’ (all from 311). The increased use of the preterit, the simple past, in descriptions of the much-changed Big House on the Corner seems to suggest that the narrator, Alba, also feels this shift from time as iterative and recurring to linear, divided simply into past/present.

As previously discussed, during the radical polychronic time-sense of the house’s earlier years, ‘the units of qualitative time are not uniform, as they depend on the events occurring 148

within them’.444 In contrast, in the monochronic time that the house shifts into, passing moments are measured by identical time-units, enforced by the ticking of the clock. There is a stylistic embodiment of this shift: the combination of the slightly shorter sentence style and frequent anaphora enacts the relentless succession of uniform minutes that has now taken over the house and family. To continue an earlier quote:

He shut the drawing rooms and used only the library and his bedroom. He was deaf and blind to the needs of his house. He was very busy with his politics and business… He did not notice that the walls of his house were eager for a coat of point… that the furniture was falling apart, and that the kitchen had turned into a pigsty…. He did not behave this way out of avarice; it was simply that his family no longer interested him. (317)

After Clara’s death, for Alba, her mother was the only stable person… After her grandfather had become a widower, Alba wore the hand-me-downs of some distant cousins… After her grandmother’s death, Alba began to suffer nightmares. (318)

The imposition of these monotonous units of time onto lived experience becomes more pronounced as Alba leaves the house and is forced into the outside world, where Western political intervention has compounded social and economic unrest and led to a military coup. Clock time becomes all important. As Han and Pöppel explain, in quantitative monochronic time, ‘linguistically, time is… divided into small and arbitrary units such as “second” and “minute”’.445 This is revealed in Alba’s idiom: ‘Alba calculated that at least two hours had passed’ (421); ‘she curled like a foetus on the ground… she stayed like this for hours’ (428); ‘They gave her a minute of time’ (428). This shift is also revealed by the eventual decrease in narrative deictic shifts. The flashbacks and forwards become less frequent, and the story time becomes more linearly chronological. This is particularly true after Alba is forced to leave the house and is eventually imprisoned by the military.446 During this time, the narrative discourse aligns more closely with story time – rather than skipping forward years between

444 Han and Pöppel, Culture and Neural Frames of Cognition and Communication, 128. 445 Han and Pöppel, 128. 446 While Alba is imprisoned by the military and tortured, there is an exploration of how subjective time changes under extreme suffering, as well as many broader issues about torture, political interventionism and military dictatorship - however I do not have the scope to cover these here. 149

paragraphs and chapters, the reader sees Alba’s almost daily perspective – being taken and imprisoned (425); her first violation at the hands of Esteban García (429), an officer with a personal vendetta against Alba and her family; developing relationships with the fellow prisoners (432); García’s rejection of her and her imprisonment in the perrera, a horrific cell ‘like a tomb’ (433) without room to stand, sit or even stretch, where Alba battles despair and psychosis until her release, a few days later (435). Alba’s trauma also represents another instance where the experiences of the house and of the family are in sync: just as Alba is taken by the military and sexually violated, the house is also violated, its defences penetrated by troops who force their way in to take Alba: ‘[They] never would have imagined, however, that [they] would see a dozen soldiers without uniforms, armed to the teeth, burst into the house under the cover of curfew’ (420). This indicates the extent to which, the Trueba family and the Big House on the Corner are in synchrony. Taken as a whole, the stylistic changes explored above show that when the house’s energy goes from being vibrantly alive to dormant, this has a significant effect on the Trueba family’s, and particularly Alba’s, mode of experiencing time. The house, and then the family, have shifted from the radically circular, event-based mode of experiencing time to a heightened linear chronology driven relentlessly forward by clock time.

Drawing attention to the temporal influence that The Big House on the Corner has on its inhabitants not only explores this cognitive phenomenon and accounts for linguistic and diegetic features of the novel, but also contributes to the political perspectives of La casa. I will not expand on this extensively, as others have already covered this ground. However, as I have briefly alluded to, the representation of ATS acts (in addition to an exploration of time and anthropomorphised objects) as an investigation into differing time cultures as a way to explore the complex cultural position of a Chile in a globalised world, dealing with Western political, economic and social interventions. Highlighting the changes within The Big House on the Corner sheds some light on the changes that were taking place changes within Chile, and the political and social turmoil leading up to the military coup. Rojas notes the link between the house and its surrounding society: ‘This magical world and enchanted atmosphere begins, however, to break apart when, at the death of Clara, the house opens its doors to the ominous world that surrounds it’.447 Western cultural and political intervention is

447 Rojas, “La Casa de Los Espiritus de Isabel Allende: Un Caleidoscopio de Espejos Desordenados,” 84. My translation. 150

critiqued in the novel: both directly and through the destruction that is wreaked in the house when it is infiltrated by the troubled Chile outside its walls. The changing time-sense of the house is a further critique of the violent changes occurring in the surrounding society: increased Western intervention leads to a displacement of the traditional polychronic time- culture by a regimented monochronic chronology.

Through this lens, La casa ties in with another intergenerational novel which magically weaves the politics of country and family together through an overarching narrative of time: Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie.448 Indeed, there are significant generic and thematic overlaps between Allende and Rushdie’s novels, with both linked to Latin American magical realism. As Faris claims of Midnight’s Children, ‘It is indeed a most ‘Márquezan’ book, and its magic is largely a ‘Márquezan’ magic’.449 The two novels are also productively juxtaposed in investigating the time-cultures which they explore. Like La casa, Midnight’s Children examines the contrast between the polychronic traditional time culture of his homeland – India – with a Westernised monochronic time. Rushdie’s narrator-protagonist, Saleem, explains, ‘time, in my experience, has been as variable and inconstant as Bombay’s electricity power supply…’450 Like La casa, Rushdie’s novel is filled with analepsis and prolepsis, recurring phrases and motifs, cycles, digressions and repetitions. The narrator confesses to struggling with ‘the world of linear narrative, the universe of what-happened- next’.451 But this holistic polychronicity is challenged by the imposition of the British- endorsed Partition of India and Pakistan (brokered by Lord Mountbatten): ‘Mountbatten’s tick-tock… English made, it beats with relentless accuracy’.452 Saleem fears the ‘inexorable tick tock’ of this Western-made clock time.453 In this way, both Midnight’s Children and La casa comment on the changing political and cultural nature of the country through the prism of time. Though I don’t have space in this chapter to conduct a thorough comparative analysis, I mention Rushdie’s novel to indicate how an analytical frame such as the one

448 Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (London: Vintage Publishing, 2008). 449 Patricia Merivale, “Saleem Fathered by Oskar: Midnight’s Children, Magic Realism, and The Tin Drum,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 329. 450 Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 142. 451 Rushdie, 44. 452 Rushdie, 82. 453 Rushdie, 82. 151

undertaken in this chapter can bring disparate novels into dialogue and find intersections between various critical perspectives.

This intersection between a temporal and political analysis of La casa is supported by a cognitive narrative which, unlike its political commentary, has not been explored, ignoring the novel’s insights on the link between time, houses and inhabitants. In this final section, I will conclude my discussion of ATS within Allende’s novel, as the temporal influence between The Big House and its inhabitants undergoes a final, significant shift in the last pages of the novel, and comment on its possible ramifications for our understanding of both the novel and this cognitive process.

2.6 The Re-Awakening of The Big House on the Corner

When Alba finally returns to the house, there is a sense of another cycle beginning, the reawakening of the house’s spirit and its own special tempo. The manner of inhabiting the house changes: the family realises that ‘they had to occupy the house wholly and begin to lead a normal life’ (451). Through material, domestic care, as well as emotionally communicating with the house and ‘refurbishing’ the memories that it holds, the house’s spirit revives, and it once more embodies the magical polychronic time of its early years. This is not only brought about by Alba’s return, but also a deliberate act to resurrect the house from its state of dormancy.

My grandfather contracted a special company that went over the house, from roof to basement, polishing, cleaning the crystal-wear, painting and disinfecting, until the house become habitable… In less than a week even the birch trees were growing, the water from the singing fountains had sprung again, and once again the statues of Olympus were arrogant, cleaned at last of so much bird shit and neglect. (451)

Afterwards, we took each other arm in arm, my grandfather and I, and walked through the length of the house, stopping in each place to remember the past and greet the imperceptible spirits and ghosts of other eras, that despite so many ups and downs, still persist. (451)

152

The unrelenting progress of the monochronic period is halted. The rapid aging of the inhabitants slows:

We hugged tightly for a long time, whispering grandfather, Alba, Alba, grandfather, we kissed and when he saw my hand he began crying and swearing, dealing blows to the furniture as he used to do before, and I laughed, because he wasn’t as old or as finished as he’d first seemed. (444)

Connections between family members and between the house and its inhabitants are re- established: ‘We were together’ (451).

That the house, when ‘awake’, exists in a polychronic state, suggests that this is the house’s natural temporality, perhaps even subsuming the exploration of monochronic time within a broader system of cycles. This aligns with the philosophy of time that the novel seems to endorse, embodied both stylistically through its prevailing mode of narration – circular plot structure, iterative narrative discourse, recurring phrases and motifs – and through the explicit commentary of Alba, the editor/narrator/protagonist of the novel. Switching into first person and present tense for the first time, in the final pages of the novel Alba observes,

At times I have the sensation that I have already lived and already written these same words, though I understand that it is not I, but another woman, that recorded down in her notebooks so that I could use them. I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the course of a life is very brief and everything happens so quickly that we aren’t able to see the relation between events, we can’t measure the consequences of our actions, we believe in the fiction of time, in the present, the past and future, but it could be that everything occurs simultaneously. (453)

It is only after re-establishing her relationship with The Big House on the Corner that Alba is able to clarify her philosophy of time. In feeling that she embodies both herself and the women before her in the Trueba line, consciously rejecting asymmetrical time with its rigid distinctions of past/present/future, Alba acknowledges the cyclical patterns and holistic perspective of polychronicity. This is hugely important for her own self-identity: As Levine explains, ‘a culture’s sense of time has profound consequences for an individual’s 153

psychological, physical and emotional well-being’.454 The re-internalisation of this radical circularity of time is seen both through Alba’s personal musings, and also structurally, as Alba uncovers the notes of family history written by her grandmother, and recasts them into the novel that we are now reading, creating a meta-circularity which comes to a head in the mirroring of the first and last line of the novel so that beginning and end merge and repeat. ‘Barrabás llegó a la familia por vía marítima…’ (11, 454).

In the act of rewriting, Alba creates a palimpsestic version of history which embodies holistic polychronicity, with the present moment encapsulating past and future cycles. Once again, the narrative discourse begins skipping back and forth through the years: in the last pages, we find out about the child growing inside Alba, the death of her father Esteban, and then taken back to the beginning of Clara’s life with the last line of the novel. This recycling/rewriting is not only a narratological but metafictional comment on the position of the novel. In fact, according to Coddou, La casa’s ties to García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is part of the novel’s ethic of iterativity: ‘every text is absorption and replica of other text(s)’.455 La casa is ‘bound to a series of other stories’,456 an instalment in a chain of literary works. Marcos and Mendez-Faith, also notes this, observing that La casa’s ‘fourteen chapters of the family dynasty of the Trueba family over the span of more than half a century of individual and collective stories mentally conjure other novelistic sagas and locate this work inside a generic tradition’.457 This form of, in Rodrigo Cánovas’ terms, ‘literary cannibalism’,458 is metafictionally recreated in La casa as Alba transforms not only Clara’s notebooks but her mother’s letters, the recounts of her grandfather, administrational record books, portraits, and official documents from the building of The Big House on the Corner into the novel La casa de los espíritus (453). This, for Alba, is a time of generation, in both senses of the word: a time of new cycles beginning. Living within the Big House, reflecting upon the circular sense

454 Levine, A Geography Of Time, 3. 455 Coddou, “La Casa de Los Espiritus: De La Historia a La Historia,” 7. My translations. 456 Coddou, 7. 457 Manuel Marcos Juan and Teresa Méndez-Faith, “Multiplicidad, Dialectica y Reconciliacion Del Discurso En La Casa de Los Espiritus,” in Los Libros Tienen Sus Propios Espiritus, ed. Marcelo Coddou (Veracruz: Universidad Veracruzana, 1987), 79. My translation. 458 Rodrigo Cánovas, “Los Espíritus Literarios y Políticos de Isabel Allende,” in Critical Approaches to Isabel Allende’s Novels, ed. Sonia Riquelme Rojas and Edna Rehbein Aguirre (New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc, 1991), 37. 154

of time which she can sense while in its walls, Alba gives birth to the novel as she is growing new life inside her belly.

As this chapter attests, a major part of Alba’s experience of time is due to the influence of the house, which through its physical, psychological and spiritual presence helped to shape Alba’s sense of time. This claim resonates with longstanding philosophical discussions of inhabiting: following the theories of Bachelard and Heidegger, there exists ‘the idea that there is a direct correlation between the nature of being and the nature of the concept of the house, in that the very conception of the self is indelibly connected to the nature of the space in which human being and dwelling occurs’.459 This is evident in the novel, as Alba’s connection with The Big House on the Corner is formative in her development and identity. After this return to the house, Alba’s identity and sense of self reveals itself as deeply polychronic, something which becomes apparent as she switches into first person. She describes her sense that she is simultaneously living her life, her grandmother’s, and her unborn child’s. This allows her a sense of peace in coming to terms with the tragic things that have happened in her life, as they are part of a broader cycle that will continue ‘in this way, through the centuries to come, in an unending story of pain, blood and love’ (452). In the preceding weeks, Alba had nursed plans of revenge, yet now, reflecting at her desk in The Big House, she says, ‘and now I search for my hate and I cannot find it… it wouldn’t be anything more than another part of the same inexorable rite’ (453). This newfound peace is explicitly linked to her reinstatement in the house: ‘But now I doubt my hate. In only a few weeks of being in the house, it seems to have diluted, to have lost its clear borders’ (452). This last comment, about her inner pain and hate having lost its clear borders, strikingly resonates with earlier descriptions of Alba’s own physical and mental borders. During the house’s early years, Alba was described as having the same ‘imprecise’, mutable borders as the house itself. While the house enters its monochronic stage, she loses this imprecise form (353), paralleling the house as it solidifies, transforming from a space which defied the laws of space and time to being plagued by time’s progress. Now, finally, as the house’s spirit is reawakened we can see that once again the radical imprecision of the house is embodied in Alba: her world view and identity.

459 Parker, “Haunted Dwellings, Haunted Beings: The Image of House and Home in Allende, MacDonald, and Morrison,” 13. 155

Concluding Thoughts

As this chapter has shown, an interpretive lens which acknowledges the role of the house in La casa through an analysis of ATS allows new ways to understand its character developments, political commentary and nuanced representation of time. This resonates with my previous chapter in offering a new way of understanding – in biological rather than abstract or metaphorical terms – the characters’ relationship with their material environment, unpacking the nature of their relationship with home, The Big House on the Corner. Allende’s novel offers an insightful account of how individuals’ sense of time can be influenced by the house in which they live, representing ATS in a manner deeply tied to the novel’s polychronic Latin American context. The analysis of this chapter has begun the investigation into ATS in novels outside the Western, English language texts of the preceding chapters, contributing to both my positioning of ATS as an important consideration in literary analysis and to readings of the novel itself. I have argued that the temporal influence of The Big House on its inhabitants underpins much of the plot and character trajectories, stylistic features and narrative time. Equally, a lens cognizant of ATS shows that Allende’s novel can reveal much about the relationship between people, houses and time. As Parker says, ‘the magical realist nature of these works, that is, the treatment of the extraordinary, the magical, and the absurd as normal aspects of everyday living… opens up phenomenological concerns that are not as easily or openly explored in works of realist fiction’.460 Like a ‘kaleidoscope of mirrors’, La casa de los espíritus’ fantastical rendering of reality offers insights into time, anthropomorphism and cognition that are not always easily identified in day-to-day life.

460 Parker, 12. 156

Time, Technology and the Body: Martín Felipe Castagnet’s Los cuerpos del verano

‘I am not someone who thinks about the future, except when I write novels. And [these] novels speak, rather, of the present, of the way in which we relate to our devices’.

Martín Felipe Castagnet, 2017461

Part 1. Living in the future

As my previous chapters have shown, the experience of time is mediated by the body. Shifts in subjective time, as brought about by the feedback loops involved in temporal synchronisation, start with the body: from the sensory organs which apprehend the objects/people in the environment to the imperceptible mimicry created by mirror neurons in the motor cortex. So what happens to subjective time when you try to theorize life without a body? Science fiction has long been interested in the possibility of disembodied human life: consciousness as code, identity as information, Descartes’ ghost in the machine. Martín Felipe Castagnet is one recent author to conduct this thought experiment, imagining a futuristic society where humans are able to stay ‘alive’ after death, by having their ‘psychic structure’ (although Castagnet doesn’t specify, this seems to refer to the mind, or subjective consciousness) uploaded onto the internet to await a new body. On the surface, and according to critics, this work – Los cuerpos del verano, Castagnet’s first novel, published in 2012 – is an exploration of teleological disembodiment, a portrait of the inevitable triumph of information over matter.462 Both critics and reviewers see the novel as portraying the mind as digital code, a ‘life of zeros and ones’.463 Yet a cognitive critical analysis sensitive to the role of time in different levels of the narrative shows that rather than eschewing the body,

461 Luciano Lamberti, “‘No tengo ningún respeto por la ciencia ficción’: Interview with Martín Felipe Castagnet,” Eterna Cadencia, July 2017, https://www.eternacadencia.com.ar/blog/contenidos- originales/entrevistas/item/no-tengo-ningun-respeto-por-la-ciencia-ficcion.html. 462 Martín Felipe Castagnet, Los Cuerpos Del Verano, 2nd ed. (Buenos Aires: Factotum Ediciones, 2016). 463 Fernando Sdrigotti, “An Afterlife of Zeros and Ones: Bodies of Summer by Martín Felipe Castagnet,” Minor Literature[s] (blog), April 28, 2017, https://minorliteratures.com/2017/04/28/an-afterlife-of-zeros- and-ones-bodies-of-summer-by-martin-felipe-castagnet-fernando-sdrigotti/. 157

Castagnet’s novel affirms the importance of the body in subjective experience. The temporal shifts that the main character experiences – heavily influenced by the radically digital, technological society he inhabits – show both the complex influences of technology on our bodies, and the significance of the body even in the digital age.

My critical framework in this thesis has championed a biological, bottom-up, body-based approach to questions of time experience in literature. However, the body is a contested space in today’s society – theories of transhumanism and posthumanism interact with new models of embedded, embodied and extended cognition in ways which make us question the limits of the body, and the demarcation between technology and biology: all issues which Castagnet’s novel profoundly explores. This chapter will propose that these themes of technology and embodiment within Los cuerpos can be productively explored through an analysis of time, using a cognitive framework which has not yet been applied by other critics of the novel. In the context of my thesis, this analysis consolidates cognitive time as a productive lens through which to explore literary phenomena and, reciprocally, unpack the insights of these literary phenomena into the interactions between mind, body and environment. This final chapter gestures towards the future – or, perhaps, the futuristic present – exploring how the digital age influences the relationship of time, bodies and environment.

I contend that the time of Los cuerpos – encoded in character experience, narrative structure and language – elucidates the intersection between body and digital technology. In order to understand the significance of subjective time, a critical framework cognizant of the phenomenon of temporal synchronisation is necessary. This frame allows us to understand specific ways in which the embodied mind mediates experience and identity, even in a world where bodies are supposedly neutral receptacles. It also puts Los cuerpos in dialogue with movements in both the humanities and cognitive science which foreground our material existence: the ‘new material turn’,464 body studies465 and embodied cognition, in particular.

464 As discussed in previous chapters. See: Bill Brown, Babette Tischleder and Sherry Turkle. In particular, in looking closely at the role of nonhuman objects, like technology, within the embodied minds of these characters, my approach engages with Connolly’s description of New Materialism, with ‘rethinking subjectivity by playing up the role of the inhuman forces within the human’. William E. Connolly, “The ‘New Materialism’ and the Fragility of Things,” Millennium 41, no. 3 (2013): 399, https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829813486849. 465 Body studies is a field constructed across a wide scholarship, from Butler (1993) and Foucault (1994) to Fiske (1992) and Hawhee (2004), which strives to ‘ensure that posthumanism doesn’t forget about the 158

The present chapter examines how time – and specifically, temporal synchronisation – operates in the novel; how it interacts with digital technology; and how it foregrounds the body within the novel’s technological world, clarifying the novel’s philosophical position on technology and mind. This does not mean that Castagnet’s novel comes to a simple conclusion, nor that it neatly resolves the dualities – virtual/material, technological/biological – that it explores. However, as the following analysis will show, throughout the nuanced and often ambivalent staging of these dualisms there is an avowal of the significance of the body embedded in its physical environment. In this way, the novel contributes to discourses which champion the biological body as a fundamental and valuable aspect of our humanity.466 Echoing N. Katherine Hayles, the novel ‘affirms humanness as more than disembodied ones and zeros’.467 Such a focus on the role of embodiment is, after all, signalled in the title of the novel, Los cuerpos del verano – ‘The Bodies of Summer’.468

Castagnet builds a world where people have, seemingly, transcended the limitations of the body. When an individual’s physical body dies, their ‘psychic structure’ is uploaded to the ‘network’, into the virtual domain of the internet itself, where they remain in ‘flotation’ until their family pays for them to be ‘burned’ into new (or, more properly said, second-hand) bodies. Organs, limbs – everything is transplantable, everything is renewable. The story follows Ramiro, a father and husband who, after dying prematurely during the early development of this process, remains in flotation for over a century, his family unable to afford him a new body. Eventually they are able to procure the funds, and Ramiro returns to the ‘real world’, where he must navigate new familial, professional and social mazes, in the process finding out what it is to forge an identity in this technological age. Many see this premise, with individuals able to ‘exist’ on the internet in the state of flotation, as suggesting the inevitability of disembodiment in a digital age: data displacing the importance of the body. Indeed, on the surface it seems to be conceived squarely within the tradition of the Cartesian, liberal subject, resonating with the speculations of classic transhuman theorists

living, breathing body since ‘the body and its specific behaviour is where the power system stops being abstract and becomes material’.465 466 Richard Shusterman, “Thinking Through the Body, Educating for the Humanities: A Plea for Somaesthetics,” The Journal of Aesthetic Education 40, no. 1 (2006): 1, https://doi.org/10.1353/jae.2006.0010. 467 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 17. 468 This and all other excerpts from the novel are my own translations. 159

such as roboticist Hans Moravec: ‘The picture is that we are now ‘a brain in a vat’, sustained by life-support machinery, and connected by wonderful electronic links, at will to a series of ‘rented’ artificial bodies at remote locations’.469 In this vein, one of the key critics of the novel, Liliana Colanzi writes:

Identity doesn’t occur through the physical, but through ascription to the internet. After all, it isn’t an idea so apart from reality… with the progressive migration of social relations and economic operations to the net, the disembodiment of the culture is accelerating; in Castagnet’s novel, the next, more radical step, is the transferring of the human being to virtual reality.470

This is an explicitly transhumanist premise: the achievement of human enhancement through science and technology. In Sandy Lyon’s words, transhumanism ‘looks toward a near-future moment in which humanity is able to transcend disease, illness, and the body itself—the supposed limits of our materiality and embodiment’.471 The transhumanist elements of the novel seemingly underline the position that human beings can be reduced to their data, tantalisingly close to achieving the ‘new kind of person made from… digital ones and zeros’,472 in the words of Siri Hustvedt, that transhumanism seeks. As this makes clear, this theoretical movement often demotes the body in defining what it is to be human: as Cary Wolfe points out, transhumanism reifies Cartesian dualism.473 However, I argue that rather than painting a picture of an inevitable disembodiment, this transhumanist novel in fact reinscribes the body into mind, destabilising the binaries of mind over body: a subtext which operates beneath the central premise. The characters of Los cuerpos may be able to extend their lifespans, but this does not mean that they have transcended their bodies; in being able

469 Hans Moravec, “Pigs in Cyberspace,” in The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future, ed. Max More and Natasha Vita-More (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2013), 250. 470 Liliana Colanzi, “Of Animals, Monsters, and Cyborgs: Alternative Bodies in Latin American Fiction (1961-2012)” (Ph.D., Cornell University, 2017), 160, https://ecommons.cornell.edu/bitstream/handle/1813/47757/Colanzi_cornellgrad_0058F_10095.pdf?seque nce=1. All translations from Colanzi are my own. 471 Sandy Lyons and Lisa Jaloza, “More Human than Non/Human: Posthumanism, Embodied Cognition, and Video Games as Affective Experience” (The Philosophy of Computer Games Conference, Malta, 2016), 3. 472 Siri Hustvedt, The Delusions of Certainty (London: Hachette, 2017), 149. 473 Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), xv. 160

to upload themselves to flotation they have moved beyond some of the body’s limitations but haven’t eschewed its constitutive role in their subjectivity. In direct opposition to other characterisations of transhumanism as ‘actively embrac[ing] the matter/information dualism – proposing to transcend the human condition by somehow leaving the body behind’,474 I suggest that this novel in fact rejects such dualism and, through the temporality embedded in different layers of the narrative, offers a nuanced portrait of the interface between digital technology and the embodied mind.

As this makes clear, the novel is neither straightforward nor one-sided, neither endorsing or condemning technological progress. It deals in dichotomies – indeed Castagnet nods to Donna Haraway’s antagonistic dualisms as Ramiro’s various incarnations works through ‘dualisms of mind and body, animal and machine, idealism and materialism’.475 Representations of this fictional world shift between social progression and regression, transhumanism and bioconservatism,476 dystopia and utopia. However, there is another important dualism weaving through the novel’s dialectics which has not been previously explored: a dual experience of time. There is a shifting between the protagonist’s experience of the accelerated time of the digital age and of the slowed analogue of bodily sensation. Ramiro variously experiences two distinct modes of temporality: one is the chronological, slow time produced by close attention to the body and sensory perceptions. In the other, through closely interacting and identifying with technology, Ramiro synchronises with the time of digital technology – a temporality which is fast-paced, non-linear and non- continuous. That is, Ramiro synchronises with the temporality that he projects onto digital technology, not only shaped by his experience as a user but by his understanding of how digital technology – digital logic circuits and derived technologies, including the computer, mobile phones, and the internet – works, and how it affects both him and broader society.

474 Joshua (Sha) LaBare, “What Is Posthumanism? (Review),” Science Fiction Film and Television 4, no. 1 (2011): 136. 475 Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 154. 476 Bioconservatism is a critique of technological trends which, according to the philosophy, risk undermining human dignity. It opposes movements such as transhumanism. See: Jonathan Pugh, Guy Kahane, and Julian Savulescu, “Bioconservatism, Partiality, and the Human-Nature Objection to Enhancement,” The Monist 99, no. 4 (2016): 406–22, https://doi.org/10.1093/monist/onw013.; Michael J. Sandel, “The Case Against Perfection,” The Atlantic, April 1, 2004, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/04/the-case-against-perfection/302927/. 161

This is where temporal synchronisation offers an explanation, in specific and neurophysiologically realistic terms, of the time depicted in the narrative. In much the same way as anthropomorphising a house can lead a character to experience the house’s time, identifying (through anthropomorphism and technomorphism) with digital technology can instil a sense of ‘digital’ time – in the case of Ramiro, a temporality which is accelerated, with distinctions of past/present/future flattened. Time seems lateral rather than linearly progressing, non-continuous rather than the stream of analogue time. The synchronisation with this digital time, brought about by Ramiro’s relationship with digital technology, acts through the same neuropsychological mechanism discussed in my first three chapters, as I will unpack further below. Both modes of experiencing time – Ramiro’s dual senses of bodily time and digital time – have a flow-on impact on the style, structure and diegetic progression of the novel. Notably, both modes of temporality attest to the role of the body in time perception. Even though it’s influenced by the technological environment, temporal synchronisation is a bodily experience largely created by motor resonance systems; therefore, it is a marker of subjective experience being produced by the body. In Ramiro’s case, it is evidence of his bodily relationship with technology. Since time perception is such a significant part of consciousness – linking and framing the events, perceptions and thoughts that we experience – this suggests a specific and significant aspect of the body’s role in producing subjectivity, even within a digital age.

This chapter will not be a defence of the embodied theories of cognition, which at this point do not need defending,477 but rather will show how an analysis of temporal synchronisation – a phenomenon which relies on embodied feedback systems and neuropsychological engagement with the people and objects in the environment – within Los cuerpos can bring to the fore the novel’s commentary on mind, body and technology.478 This is important because despite the traction of embodied theories of mind, the idea that technological development is linked to disembodiment still circulates in a number of spheres. These include the criticism surrounding this novel and science fiction studies more broadly, as well as several areas of scholarly and popular cultural discourse. Siri Hustvedt emphasizes just how ubiquitous this

477 See, for example, Foglia and Wilson, “Embodied Cognition”; Lawrence Shapiro, The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition (London: Routledge, 2017); Albert Newen, Leon De Bruin, and Shaun Gallagher, The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 478 This resonates in certain ways with the nonhuman turn, which, according to Grusin, claims that ‘that the human has always coevolved, coexisted, or collaborated with the nonhuman’. Richard Grusin, The Nonhuman Turn (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). 162

mode of thinking is, despite numerous advancements in the humanities and the cognitive sciences that confirm the importance of the body in mind:

Many thinkers continue to live with Descartes’s legacy. The questions he asked about the stuff we human beings are made of, our relation to the world, what is innate to us, what is acquired through sensory, lived experience, and whether there are immutable timeless truths continue to haunt Western culture. Most people intuitively think of thoughts as different from bodies. Over and over, in all kinds of writing, both academic and popular, the psychological and physiological are split.479

According to Hayles, ‘a defining characteristic of the present cultural moment is the belief that information can circulate unchanged among different material substrates’.480 This involves what Sara Danius terms ‘the marginalization of the epistemic mandates of the human senses in an age where technological devices increasingly claim sovereignty over and against the sensorium’.481 However, I argue that the novel in fact does the opposite, privileging rather than eschewing the body. The sensorium to which Danius refers is underscored, as sensations and perceptions of the body and physical environment – from the trickling of sweat to the flickering of the computer screen – are shown to shape the organising fabric of the characters’ consciousness: their sense of time.

My approach to the novel is informed by certain aspects of posthumanism, which according to Marina Maestrutti, ‘suggests no longer considering the interface with technology as an ergonomic relationship with an external tool that just extends the human body, but as a hybrid, or interpenetration that questions the separation of the body and its centrality’.482 Posthumanism is a broad term to describe a call for redefinitions of the notion of the human,

479 Hustvedt, The Delusions of Certainty, 5. 480 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 1. Unpacking this further, there is a perception that we’re moving towards an age where people believe, as digital theorist Jake Buckley explains, ‘that, in the twenty-first century, bodies are moving inexorably towards (or have inexorably entered) a digital age’ (Jake Buckley, “Believing in the (Analogico-)Digital,” Culture Machine 12, no. 1 (2011): 1.), in which ‘human identity is essentially an informational pattern rather than an embodied enaction’.480 There is a growing suspicion that we no longer ‘need the body’s superfluous flesh’. Cultural critics such as Byung-Chul Han suggest that ours is no longer an era of “biopolitics,” but rather one of “psychopolitics”. Han Byung-Chul, En El Enjambre, trans. Raul Gabas (Berlin: Herder, 2014). 481 Sara Danius, The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics (New York: Cornell University Press, 2002), 23. 482 Marina Maestrutti, “Human, transhuman, posthuman. Representations of the body between incompleteness and enhancement,” International Journal of Bioethics 22, no. 3–4 (2011): 193. 163

in accordance with post-anthropocentric and post-dualist approaches.483 Although my analysis doesn’t explicitly decentre the human (a particular aim of posthumanism), it does paint a picture of a subjectivity that is embodied, enactive and embedded, which implicitly engages a posthumanist destabilization of the old binaries of self/other and human/nonhuman.484 Humanities scholars have long championed the body, from feminist and postcolonial theory to the ‘new material turn’ discussed previously in this thesis. My approach brings the novel into dialogue with this trend in the humanities, as well as aligning it with recent movements in cognitive science and philosophy of mind which argue that our minds are not brain-bound, but rather are constituted by brain, body and physical environment in a dynamic, predictive feedback system.485 To use the words of Andy Clark, a proponent of distributed cognition, in Los cuerpos the interconnection of body, brain and technology creates ‘human-technology symbionts: thinking and reasoning systems whose minds and selves are spread across biological brain and nonbiological circuitry’.486 Here I argue that Castagnet’s novel is positioned more in line with these recent conceptualisations of mind, rather than seeing the mind as immaterial information – as science fiction often points to. Though within the scope of this chapter my analysis retains a conservative focus on human experience, through this lens the novel suggests a third space between human and nonhuman, biology and technology: an ethical move in the navigation of technological relations in the digital age, as it forces us to rethink humanist hierarchies of power relations between humans and nonhumans.487 Through this I hope to show that an analysis of subjective time in Los cuerpos can spotlight the interactions of mind, body and technology within a digital world, reframing common misconceptions of disembodiment within both real life and reception of the novel.

483 Francesca Ferrando, “Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Antihumanism, Metahumanism, and New Materialisms: Differences and Relations,” Existenz 8, no. 2 (2013): 26. 484 This aligns with the aim of posthumanism: rejecting individualism and anthropocentrism, and forging a concept of humans as part of a planetary whole.Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2013). 485 Clark, Supersizing the Mind; Andy Clark, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 486 Andy Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technology, and the Future of Human Intelligence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 3. 487 Though I do not have space in this chapter to elaborate on the ethical implications of such an approach, see Patricia MacCormack, Posthuman Ethics: Embodiment and Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 2016). 164

1.1 Time, Literature and the Digital Age

The internet age has changed our lives in many ways. As Lisa Meloncon claims, ‘We can no longer ask the basic question, how will the user interact with thing X? Rather, the question needs to be, how does this technologically embodied user imagine thing X as part of himself or herself and what does it mean to all of us?’488 This new context has meant that, as Miriam Locher and Lorenza Mondada claim, we now need to ‘explore the ecology of practices of people interacting in physical and virtual contexts’.489 This is often done through works of fictional literature, which allow us to stage certain tensions, anxieties and dichotomies in a productive way. Science fiction in particular works through social, political and phenomenological issues of technology. As Rob Latham claims,

As a form of literature devoted, in large part, to evoking the potential futures and possible worlds engendered by mechanical innovation, Science Fiction emerged… as the preeminent site within Euro-America popular culture, where the vast social impact of modern technology could be creatively explored and critically interrogated.490

Though in interviews Castagnet has expressed an ambivalence about the genre, he says, ‘Science fiction is a way of seeing the world… to write about the fantastical, today, is a way of being a realist, because it is a fantastical world’.491 More broadly, literary fiction in general has long been hailed as essential in such investigations of mind by critics such as Hayles, who declares that ‘the resources of narrative itself, particularly its resistance to various forms of abstraction and disembodiment’ are necessary in the exploration of the human self in the modern technological age. ‘With its chronological thrust, polymorphous digressions, located actions, and personified agents, narrative is a more embodied form of discourse’ than other forms of theory surrounding technology.492 Understanding how digital technology has impacted both life and literature has called for the deployment of various theories in the study

488 Lisa Meloncon, “Toward a Theory of Technological Embodiment,” in Rhetorical Accessibility, vol. 2 (New York: Baywood Publishing, 2013), 62, http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2559866.2559872. 489 Miriam Locher and Lorenza Mondada, “Linguistics and the New Media,” Dichtung Digital 1, no. 44 (2014): 34. 490 Rob Latham, The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 4. 491 Lamberti, “‘No tengo ningún respeto por la ciencia ficción’: Interview with Martín Felipe Castagnet.” (My translation). 492 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 22. 165 of fiction: much literary criticism discusses posthumanism,493 cyborgs,494 and technologically distributed cognition495 within novels. However, while these implications have been well explored, not enough critical attention has been paid to anthropomorphism and technomorphism in discussions of how individuals navigate their technological environment. These reciprocal effects, as represented in Los cuerpos, influence Ramiro’s internal resonance systems, creating a number of run-on effects: most significantly, on his sense of time.

The shift into a digital society has meant that, as Heather Lum notes, ‘even our perception of time is evolving’.496 Over the last few decades, discussions in the philosophy and history of technology from a diverse range of thinkers such as Stephen Kern and Manuel Castells have shown, in many different domains, that our experiences of time and space are linked to our experience of technology.497 In particular, theories focus on how digital technology compresses space, connecting places instantly.498 This work is important and insightful; however, in general these theories address our experience of technology as users – the way in which ‘the development of vast networks, increasing data transfer rates and the ubiquity of computing have changed the way that the majority of us experience the world’.499 In contrast, Los cuerpos – and my analysis of the novel – takes a related but different approach, focusing on identification with digital technology, and how this creates neuropsychological resonances

493 Jeff Wallace, “Literature and Posthumanism,” Literature Compass 7, no. 8 (2010): 692–701; Grace Martin, “For the Love of Robots: Posthumanism in Latin American Science Fiction Between 1960-1999” (Ph.D., University of Kentucky, 2015). 494 Michael Peck, “On the Literature of Cyborgs, Robots, and Other Automata,” Literary Hub (blog), April 21, 2016, https://lithub.com/on-the-literature-of-cyborgs-robots-and-other-automata/. 495 David Herman, “Genette Meets Vygotsky: Narrative Embedding and Distributed Intelligence,” Language and Literature 15, no. 4 (2006): 357–80, https://doi.org/10.1177/0963947006068654. 496 Heather Christina Lum, Are We Becoming Superhuman Cyborgs? How Technomorphism Influences Our Perceptions of the World around Us (Orlando: University of Central Florida, 2011), 5. 497 Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2011); Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918: With a New Preface (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003). 498 Larry Busbea and et al, “Circularity and Flow: Subjective Experience, Technology and Non-Linear Time” (Design History Society Conference, London: Design and Time, 2016), http://designandtime2016.co.uk/circularity-and-flow-subjective-experience-technology-and-non-linear- time/; Naief Yehya and Cynthia L. Ventura, “Disinventing the Future,” Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas 48, no. 1 (2015): 39–41, https://doi.org/10.1080/08905762.2015.1021129; Timothy Scott Barker, Time and the Digital: Connecting Technology, Aesthetics, and a Process Philosophy of Time (Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2012); Paula Sibilia, El hombre postorgánico: Cuerpo, subjetividad y tecnologías digitales (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 2012). 499 Barker, Time and the Digital. 166

which change our behaviour and experience. The novel highlights psychophysiological responses to the technological world we live in, where devices are anthropomorphised as fellow social beings, and where we increasingly conceptualise ourselves, particularly our cognition, as technological devices. Since these reciprocal responses to technology are not often considered in discussions of how digital technology changes the experience of time, this remains underexplored territory both in real-life and literary discourses. The science fiction genre, being interested in exploring the realities of minds and bodies in a technological age, creates a space for exploration of time, technology and bodies – not just through the deliberate thematisation of these elements but also through the exaggerations afforded by literary licence, the extended access to a (fictional) mind, and the weaving together of speculative fiction and scholarly research into time. The productivity of this can be seen in Los cuerpos. Through his fictional exploration Castagnet has intuited the unconscious process of temporal synchrony with technology, and the speculative possibilities of the genre have amplified and spotlighted the subtler temporal influences of life in a digital world.

Many Western science fiction novels have also examined these issues, often playing out this debate about the nature of human cognition as either disembodied information or embodied minds in different ways to Los cuerpos, for example, When HARLIE Was One by David Gerrold,500 Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers’501 or Zero K by Don DeLillo. However, I chose an Argentinian, Spanish language novel in order to move beyond the ‘Anglo-American ethnocentrism’ – noted, for example, by Carolyn Marvin502 – within debates around technology. In looking at the question of how technology changes human experience, as Grace Martin writes,

answers should not come from one source alone, as humanness is experienced differently across time and cultural systems. In this sense, it is imperative to focus critical attention on works beyond the English-language canon in order to discover

500 When HARLIE Was One seems to champion a physicalist stance and deny the existence of a subjective consciousness. 501 Galatea 2.2 focuses on the singularity of qualia, or conscious experience, rejecting philosophical nominalism. 502 Carolyn Marvin and Hong Sun-ha, Place, Space, and Mediated Communication: Exploring Context Collapse (New York: Routledge, 2017), 192. 167

alternative readings of the posthuman, understand how varying historical, social, and economic contexts give new meanings to robots, cyborgs and hyper-technological imaginaries, and provide balancing perspectives to the ideas presented in canon[ical] posthuman science fiction from the developed world.503

Literature from Argentina has a valuable perspective to offer on the subject of time, bodies and technology. Though Castagnet rejects limiting categorisations of his works, and though Los cuerpos cannot be reduced to its Argentinian origins, an analysis of time in the novel highlights links with a number of other Latin American texts.504 As I will briefly outline, there are several science fiction novels which also explore time, technology and body, such as works by Eugenia Prado Bassi505 and Miguel Esquirol, whose story ‘El limite del piel’ (‘The Limit of the Skin’) explicitly signals its focus on this intersection: ‘Inside this was exposed various models of hearts. Noisy machines that beat with the synchrony of watchmakers’.506 However, I chose Los cuerpos because, as Colanzi writes, ‘though the interface between human and machine has been widely addressed in North American science fiction… few Latin American novels have explored its social and moral implications with the complexity of the Argentine writer Martín Felipe Castagnet’s Los cuerpos del verano’.507 I see Los cuerpos as specifically answering to, as Marvin describes, an ethnocentrism that perceives Anglo-American technology as ‘always orienting the rest of the world to its own centre’,508 partly in that Castagnet’s novel troubles this tradition’s privileging of ‘decontextualised digital information over the analogue’.509 This is an important project: staging the teleological disembodiment of a technological future should be tempered by the insights emerging from both the humanities and cognitive science into the materially embodied nature of the human mind, insights to which this thesis itself aims to contribute.

503 Martin, “For the Love of Robots: Posthumanism in Latin American Science Fiction Between 1960- 1999,” i. 504 Lamberti, “‘No tengo ningún respeto por la ciencia ficción’: Interview with Martín Felipe Castagnet.” 505 Eugenia Prado Bassi, Lóbulo (Santiago: Editorial Cuarto Propio, 1998). 506 Miguel Esquirol, “El Límite de La Piel,” in Memorias Del Futuro, Kindle Edition (La Paz: Grupo Editorial La Hoguera, 2008), 999. My translation and emphasis. 507 Liliana Colanzi, “Fugitive Bodies,” Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas 48, no. 1 (January 2, 2015): 90, https://doi.org/10.1080/08905762.2015.1020690. 508 Marvin and Sun-ha, Place, Space, and Mediated Communication, 193. 509 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 19. 168

Such a position makes Los cuerpos an important text in my examination of time and technology, both in the current digital age and the speculated future.

Los cuerpos draws upon the complicated history of technology and Latin America in its nuanced commentary on the digital age. Jerry Hoeg observes,

[W]hile science and technology have always had an enormous impact on both humanity and nature in Latin America, mainstream literary criticism in or about Latin America has generally sought to separate itself from and, essentially, ignore the sciences… Interestingly enough, creative writers and other artists in Latin America, those who produce the humanistic narrative of the region, have been anything but silent on the subject of science and technology.510

However, the relationship between technology and Latin America has not been simple: ‘the later twentieth century, especially in Latin America, often mistrusts and even fears technology and its effects on humankind’.511 As Carl Mitcham notes in Philosophy of Technology in Spanish Speaking Countries, ‘technology is not, as is often the case in North America, seen as some simple positive force’.512 This anxiety is articulated in Los cuerpos. The technologically advanced world it portrays is in many ways confronting and dystopic: its transhumanism is libertarian, where bodies have been almost entirely subsumed into the capitalist system; inequality has risen as class prejudices are biologically reified; and masochism, murder and torture are rampant in a world where bodies are temporary, yet time is unlimited.

While technology as dystopia is a common theme in many Western science fiction novels, there is a species of suspicion about technology particular to Latin America and articulated by many classic Latin American novelists. In an interview, Isabel Allende says, ‘Scientific and technological development, especially in the Western world, has kept us from paying

510 Jerry Hoeg, Science, Technology, and Latin American Narrative in the Twentieth Century and Beyond (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2000), 9. 511 Ted Lyon, “Science and Technology in Contemporary Latin American Literature: A More Complete Humanity,” Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 7, no. 3–4 (1987): 628, https://doi.org/10.1177/027046768700700334. 512 Carl Mitcham, Philosophy of Technology in Spanish Speaking Countries (New York: Springer Science & Business Media, 2012), 291. 169

attention to our instincts or our spiritual nature’.513 In the novel of my last chapter, Allende’s La casa de los espíritus, technology is seen as a force wielded by the domineering, misguided patriarch: a male domain. There is a layer of exploitation and resentment in Latin America, a sense that this technology is a foreign influence, as expressed by Allende in another interview: ‘every day the developed countries of the world invent new technologies… and sell their leftovers to us, the Third World’.514 Many Latin American narratives similarly feel that ‘technology is not just foreign in the sense that it was created elsewhere, imported and imposed on the local people. It is foreign to and at odds with the natural magic inherent in nature itself’.515 This can be seen in the works of other giants of Latin American literature, such as Jorge Luis Borges, who similarly saw the epistemological bases of science/technology as flawed, unable to comprehend the complexity and nuance of the mind and universe.516 Pablo Neruda, whose poem ‘United Fruit Co’. represents US industry (and technology) in a negative light, makes the same critique as Allende – it is exploitative, foreign, and dangerous, perverting natural ways of living.517 Furthermore, technological paranoia, warnings of excessive scientific hubris and the possibility of a cybernetic revolution have been raised by Argentine writers such as Ernesto Sábato and Julio Cortázar, writing in the 50s and 60s.518 This suspicion has not necessarily abated: as Brown writes, ‘more recent works held fast to the idea that the embrace of new technologies resulted in the loss of an essential identity… a species of cognitive imperialism’.519 In Los cuerpos, the mind/body altering technological inventions and the capitalist market in which they operate are modelled on Western developments: ‘a society based on the capitalist economy – developed in the Western world during the last 3 centuries – that invented the wide range of techniques to alter

513 Colanzi, “Of Animals, Monsters, and Cyborgs: Alternative Bodies in Latin American Fiction (1961- 2012),” 144. 514 Michael Moody, “Una Conversacion Con Isabel Allende,” Chasqui XVI 2, no. 3 (1987): 57. 515 Mitcham, Philosophy of Technology in Spanish Speaking Countries, 291. 516 For example in his classic short story, ‘Death and the Compass’, where the protagonist Lonnrot’s failure is due to his reliance on pure reason. However, as a number of scholars have noted, Luis Borges maintained a complex attitude towards science and technology. See, for example, John Zehnder, “Leopoldo Lugones and Jorge Luis Borges on Science: The Garden of Forking Opinions,” Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato 15, no. 1 (2015), https://cornerstone.lib.mnsu.edu/jur/vol15/iss1/5. 517 Pablo Neruda, Canto General (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 518 Ernesto R. Sábato, Hombres y engranajes (Barcelona: Editorial Planeta / Seix Barral, 2003); Julio Cortázar, Rayuela (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1972). 519 Andrew Brown, Cyborgs in Latin America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 1. 170

bodies and subjectivities’.520 This helps to explain not only the novel’s deep ambivalence towards the technological advances in its fictional world, but perhaps also its underlying focus on the biological body as partly constituting human experience. However, the novel does not turn to the bioconservatism of many older Latin American works. There is an ideological oscillation in Los cuerpos between anti-technology suspicion and a pro- technology focus on the opportunities afforded, as in much Western science fiction literature. In an interview, Castagnet articulates the duality of his position on digital technology: he sees its value, and also its dangers. ‘Because the internet is important, I think it is also important that we stop using it for a moment, without the mediatization of technology. To appreciate the world, but also to appreciate the internet’.521 Ultimately, the book creates this dichotomy not to resolve it, but to stage particular tensions about technology within cultural consciousness both in Western and Latin American societies.

Unlike many other critics of the novel itself and Latin American science fiction in general, this chapter will not look at the novel’s portrayal of technology as a political metaphor. For example, in her discussion of Los cuerpos, Colanzi comments that ‘in Argentina, the body connected to chips, implants and prostheses has served as a metaphor for the changing relationship between individual, state and market’.522 However, as these critics themselves note, this approach does not focus on the direct influence of technology, but rather sees it as a lens through which to examine other aspects of society. Author of Cyborgs in Latin America, Brown states, ‘I am not as interested in how authors have anticipated the technological realities in which we live as I am in the ways in which cultural production uses the posthuman to make sense of social and political realities’.523 This characterises the main approaches that critics have brought to bear on Los cuerpos, which deal with political realities that are tangential to the questions of consciousness and the embodied mind which I explore. These modes of analysis examine the subject as a political entity, rather than an experiential subjectivity. An example includes Yehya and Ventura’s work, which explores the ‘contemporary fascination with transgenderism’ represented in the novel. 524 Colanzi

520 Sibilia, El hombre postorgánico, p.2012. 521 Lamberti, “‘No tengo ningún respeto por la ciencia ficción’: Interview with Martín Felipe Castagnet.” 522 Colanzi, “Of Animals, Monsters, and Cyborgs: Alternative Bodies in Latin American Fiction (1961- 2012),” 144. 523 Brown, Cyborgs in Latin America, 2. 524 Yehya and Ventura, “Disinventing the Future.” 171

conducts an insightful analysis of ‘a reality inextricably linked to market logic’.525 Piccioni discusses the novel in relation to the Foucauldian political subject.526 It is true that the novel uses its premise to examine how bodies are co-opted by the capitalist system, and the role of digital technology in creating the consumer – the political subject in a society of Foucauldian control. However, I will argue that the novel’s critique of capitalist bodies doesn’t go so far as to erase the body in the constitution of the self or subjectivity.

In other analyses of the book, scholars have focused on the aspects of the novel in which the importance of the body is superseded by the virtual self, the informatic code that can be uploaded and burned. Los cuerpos ostensibly assumes a virtual subjecthood, a ‘psychic structure’ which is able to exist without the body, in that characters in the world are able to exist in ‘flotation’, on the internet, after death. This aspect of the plot could be taken at face value, and become a vision of a Cartesian, disembodied subject where ‘human’ is merely information that can be uploaded or downloaded. This is where readers are often led, as Piccioni notes: ‘For the reader, it is enough to know that the digitalised is the foundation of the “non-corporeal”; identity, the person’.527 Colanzi writes, ‘in the case of Castagnet’s novella, this defamiliarization reaches the point where individual identity doesn’t pass through the body: the subject moves to the internet’.528 Where the role of the body is acknowledged, it is done so within a Cartesian framework. For example Colanzi relegates the role of the body in Los cuerpos to the primitive in human nature, exploring corporeality through inscriptions of the animal in specific reference to Ramiro’s final incarnation in the body of a horse. Yet this affirms the dualism that I argue the novel eschews. As Colanzi herself underlines, ‘Descartes proposed that reason – abstract thought – was that which made us human, while the body belonged to the sphere of the animal’.529 According to Colanzi, Ramiro’s other embodiments – the human bodies into which he is burned – serve only as capitalist objects: mere commodities. Following a similar vein, critics have not focused on

525 Colanzi, “Of Animals, Monsters, and Cyborgs: Alternative Bodies in Latin American Fiction (1961- 2012),” 144. 526 María Laura Piccioni, “¿Cómo Quemar Un Cuerpo En El Verano?,” El Toldo de Astier 4, no. 6 (2013): 124–28. [All quotes from Piccioni are my own translations] 527 Piccioni, 124. 528 Colanzi, “Of Animals, Monsters, and Cyborgs: Alternative Bodies in Latin American Fiction (1961- 2012),” 122. 529 Colanzi, 148. 172

the body as an essential element of consciousness. According to Piccioni, ‘these new burned subjects and their minds possess the same relation as that between an optic disk and its data’.530 Contrary to these positions, I argue in this chapter that by representing different modes of experiencing time, Castagnet is actually making a comment on the bodily relationship between individual and technology. I will conclude that Castagnet rewrites common assumptions in science fiction about divisions between mind and body, information and materiality, ultimately recognizing ‘the importance of embodied processes constituting the lifeworld of human beings’.531

Part 2. Embodied Identification with Digital Technology

The temporalities experienced by Ramiro in Los cuerpos can be generalised into two modes: one is a linear, analogue time created by close attention to bodily sensations, and the other is the non-linear, accelerated and non-continuous time that Ramiro associates with digital technology. He comes to synchronise with this fast-paced digital time in what I argue is an example of temporal synchronisation between human and digital object. This is the focus of the present section, as I explore how the digital technology in Ramiro’s environment affects his embodied mind, creating an insightful portrait of technology, bodies and minds.

At this point in my thesis, this is now a familiar story – embodied identification with another can alter someone’s perception of time. Just as the participants of Droit Volet et al.’s studies looked at photographs of the elderly, embodied their slow movements and felt their internal clock slow in synchrony, and as in the temporal synchrony that occurred between Lauren and Tuttle, between Kit and her grandparent’s Sea House, and between Alba and her Big House on the Corner, we have seen that psychological identification with an other can stimulate resonance systems and change the tempo of our internal clock. This process of temporal synchronisation occurs through embodied identification with a perceived other, whether person or anthropomorphised object. This is evident in Los cuerpos, except this time it is the devices of digital technology which are being anthropomorphised. Furthermore, in this relationship between person and technology, there is a reciprocal psychological effect: in

530 Piccioni, “¿Cómo Quemar Un Cuerpo En El Verano?,” 124. 531 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 20. 173

addition to anthropomorphising these objects, Ramiro also conceptualises himself as a device of digital technology: he technomorphises himself. Both these avenues of identification with digital technology, anthropomorphism and technomorphism, work to facilitate Ramiro’s embodiment of technology, creating an internal simulation which, eventually, comes to shape his sense of time.

So, in Los cuerpos, Ramiro’s relationship with digital technology is twofold: he doesn’t just see technology as personified, but also sees his own body and mind as technological, meaning that the digital technology in his surroundings is seen as a part of his social and emotional fabric, stimulating his resonance systems and creating an internal motor resonance between himself and this technology. As a result of this strong embodied connection, Rama begins to experience the perceived time of the digital technology. As in the human–object relationships of my previous chapters, the time associated with technology is based on the character’s perception of its nature – the temporal mode Rama associates with digital technology is accelerated, and the linearity of chronology is collapsed, replaced by intermittent pulses. This influence on Rama’s sense of time is represented at various levels in the book – stylistically, diegetically, structurally. The accelerated temporality of the narrative has been touched upon by other critics, such as De Angelis who describes the novel as occurring in ‘the first decade of the third millennium, [where] the frenetic advance of technology and the huge presence of its apparatus in social and daily practices has modified – and continues doing so at an overwhelming speed – each of the activities of the human being’.532 However, there hasn’t been a nuanced examination of the narrative’s temporality, which means that its implications for the novel’s commentary on time, technology and bodies have been overlooked.

In order to explain the underpinnings of the temporal synchronisation in the novel, in the following section I will briefly look at the evidence for both anthropomorphism and technomorphism in the relationship between the characters – specifically the protagonist, Ramiro – and digital technology. Then I will explore how this affects time encoded at various levels in the novel.

532 Diego de Angelis, “Un paseo por el futuro,” Clarín Revista, 2013, https://www.clarin.com/resenas/martin-felipe-castagnet-cuerpos-verano_0_rJrbACtiDmx.html. [My translation.] 174

2.1 Anthropomorphism and Technomorphism

As Aggarwal and Mc Gill explain,

technomorphism and anthropomorphism are intertwined in both definition and concept. If technomorphism involves the attribution of machine-like characteristics of humans, anthropomorphism can be considered the opposite, such that it is the attribution of human-like characteristics to non-human entities.533

These are the psychological perceptual frames through which digital devices are seen as part of our social network, fellow beings, and we ourselves are seen as their peers. This can create an embodied identification between people and the devices they surround themselves with, stimulating the same resonance systems as socialising among humans stimulates. Focusing on these specific and tangible aspects of digital technology’s role in the extended feedback loops of body, environment and mind refigures the digital/human interface, exploring subjectivity in a way which ultimately resonates with Rosi Braidotti’s affirmation that we ‘must take into account the embodied and organic structure of the subject’.534

Anthropomorphising, or attributing human qualities to, technology has long been of interest to researchers. (See, for example, Lum, Gazzola et al., Turkle, Boden, Damiano et al.535) As Boden describes, ‘[o]ur natural tendency to anthropomorphism, grounded in Theory of Mind and related psychological mechanisms’,536 has been a big part of research into new technologies – particularly robotics. Unlike other disciplines, such as literary criticism, in philosophy of technology there has developed

533 P Aggarwal and A.L McGill, “Is That Car Smiling at Me? Schema Congruity as a Basis for Evaluating Anthropomorphized Products.,” Journal of Consumer Research Inc 34, no. 1 (2007): 468. 534 Rosi Braidotti, “Posthuman, All Too Human - Towards a New Process Ontology,” Theory, Culture and Society 23, no. 7–8 (2006): 197. 535 Lum, Are We Becoming Superhuman Cyborgs? How Technomorphism Influences Our Perceptions of the World around Us; Gazzola et al., “The Anthropomorphic Brain”; Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (London: Hachette, 2017); Margaret Boden, “Robots and Anthropomorphism,” Technical Report (AAAI Digital Library, 2006); Luisa Damiano and Paul Dumouchel, “Anthropomorphism in Human–Robot Co-Evolution,” Frontiers in Psychology 9 (2018): 1–9, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00468. 536 Boden, “Robots and Anthropomorphism,” 1. 175

a particular relationship with anthropomorphism, which it neither sees as a cognitive error, nor as a sign of immaturity. Rather it considers that this common human tendency, which is hypothesized to have evolved because it favored cooperation among early humans, can be used today to facilitate social interactions between humans and a new type of cooperative and interactive agents.537

Technomorphism, attributing technological qualities to humans, however, has been slightly less explored: according to Heather Lum, ‘only a handful of studies have even mentioned technomorphism in any form’.538 However, while scientists have been slow to investigate the effects of conceptualising humans as technological artefacts, technomorphism is widely represented in the science fiction genre, as innumerable characters are described in terms of their mechanical nature.539 This has been true of both Western and Latin American novels, such as Los cuerpos. In the futuristic world of the novel, with increasing integration of technology into their lives, the characters blur the ontological boundaries between biological subjects and technological objects.

In this way, Los cuerpos thinks through technomorphism on a radical and literal level. The humans in the narrative world are more like pieces of technology: posthumans. Individuals don’t need their own life force but can be powered by batteries; they can ‘upgrade’ themselves by switching bodies or purchasing new body parts; and they can put their minds into storage: the state of flotation. This exaggerates the effects that technomorphisation has on the characters, making it easier for them to see themselves as part of the same social fabric as technology. Anthropomorphism in the novel is also exaggerated, since the technology in the narrative world has been developed to cater to individuals’ needs minutely – for example, the digital fridge communicates with characters verbally, the computers follow them around the house, and the internet is omnipresent, shaping almost every aspect of their daily lives. However, despite these exaggerations, both the anthropomorphism and technomorphism in the book reflect real-world responses to technology and digitization. As Brian Christian exclaims in his book The Most Human Human, ‘In the twenty-first century, it is the human math whiz that is “like a computer”. An odd twist: we’re like the thing that used to be like

537 Damiano and Dumouchel, “Anthropomorphism in Human–Robot Co-Evolution.” 538 Lum, Are We Becoming Superhuman Cyborgs? How Technomorphism Influences Our Perceptions of the World around Us, 2. 539 Lum, 2. 176

us’.540 As Rana el Kaliouby explains, ‘there’s a lot of evidence that we already treat our devices, especially conversational interfaces, the way we treat each other… This is often unconscious’.541 Overall, in both the novel and in real life, individuals respond to digital devices in many similar ways to how they respond to people.542

In Los cuerpos, the internet, in particular, is anthropomorphised. It is seen as a mother – it can ‘incubate’ people for a time before they are reborn into new bodies: Ramiro swears that, when looking closely at a computer screen, it smells like ‘amniotic fluid’ (15). It is a parental figure in quite literal ways – Ramiro describes how the newest generation, his great grandchildren, are practically raised by the giant computers in their room. In every scene in which they appear, the children are immersed in video games – we do not once see them talking to their own parents. More than a parent, the internet – in its omnipresence and omniscience – is even revered as a god: ‘Teo [Ramiro’s son] sits with legs crossed, bending towards the screen in a form of reverence’ (87). Old ontological distinctions of human and technology are blurred – ‘For the user everything overlaps’ (63). The anthropomorphic figures through which the internet is conceptualised – mother, father, god – are fleshed out by the characters’ perception of its humanoid embodiment. Digital technology is described as having blood and body parts: ‘I want to avoid touching the cold, transparent screen. I could swear that it smells of blood’ (15). When a computer is broken, its remains are described as a ‘carcass’, its webcam now an ‘empty eye-socket’ (34). Later, an old machine, taken apart, ‘has all of its intestines open to the air’ (94). Indeed the characters themselves reflect on digital technology’s ontologically liminal embodiment – tellingly, Ramiro’s daughter Vera comments that the ‘Internet cuenta como cuerpo’ – the internet counts as a body (20).

The behaviour of digital technology also facilitates its anthropomorphisation. For example, computers are not fixed in place but follow characters around: Ramiro describes the ‘computer that follows me everywhere, except when I go out to run, and on some occasions even then’ (69). According to Damiano and Dumouchel, ‘when any object begins to

540 Brian Christian, The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Being Alive (London: Penguin UK, 2011), 11. 541 Rana el Kaliouby, “Your Computer Has No Idea What You’re Feeling—That Needs to Change,” MIT Technology Review, October 20, 2017, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609071/we-need-computers- with-empathy/. 542 See Byron Reeves and Clifford Ivar Nass, The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media like Real People and Places (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 177

manifest, for example, autonomous coordination with a human’s movement, the person is inclined to socially interact with the object even in absence of human-like appearance’.543 Despite the fact that the novel does not feature humanoid robots, the way that digital technology operates and influences their lives gives the characters a sense that it is ‘sort of alive’ or ‘alive enough’ (to use the terms of Sherry Turkle544). This is consistent with empirical evidence from psychologists Urquiza-Haas and Kotrschal which suggests that being able to ‘perceive’ human qualities in the behaviour of the observed other (be it animal or object) – is more important than human-likeness when it comes to activating anthropomorphism.545 In Los cuerpos, the behaviour and operation of the web is attributed human qualities: it seems motivated by a human personality, described as ‘capricious… some objects are absorbed and others are expulsed’ (64). Its personality is further expressed through animalistic metaphors – the loyalty of a dog (37), the wisdom of an owl (41), the chaotic potential of a monster (64). Rather than treated as inanimate objects, computers are afforded the emotional significance of human beings, or perhaps even more. When a computer is broken (34), Ramiro’s grandson, Gales, is angrier than at the murder of his young son (99). This makes sense – in anthropomorphising digital technology, the characters project a theory of mind to these computers and devices. The broken computer was a part of Gales’ family as much as his son. Technology is attributed mental life – ‘the fridge is conscious of its own content’ (12). The internet’s history is described as exactly as sociologically rich as human cities: ‘The web has an existence as concrete as the cities of a civilisation’ (63). In fact, the profession that recovers old websites is called a ‘cybernetic archaeologist’ (63). As archaeology is the study of human remains, this term suggests the extent to which computers and the internet are perceived as fellow beings.

In addition to this anthropomorphisation of digital technology, there is also a technomorphisation: the characters in the narrative world conceptualise humanness through the lens of digital technology, attributing technological aspects to human nature, experience and history. Technomorphism is most strongly evident in the metaphors used to describe human bodies and minds. Physical experiences are described in technomorphic ways: after being ‘burned’ (the term used to denote copying information onto a compact disk) into a new

543 Damiano and Dumouchel, “Anthropomorphism in Human–Robot Co-Evolution.” 544 Turkle, Alone Together. 545 Urquiza-Haas and Kotrschal, “The Mind behind Anthropomorphic Thinking.” 178

body, people ‘overheat like old computers’ (53). Similarly, when Ramiro’s daughter, Vera, is explaining her brother’s mental deterioration, she does so in the language of technology, not biology: ‘it’s irreversible. There are cables inside of Teo that are disconnected’ (38). The ultimate death is described as a computer switching off: ‘we are going to die for real someday… the blue screen, and then nothing’ (38). Vera goes on, ‘Everything decays. Here inside, also, we will deteriorate. At some moment, the links [los enlaces] will break and the data will be lost’ (38). In the narrative world, human history and its archaeological relics are now thought of as digital information, (and vice versa), as described to Ramiro by a cybernetic archaeologist: ‘think of the storage as boxes full of relics: megas, gigas and, my favourite: teras’ (64). In fact, these curators of internet content describe the unused sites of the internet that they delete as true markers of human development: ‘The key to humanity is in what disappears’ (64).

The psychological avenues of identification work in concert with the physical link between characters and technology, and the new ways in which digital technology has been incorporated into their daily lives. The influence of digital technology is all-pervasive: Ramiro describes how almost every space in the house is illuminated by some monitor (37). The characters have increasingly adopted technology into their body schemas, through implants, battery packs (worn enchufada, plugged in, to their bodies [13]), and artificial sensory organs (e.g. Ramiro describes hearing through dispositivos mecánicos – mechanical devices [87]). Other Latin American science fiction novels similarly work through these transhumanist technologies, and comment on how this changes humans’ perceptions of themselves – shown for example in this technomorphic simile in an exchange between two characters in Esquirol’s Memorias del futuro:

“Her heart, it’s failing.” “And why don’t they change it?” “What? You can’t change a heart as if it were a machine.” “Of course you can.”546

546 Miguel Esquirol, Memorias Del Futuro, Kindle Edition (La Paz: Grupo Editorial La Hoguera, 2008), 912. 179

In both Memorias del futuro and Los cuerpos, the fact that characters are constructed of separate body parts sourced from different places, and can continue to function even after losing vital organs and other important body parts, disrupts the characters’ self- conceptualisation as a whole, indivisible being. Ramiro’s own body is missing a couple of organs; it is not a full set: ‘This body didn’t come complete. It is the only one my family could get that fitted their budget’ (53). The standard meronomy, the whole-part hierarchy usually held by humans when they think of themselves – that they are not just the sum of their parts, but individuals – is subverted. Instead, they are now, to co-opt Deleuze’s term, dividuals547 – able to be, literally, separated out into parts. In this way they are now more mechanical, closer to a technological device than an organic being. This anxiety about individuals no longer being indivisible resonates with Donna Haraway’s declaration in the ‘Cyborg Manifesto’: ‘The relationships for forming wholes from parts… are at issue in the cyborg world’.548 Interestingly, in Los cuerpos there is a reversal in the meronomy of humans and computers – the modern computers in the narrative world are no longer divisible into parts, but fragile and holistic. If one part breaks, the whole needs to be replaced. Ramiro complains that with new upgrades, computers are ‘each time more fragile… in my time a computer was divided in parts and you had to connect everything together so that it functioned’ (34). Now, with the development of ever more complex digital devices, it is computers, rather than humans, which are the individuals.

The ability to surpass the natural human body has other consequences. Individuals have a new life cycle – human birth is supplanted by another kind of rebirth, being ‘burned’ or ‘downloaded’ from the internet to a new body. Here, digital technology is figured as a progenitor, alluded to through the image of renewal, the egg. Ramiro sees the fragments of a broken computer like the fragments of egg shells: ‘As much as I sweep, the fragments of the screen never finish – they remind me of clay and egg shells’ (34). Since humans are born from computers, it seems intuitive to imagine themselves as digital artefacts – characters feel that their ‘digital fingerprint’ [huella digital] (51) is now their identity. Cognitive functioning is often described in terms similar to descriptions of software, for example when Ramiro tries to find a new location: ‘The buildings that weren’t there anymore were superimposed on my

547 Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control, October 59 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992). 548 Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” 152. 180

head like a sheet of tracing paper on top of reality. I assimilate the new constructions’ (50). Emotions are also seen through the lens of digital technology – trust is expressed as exchange of passwords, so that emotional opening up now takes form of digital privacy unlocking. Changes in emotions are described as the flow of electricity: during a fight between Ramiro’s grandson, Gales, and his wife Septiembre, Ramiro describes the tense scene as if ‘a current had volatilized all emotional equilibrium’ (33). The end of the fight coincides with the restoration of the net (which has been down), linking human connection to internet connection. In fact, it is digital technology which symbolically mediates the resolution: ‘“the connection has been restored”, says the cold voice of the fridge’ (33). In another fight, this time between Ramiro and his daughter, Vera, who is in flotation, Ramiro expresses his anger not with words but through digital technology: Vera’s comments ‘make me want to turn off the computer; better still: to turn it around’ (38). Vera similarly uses technological modes of expressing her anger: she ‘disconnects’ the conversation (38). Furthermore, much of Ramiro’s communication – both to other characters and also as the narrator – is often computer-like, more the transmission of information than telling a narrative. This is particularly jarring in the scene where one of his great grandchildren murders another: ‘One of the children beat another to death. They were not fighting. Nor were they angry. They did it because they believed it was best’ (99). This dispassionate account of the shocking event suggests how much human emotion has been suppressed in this technomorphic self- conceptualisation. This excerpt is also exemplary of much of the narrative style – the prose is informational, matter of fact, and largely uncoloured by emotion. This style of expression recalls real-world research into how human communication is influenced by using digital technology. According to a study by Lum, ‘as the participants interacted with each other via a computer interface, the content and tone of their conversation became much less conversational, and much more rote and computer-like with short, direct questions and answers between the two humans’.549 In a similar vein, the novel frequently features lists – a formatting style not usually associated with fiction, but rather with the conveyance of information.

Las restricciones biológicas y legales: Toda reencarnación debe estar registrada y notificada en el Registro Koseki.

549 Lum, Are We Becoming Superhuman Cyborgs? How Technomorphism Influences Our Perceptions of the World around Us, 13. 181

Los menores de edad no pueden obtener cuerpos de mayores de edad. Aún hay que morirse para obtener un nuevo cuerpo; los mejores se agotan rápido. (18)550

El primero es en una casa de té; soy ‘demasiado joven’. El segundo es en una carnicería; soy ‘demasiado vieja’. El tercero es en un complejo deportivo; soy ‘demasiado mujer’. En los tres casos soy ‘demasiado gorda’. (52)551

La mayoría de los muertos prefiere cambiar de cuerpo. La primera minoría se preserva en internet. La segunda minoría conserva el cuerpo original. (17)552

The technomorphic self-conceptualisation of the characters runs so deep that they seem to perceive themselves not only as biological subjects but also as technological objects. Throughout the novel Ramiro expresses his occasional sense of his body as an object, separate to the subject ‘I’. At times, he reports, it seems an entirely ‘foreign body’ [un cuerpo ajeno] (57). Spanish grammar enables linguistic expression of this through impersonal definite articles rather than possessive adjectives. Instead of ‘my body’, Ramiro speaks of el hueso/the bone; la carne/the flesh. This is also achieved through his choice of similes: ‘I observe the bone up to the elbow, and the flesh on the floor like a discarded glove… the belly opens like a piñata’ (75). The psychological sense of the body as object recurs in other Latin American science fiction texts. In Lóbulo, the narrator describes, ‘this is how memories should be, I think – stored delicately in some location. Each pain, each emotion situated in a specific space, as if the body were a receptacle [recipiente] capable of containing all of existence’ (26). This shows how other science fiction authors have intuited the defamiliarizing effects of immersion in digital technology.

550 The biological and legal restrictions:/ all reincarnation should be registered and notified in the Koseki Register./ Minors cannot obtain overage bodies./ One must still die to obtain a new body; the best are sold out fast. 551 The first is in a tea house; I am ‘too young’./ The second is in a butcher; I am ‘too old’./ The third is in a sporting complex. I am ‘too much a woman’./ In all three cases I am ‘too fat’. 552 The majority of the dead prefer to change bodies./ The first minority remains in the internet./ The second minority retains their original body. 182

Looking at these transhumanist elements through the lens of technomorphism offers a new way to see the neuropsychological effects of technology on the individual, and the changes that this can bring about. The combination of anthropomorphism and technomorphism working within the characters of the novel creates a strong psychophysical identification with digital technology – characters feel that they share a common identity with digital technology, that computers are part of their social world in the same way that other humans are. This means that the other-embodiment which occurs in the real world between two humans, in the novel occurs between the human characters and the digital technology that they are surrounded by. This results in a technological embodiment – not just in the transhumanist sense of the cyborg553, but in the subtler sense of inner simulation created by motor resonance and other aspects of the mirror neuron system: the underlying substrates of temporal synchronisation. Examining this other-embodiment of digital technology suggests a third space between subjectivities, between human and non-human, organic and inorganic. This altered subjectivity space is marked by the changing experience of time – something which shapes the characters’ experiences, the narrative temporality, and the novel’s philosophical commentary.

2.2 Digital Time

Real life discourses have examined the influence of digital technology on our sense of time; however, not from the perspective of an embodied identification. Where Barker describes how ‘the time of the user meshes with the time of the machine’,554 or how ‘[digital technologies] alter, among other things, a “natural” experience of time’,555 temporal synchronisation offers one answer to how this ‘mesh’ or ‘altering’ occurs. In Los cuerpos, Ramiro’s experience of time simulates the temporality he perceives in or attributes to digital technology. But what kind of temporality does Ramiro attribute to digital technology, and what actual changes does this have on his experience of subjective time? I will focus on three main temporal aspects – acceleration, disruption of linearity, and intermittence (in the sense of pulsing or oscillation).

553 As explained by Lisa Meloncon in ‘Towards a Theory of Technological Embodiment’ (2013), when embodiment incorporates technology, the body and its actions become technologically embodied. 554 Barker, Time and the Digital, 23. 555 Barker, 8. 183

i. Acceleration

Ramiro’s experiences with knowledge and conceptualisation of digital technology mean that he associates it with an accelerated temporality. The internet connects things, to our minds, seemingly instantly, creating a compression of space and time so that, as described by Brennan, ‘at the level of constructed space-time, everything seems to be getting faster and faster’.556 Further influencing this impression of digital time as accelerated is the speed at which it develops and precipitates change, expressed in Rama’s animistic metaphor: ‘Technology is not rational; hopefully, it is a runaway horse that spits foam from its mouth and tries to buck you off every time that it can’ (31). Ramiro describes society, and himself, as feeling physically ‘chained to that horse’ (31) as it runs along, implying the sensation of acceleration that digital technology imposes on those it affects.

Ramiro synchronises with this fast-paced temporality. The effect is most pronounced when he is close and paying attention to technology, just as temporal synchronisation between humans mostly happens when the two people are physically together and paying attention to each other (as mirror neurons are most strongly activated through close and attentive observation557). For example, as he uses the web, things around Ramiro seem to speed up:

I sit on the bench; the computer descends to the height of my fingers… The earth steams and absorbs the water rapidly. When I sat down I was at the edge of the shadow; now I’m at the edge of the sunshine. (38)

Time often skips like this for Ramiro: ‘Suddenly, I am in front of the house that Vera described’ (41). He often remarks on time getting away from him: he is surprised by the coming round of weekdays – ‘Friday again’ (83). The sense of accelerated time is particularly experienced by those in flotation, who identify with and embody digital technology the most deeply. In this state, time flies by, scarcely noticed. While Ramiro is talking to his daughter

556 Teresa Brennan, “Age of Paranoia,” in Rethinking Technologies, ed. Verena Andermatt Conley (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 108. 557 Stephen V. Shepherd et al., “Mirroring of Attention by Neurons in Macaque Parietal Cortex,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 106, no. 23 (2009): 9489–94, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0900419106. 184

Vera when she is still in flotation, he observes, ‘Vera is waiting for me; maybe she was there since speaking with Septiembre [hours earlier], or even before then. A person inside the web can became a Buddha, if they avoid social media and pornography’ (36). Ramiro himself was in flotation ‘almost a century’ (89), yet the logic of internet time collapses this eternity, condensing the years which he spent inside, until a century is comparable to a matter of days: ‘Several days outside of the state of flotation, and I have already forgotten what it is to be inside’ (16). This acceleration of time is also especially evident in the younger generation, who have grown up entirely immersed in technological life. They experience time at a fast pace and are frustrated by others who do not keep up with them. ‘The boys grabbed their heads: “How slow! Faster! Boring!”’ (36).

The sense of acceleration is also embedded in the structure of the novel – for example the narrative skips forward over the weeks that Ramiro spends in flotation, in-between bodies, so that he suddenly appears as first a woman, then a man, and then a horse, in seemingly quick succession. Indeed the whole course of the short novella progresses at high speed. Particularly the second half, in which, for example, the narration skips in the space of four pages from a hostile confrontation between Ramiro and his old friend Bragueta (96), to weeks later, a scene where the two of them are sharing a meal on Christmas day (100). In the pages between, we find out that Ramiro’s grandson has revealed to his wife that he is transgender, thus saving their marriage from the point of divorce; that Ramiro has managed to seduce his step-granddaughter; and that one of his grandchildren has killed another. Both the story time and the plot developments are set at a fast-pace, so that the reader perhaps feels that they are, like Ramiro, ‘chained to a runaway horse’.558 This sense of narrative acceleration is also found in Esquirol’s Memorias del futuro, which similarly represents a link between immersion in digital technology and an accelerated subjective time. A protagonist describes his days as flying by in a haze of technological noise: ‘The rest of the day passes without being able to concentrate in the office with the sound of telephones, the buzzing of the faxes, the sliding chairs, the steps of his colleagues on the carpeted hallways, the keys of his computer’.559 The pace and chaos of it suffocates him, so he shuts it off: ‘He unplugs the refrigerator without caring what food will defrost. He had to unplug also all the

558 As I have mentioned elsewhere in this thesis, a discussion of temporal synchronisation in the context of reader response would be very interesting - however, it does not fall under the scope of my research. 559 Esquirol, “El Límite de La Piel,” 482. 185

electrical devices because of the incessant buzzing. He stopped the clocks’.560 Here, the turning off of the technological devices is explicitly linked with stopping the clock – wanting to slow the rush of time. Again in Prado Bassi’s Lóbulo, the pace of time in the protagonist’s technological world is uncomfortable: ‘the speed confuses her… the minutes go by. The time takes on a hostile aspect [un cáracter hostil]’.561 In all three of these novels, when individuals are immersed in a world of digital technology, there is an alignment between the accelerated temporality of this technology and the characters’ subjective time.

ii. Non-linearity

This acceleration is not the only aspect of time associated with digital technology. In Los cuerpos, as part of Ramiro’s synchronisation with digital temporality, the linear progression of time – each moment passing and accumulating in a linear sequence as individuals move through past-present-future – is lost. Again this resonates with reports of real-life experiences of time when interacting with digital technology. As Argentinian anthropologist Paula Sibilia describes, ‘In this way the global networks of telecommunication and their diverse apparatuses of connection offer access to the novel ‘virtual experiences’, dispensing with the linearity of time’.562 The ability of humans to be made new through the bodies of old humans – the most important premise of the novel – mirrors the collapse of linearity in digital technology described by Barker, ‘What I describe as a technological re-presentation of events, as tools such as databases and recording technology are used to make the past present again, to re-present the past’.563 This capacity of digital technology for renewal or re-iteration is transferred to humans in Los cuerpos, eschewing the linear chronology of normal human time: the asymmetry of experience as moments turn from future to present to past. Although in real life the temporal synchronisation with technology would only affect subjective duration, in this novel the effect is broadened, so that it comes to shape the characters’ lives at ontogenetic, historical and subjective levels, as well as shaping the novel in several significant ways: a literary figuring of the far-reaching effects of temporal synchronisation.

560 Esquirol, 482. 561 Prado Bassi, Lóbulo, 14. All translations of Lóbulo are my own. 562 Sibilia, El hombre postorgánico, 16. 563 Barker, Time and the Digital, 22. 186

In an ontogenetic sense (of the origin and development of humans as biological organisms), the internet’s infinite iterability is reflected in the re-newing or re-presenting that occurs in the burning of a body. Ramiro describes how his ‘mind was fresh although his brain was used; if the head had any history, it had been erased’ (13). Although time in both Castagnet’s and Allende’s novels is non-linear, there are marked differences: the temporal phases of the digital world are not the organic, variable cycles of polychronicity. The cycles of polychronicity are ‘structural patterns’ rather than identical repetition; the present is not simply a copy of the past and future. However, in Los cuerpos, it is the reproducibility or iterability of digital information - and, with technological assistance, the iterability of humans, that creates the non-linear ‘re-presentation’ of the past.

Ramiro reflects on the implications of this: ‘Now there is a new everyday cycle: we are in flotation, they burn us and then we enter in flotation again’ (100). The sense of (re)presenting is shown stylistically in the novel through the consistent present tense narrative style. The characters make this explicit: in describing the experience of flotation – a time when characters feel most strongly technomorphic – Vera characterises it as ‘a place where only the moment lives’ (37). This also resonates with linguistic studies of computer-mediated communication which found that ‘the present tense is predominant’.564 Echoing Barker, here there is a radical questioning of decay or entropy in the face of digital technology.565 People’s bodies in Los cuerpos are like ‘half-frozen steak’ (78), in many ways detached from normal human chronology. Subjectively, an individual feels the loss of clear beginnings and endings. Ramiro notes, ‘what disappeared was the certainty that everything finishes sooner or later’ (14). For the characters of Los cuerpos,

There is time to shave your head and to keep your grey hair, to get pregnant and to torture, to become champion of the world and to re-write the encyclopedia. With patience, a person could construct a pyramid; with perseverance, another person could knock it down. (31-32)

564 Rachel Panckhurst, “Computer-Mediated Communication and Linguistic Issues in French University Online Courses.,” in Online Education (Berlin, 2003), 454, https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00291766. 565 Barker, Time and the Digital, 82. 187

The anxiety of this infinity, an interminable technological time, is echoed in the anthology Memorias del futuro. One narrator muses on infinite life, the weight of ‘the endless echoes of all the possibilities repeated’.566 He wonders, when the normal linearity of human life is lost and the iterability of digital technology creeps into human chronology,

How many things can a man think during identical, interminable sunrises? He has had time to count all the grain of his estate, all the leaves on the trees that grow in his garden, all the cracks in his four walls. He has spoken with all the people, met fascinating individuals and despicable louts… He has tried to remember each different day, knowing them to be the same.567

Showing the intertwining of the time of humans and digital technology, the cyber archaeologists for whom Ramiro begins to work also look explicitly at how the recursive representing of time within digital technology has come to shape human history: ‘The key to humanity is in what disappears [from the internet]; our work is to reconstruct what is destroyed, replace what is lost, re-appear the invisible before it disappears altogether’ (64). In the story world, it is not just websites but people which can ‘re-appear’ (64) – and also, collectively, their customs and traditions. Through Ramiro’s descriptions, we see that society has aligned itself with the recursive temporality of digital technology. Just as technology can ‘produce an image of time beyond the linear sequence of future, present, past’,568 the society of Los cuerpos exists in cycles of progression and regression: ‘It seems that a prejudice disappears only when it is replaced by another’ (70).569 Public debates and ethical quandaries that ‘had their apogee in the past century’ are ‘reproduced’ (28). Though on the surface society seems to be progressing, the culture is characterised by recurrence, repetition and replication:

After such social turbulence, art is more classical and is valued according to respect for norms. Writers have new taboos to describe. Psychoanalysts make up new

566 Esquirol, Memorias Del Futuro, 872. 567 Esquirol, 859. 568 Barker, Time and the Digital, 22. 569 Though it is outside the scope of my thesis, it is notable that these cycles of prejudices have special relevance to Argentinian society, especially prejudices displayed against the Panchamas (those that chose to be burned back into their original body), who can be read as a symbol for the oppressed indigenous of South America. 188

terminologies for old conflicts. Lawyers charge cheques for each litigation over the application or not of the antiquated system of inheritance. (29)

Polychronic and digital non-linearity are distinct in the nature of their repetitions: the polychronic cycles of Latin American magical realism are informed by the organic cycle of births, deaths, seasons that informs. The other is a digital copy: a re-presentation of the past. As Los cuerpos shows in the inability of its society to morally or culturally advance, this mode of time – unlike polychronicity – precludes meaningful progression. This is also seen in other Latin American science fiction novels which look at the influence that digital technology has had on linear progression in society: a contrast to a common Western perception of technological development as progressing society forward linearly.570 As Ryan notes, ‘progress is a change that moves in a linear fashion toward a very specific goal… Technology, as we traditionally think of it, is a perfect example of the abstract characteristics of progress’.571 However, in both Los cuerpos and Memorias del futuro, linear progression is disrupted by the sense of ‘re-presenting’ created by integrating society with technology. Even the name Memorias del futuro suggests this regressive sense of time. One of the characters comments that ‘at times it seems to me that we have returned to the cave age, that we have gone back in time’.572 As the two novels show, the cycles of this digital world are not the organic, variable cycles of polychronicity (explored in my previous chapter, and a feature of much non-science fiction Latin American literature). This is the iterability, the reproducibility of digital technology – and this form of artificial renewal makes a very different impact on the characters’ conceptualisation and experience of time.

For example, generations are flattened – the elision of beginnings and endings has conferred an equivalence to different generations and different phases of life. Rather than representing new generations as new cycles or new beginnings (as in the polychronicity of Allende’s novel), the non-linearity of technological time in Los Cuerpos eschews such distinctions: as a result, this undermines growth and accumulative, intergenerational wisdom. This resonates with David Savat’s description of digital time in his work Uncoding the Digital: ‘In the

570 Of course, many Western texts and scholars challenge this simplistic view: nevertheless, it persists in folk conception and several spheres of thought - see Ryan (2007) or Hachem (2017). 571 Patrick Ryan, “The Myth of Technological Progress,” Inquiry Journal 13 (2007): 2. 572 Esquirol, “El Límite de La Piel,” 177. 189

context of digital technologies, time is not organized linearly in successive elements’.573 In Los cuerpos, this is amplified to the point that the old manner of sequencing and dividing time periods has been rendered irrelevant. There are no longer temporal hierarchies; everything is lateral: ‘The old labels seem to be clumsy and imprecise. This is the last generation’ (93). This comment about being the last generation resonates with Ramiro’s name. When we meet him, he calls himself by the nickname ‘Rama’, which means ‘branch’ in Spanish, perhaps referring to his being the last branch on human history’s family tree. His grandchildren ‘don’t understand very well who is grandparent, who is uncle, who is great- grandparent’. Ramiro continues, ‘From now on, there will be no generations but multiplications, upwards and downwards, towards a new lateral structure’ (93); ‘The genealogical tree is no longer a tree, but a network’ (97). The mirroring of human history with that of digital technology is here made explicit: the word for ‘network’ that Ramiro uses is also the word used to refer to the internet – ‘la red’.

iii. Intermittence: pulses and oscillations

As I have noted, the linear sequencing of time – where seconds, minutes, hours and days pass chronologically, components of time that together a complete analogue stream – is disrupted in this imagined future. Both the conceptualisation and experience of time by the characters in the novel have lost their natural sense of organisation: the hierarchies of generations, the asymmetry of past/present/future, and the linearity of progress have all been blurred. Replacing this structure is one flattened, non-linear stream of time; however, it is punctuated by temporal markers: intermittent intervals which create a sense of pulsing, or of ticking back and forth. I argue that this is a further effect of Ramiro’s synchronisation with his sense of digital, technological time. The collapsing of past, present, future in the organisation of time has been taken over by the server tick, the electrical pulse, the on/off of binary code. Ramiro’s understanding of digital time as quantized, oscillatory, creates a motor resonance: an embodied experience of this oscillation. This unconscious motor mimicry is evident not only through his movements, speech and thoughts, but also poetically transposed to the prosody and structuring of the narrative – a literal and symbolic sense of oscillation, of switching between on and off, movement between two poles. This is significant for the

573 David Savat, Uncoding the Digital (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 27. 190

temporality of the narrative and the subjective time of the characters, not just because it foregrounds the motor mimicry between human and digital object – the foundation of a synchronisation of time – but also because these oscillations create a laterally segmented sense of time. Instead of linear chronology, the time of Ramiro, and the novel itself, is organized by the interval duration of these pulses, switches or oscillations.

To unpack the connection between digital technology and intermittence, digital devices are powered by the pulse signal of electrical voltage. In digital systems, ‘pulses comprise brief bursts of direct current voltage, with each burst having an abrupt beginning (or rise) and an abrupt ending (or decay)’.574 That is, the electric current oscillates, creating a regular variation in magnitude as the voltage moves between two poles. Each of these spikes or pulses in a digital computer is allocated a binary value – positive and negative peaks.575 Despite being very different systems, there is a relevant similarity between this variation between two poles of voltage in the electric current, and between the two poles of the binary number system, in which ‘there are only two possible states, off and on’ (or 0/1 of the Boolean domain). This is the binary coding of digital software. There is a conceptual similarity in the polarity, the variation between two binary poles – whether positive/negative or true/false – of both digital hardware and software. Indeed, the 0s and 1s of binary notation are themselves ‘embodied in the ups and downs of electrical pulses and the settings of electronic switches inside the machine’.576 As a result of these abstract similarities, I suggest there is a connection in Ramiro’s sense of both digital technology’s hardware (pulse signal) and software (binary signal), and a similarity in how they influence the Ramiro’s conception of digital technology’s temporal profile.

That is, in Los cuerpos, the characters’ sense of both digital technology’s hardware and software have converging impacts on the resonance systems of the individuals, affecting them physically and psychologically. This offers an explanation – in realistic, rather than simply aesthetic terms – for the novel’s preoccupation with pulses, oscillation, or switching

574 “What Is Pulse? - Definition from WhatIs.Com,” WhatIs.com, accessed October 23, 2018, https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/pulse. 575 Jeffrey Miller and Woodward Yang, “Simple Pulse Asynchronous State Machines,” Circuits and Systems 3 (1996): 405–9. 576 “The Electronic Digital Computer: How It Started, How It Works and What It Does,” The New York Times, January 9, 1967, https://www.nytimes.com/1967/01/09/the-electronic-digital-computer-how-it- started-how-it-works-and-what-it-does.html. 191

back and forth between poles, showing it as part of the novel’s exploration of how digital technology affects the embodied minds of individuals. Furthermore, evidence of linguistic, thematic and structural intermittence not only indicates a conceptual and motor synchrony with digital technology but also indicates a temporal synchrony with this technology. These pulses or oscillations involve an encoding of time, creating a temporal structure: a new, lateral organisation of a time removed from linear chronology.

In fact, in the above quote in which Ramiro observes the new structuring of time, the sense of oscillation between two poles was made implicit: ‘From now on there will be no generations but multiplications, upwards and downwards’ (93, my emphasis). Instead of the vertical hierarchy of generations, the analogue stream of moments or the even the asymmetry of past/present/future, Ramiro describes a new lateral way of organising human time, punctuated by intermittent intervals – even resonating with ‘the ups and downs of electrical pulses’.577 Phrases such as ‘upwards and downwards’ [hacia arriba y hacia abajo] and ‘backwards and forwards’ are repeatedly used throughout the novel, symbolising the oscillation between poles that affects much of Ramiro’s experience. As he scatters his son’s ashes, Ramiro says, ‘From now on, there will be no generations but multiplications, upwards and downwards, towards a new lateral structure. Upwards and downwards go also Teo’s ashes, dragged by the wind that brings the end of spring’ (93). Other examples include, ‘From the layer below to the layer above, and upwards and downwards. She makes me repeat it’ (48); ‘I don’t know if I begin from the top downwards to the bottom upwards’ [de arriba hacia abajo o de abajo hacia arriba] (42). Oscillation is symbolically and literally conveyed in Ramiro’s physical movements even from the very first page of the novel: ‘Teo’s grandchildren help me to take my first steps… my trajectory goes from the house to the corner and then back’ (11). In the final pages of the novel, this motif becomes more explicit in Ramiro’s repetitive movements. He is constantly ‘looking from side to side’ (107); ‘every so often my head moves towards each side of my flanks’ (107); the phrase ‘left foot, left hand, right foot, right hand’ (106-107) is repeated three times in the space of two pages. Here the sense of oscillation, of a switching back and forth, is evident.

This is also represented in the novel through repeated references to intermittence, to pulsing on and off. This is evident when Ramiro meets his love interest, Azafrán, the young woman

577 “The Electronic Digital Computer.” 192

who is the granddaughter of his ex-wife: ‘On the left ankle I hear and see a pulse; as hypnosis it is more effective than a pendulum’ (43). This shows not just pulsing but oscillation, as her pulse switches from foot to foot: the next time he sees her he notices that ‘the pulse is this time on the opposite ankle to the last time’ (53). This pulsing preoccupies Ramiro even as they make love for the first time: ‘I lick her feet and the pulse on her ankle’ (97). During the act, again the on/off switching is encoded in physical motion: ‘Azafrán squeezed, and then stretched, her toes until she finished’ (97).

The way that flotation and burning have replaced death and birth means that the life cycle of humans now more closely resembles the polarity of digital technology: life, now, is more like the binary code that Hayles speaks of, ‘elementary units that can occupy two states: on or off’.578 The linearity of human development has been replaced with an infinite lateral time, divided into discrete variables: on (incarnated) or off (in flotation). The binary logic of their lifespan is underlined by Ramiro’s use of syntactic parallelism as he speaks to his daughter, who is now in flotation, about an earlier time, ‘when I was dead and you were alive’ (39). This connection between the narrative style and binary logic is sometimes made explicit in the text, for example as Ramiro makes reference to the true/false of the Boolean domain while he explains his history to Azafrán:

I tell her that I was Adela’s best friend (false) until I died when she had two children with her first husband (true). Azafrán takes account quickly. “Are you one of the first people in the country to enter into flotation?” I respond yes (true). “You couldn’t talk with her from the web?” I respond that I lost contact with her (true). “Why?” I respond that Adela hated the internet (true). “And she couldn’t make the effort for you?” I responded that I never resented her for this (false). (43)

This sense of binaries or oscillation is evident not only in the dialogue but in the overall style of the novel, including aspects of punctuation, phonetic patterning, syntactic structures, text formatting, word choice and figurative devices. (Particularly as the narrative is told in first person through Ramiro’s voice, the narrative style gives some indication of his subjective experience.) A syntactic device prominent in the novel is parallelism, sometimes even chiasmus, which echoes the polarity of digital technology: the two-part structure with each

578 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 10. 193

clause mirrored, but with differing or opposite content. The technique is so prevalent in the narrative that it deserves special attention – it is not a random stylistic choice but needs to be considered in the context of the novel’s exploratory project: examining the effect of digital technology on human experience. Parallelisms are strewn throughout the text:

‘I was never useless as a man, and neither will I be useless as a woman’ [Nunca fui inútil como hombre, tampoco lo voy a ser como mujer] (47)

‘What you say that she was for you, well, you were for her’ [Lo que vos decís que ella era para vos, bueno, vos lo eras para ella] (40)

‘On her brown arms, perhaps natural, she has discoloured hair, perhaps artificial’ [En los brazos tostados quizás de forma natural tiene un vello decolorado quizás de forma artificial] (42)

‘she was on the inside and I was on the outside’ [ella está del lado de adentro y yo del lado de afuera] (19)

‘I hate to be a useless person, but I hate more to be a bad grandfather’ [Odio ser un inútil, pero aún más odio ser un mal abuelo] (59)

‘We are both content: me for being with my child, and he for being with his grandmother’ [Ambos estamos contentos: yo por estar con mi hijo, y él por estar con su abuela] (65)

Repetition is another stylistic motif used to represent this digital intermittence, particularly in the sense of pulsing. Ramiro describes ‘a woman in the body of a man that dresses as a woman’ (30); ‘Vera calls me “dad”. Gales calls me “grandpa”. Septiembre calls me “Ramiro”. The children call me “Rama”. Cuzco continues calling me “sir”’ (107). In both excerpts, the slippage in such relational identity categories shows how even identity in the novel can oscillate back and forth, the characters shifting between different binary identity categories as they’re burned into new bodies – man/woman, human/animal.579

579 This indeterminacy in identity deserves further attention: however, in the scope of this chapter I am not able to explore the novel’s identity politics. 194

Repetition in the wording and structure of sequential clauses is also replicated in dialogue. I have left the following excerpts in the original Spanish as I feel the semantic and phonemic patterns are important to the sense of pulsing or oscillation, for example in these lines from Azáfran:

Nací en Géminis, aunque ya no sé si el zodíaco se aplica siempre o solo en tu cuerpo original. Vivo en mi cuerpo original, aunque a veces fantaseo con intercambiarlo por el de una chica asiática. (43)580

A particular type of repetition, anaphora, also suggests this pulsing style:

Me doy cuenta de que necesito conseguir un trabajo cuando paso la mayor cantidad de horas al día dentro de la casa con una compresa húmeda en la nuca; cuando vuelvo a conectarme a los nodos, habiéndome prometido no hacerlo…; cuando no tengo ganas de acostarme a la noche pero tampoco tengo ganas de levantarme a la mañana; y, sobre todo, cuando Septiembre y Gales discuten por mí. (47)581

When Ramiro is told that his son, Teo, is dying, he thinks to himself:

Hace mucho tiempo que espero esa frase. Cuando Teo era chico y yo tenía miedo de cualquier accidente en la cuna o en el tobogán; cuando yo estaba en flotación y creía que jamás lo volvería a ver; cuando me quemaron y pude ver desde mi cuerpo gordo que Teo era la momia aún viva de mi hijo. (92)582

580 I was born in Gemini, although I don’t know if the zodiac is applicable forever or only in your original body. I live in my original body, although sometimes I fantasize about changing it for an Asian woman. 581 ‘I realise that I need to get a job when I spend the majority of the hours of the day inside the house with a moist compress on my neck; when I connect myself to the nodes again, having promised myself not to do it… when I have no desire to go to bed at night but neither do I have the desire to get up in the morning; and, above all, when Septiembre and Gales argue about me’. 582 ‘I have expected that phrase for a long time. When Teo was a boy and I was frightened of some accident in the crib or with a toboggan; when I was in flotation and I believed that I would never see him again; when they burned me and I could see through my fat body that Teo was the living mummy of my son’. 195

Sigo pensando en mi examigo cuando estoy en la oficina, cuando estoy en el inodoro y cuando no me puedo dormir por las noches. (68)583

In hinging on the temporal connector, ‘cuando’ [when], these examples of anaphora make reference to the temporal aspect of this sense of pulse signal – the dividing of time into lateral phases. This effect of intermittence is also achieved through the prosody or cadence of much of the narrative style: it has a back and forth lilt, a phonetic symmetry, achieved through alliteration, assonance, or near-rhyme: ‘el segundo esposo de mi esposa, el hombre que se casó con mi mujer y se la cogió, el marido de la viuda’ (15)584;

Es raro estar del lado de afuera; me acerco a la pantalla como si fuera una pecera. Yo supe ser un pez y ahora camino de nuevo en la tierra. Hay varios amigos míos… La mayoría murió justo después de que yo lo hiciera. (15)585

Other stylistic tendencies in Los cuerpos figure this synchronisation with the pulses or oscillations of digital technology. For example, the formatting of the prose into short lines also suggests pulses rather than an analogue stream of narrative. This happens even when there is no list or other reason to format the lines in this way. For example, after the observation of Azafran’s ankle pulse as a hypnotizing pendulum, the three short lines under this are formatted alone, visually representing this pulse duration.

She asks me, then, who I am. I don’t want to say I am a man. She observes the battery next to me. (43)

This shows how Ramiro experiences this scene as a series of intervals or pulses, rather than the analogue of normal temporal perception. Like digital technology, Ramiro’s time involves

583 ‘I keep thinking of my ex-friend when I am in the office, when I’m on the toilet and when I can’t sleep at night’. 584 ‘The second husband of my wife, the man that married my woman and fucked her, the husband of the widow’. 585 ‘It’s strange being on the outside; I approach the screen as if I were a fisherman. I knew how to be a fish and now I’m walking on the earth again. There are various friends of mine… the majority died just after I did’. 196

‘discrete elements and discontinuous scales’.586 Digital compared to analogue is not a continuous stream, but rather has little ‘gaps’.587 These gaps are further suggested in the prominent use of colons and semicolons breaking up the long sentences of the narrative style:

I realise that I need to get a job when I spend the biggest quantity of hours of the day inside the house with a wet compress on my neck; when I again connect myself to the nodes, having promised myself not to do so, to converse with the dead about events that happened more than fifty years ago; when I don’t feel like going to bed at night but neither do I feel like getting out of bed in the morning; and, above all, when Septiembre and Gales argue about me. (47)

The structure of the narrative also reflects this intermittence or division into discrete intervals. The discontinuous scale is represented in the division of chapters: they are segmented further into micro-episodes, represented numerically to the first decimal place (1.1, 1.2 etc). Furthermore, the narrative tension also plays out this on/off oscillation. Though taken on its own this is not a wholly unique characteristic of narrative arcs, in concert with the rest of Los cuerpos it resonates with the switching of on/off that runs through the novel. The narrative tension alternates with each chapter: there is a pulse of activity and then a lull, a section filled with routine activities or observations of society. This oscillation of tension creates a pulse interval – for example in chapter 5.1, there is charged fight between Ramiro’s grandson and granddaughter in law: ‘It seems that the man who cleans the house broke one of the computers. Teo’s son became angry and threw it. I was walking when it happened: when I returned it seemed that a bolt had volatized all emotional equilibrium’ (33). The following chapter, 5.2, is an interaction between Ramiro and his great-grandchildren: ‘I delay my shower until after visiting the web. I walk towards my great-grandchildren’s room, where the closest computer is’ (35). In 5.3, Ramiro clashes with his daughter Vera (who is in flotation) while discussing the fate of his son, Teo. The oscillation of the tension continues – 5.4 is a short section in which Ramiro finds the house he was looking for, followed by 5.5, a charged interaction between Ramiro and the granddaughter of his ex-wife, Azáfran. In 5.6 the tension is again switched off, as Ramiro returns to his house, meets the cleaner, Cuzco, and has a

586 Anthony Wilden, “Analog and Digital Communication: On Negation, Signification, and Meaning,” in System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange (London: Tavistock, 1972), 156. 587 “Digital Computer - an Overview | ScienceDirect Topics,” accessed March 21, 2019, https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/digital-computer. 197

shower before bed. The trajectory of narrative tension combines with the other stylistic phenomena discussed above in evoking the sense of a digital intermittence, the pulsing or oscillation which Ramiro has come to incorporate into his own subjectivity. These literary devices have a temporal aspect: the rhythm of the style (punctuation, chapter divides, tension etc) controls the speed at which the story progresses, and are suggestive of the temporality in which Ramiro experiences the world. The on/off creates a periodicity, an intermittence in his experience of time which isn’t organised by linear chronology but is segmented by pulses or phases.

The above analysis, as a whole, shows how the language and form of Los cuerpos reflects the protagonist’s temporal experience: accelerated, non-linear and intermittent. In this way, the novel explores how embodied minds can be affected – physically, psychologically, temporally – by their technological environments. Though the portrait of temporal synchronisation that the novel paints may not be an exact mirror to real life – the futuristic speculations and aesthetic drives of the genre have produced an exaggerated version of this phenomenon – it still resonates strongly with a real-life neurophysiological understanding of how elements of our environment can affect our subjective experience. In terms of understanding the novel better, I believe that using this lens, one which attributes neurophysiological underpinnings to these fictional representations, can show the link between narrative phenomena ranging from, as I’ve shown, character development to punctuation. More broadly, by understanding the temporality embedded in the narrative, it opens up the novel’s insights into how technology can influence individuals, illustrating a subjective interface between digital technology and humans that doesn’t eschew the body, rather showing how time, technology and bodies are all bound together in this futuristic society.

In the next section, I will focus on the third point of that trio – bodies – and show how close attention to Ramiro’s own biological body shifts the emphasis in this interplay of subject and object, biology and technology.

Part 3: Bodily Time

198

“Is it true that the dead get hotter than the living?” I tell her I don’t know as I sit down beside her. “They told me that the dead bathe in pools of ice. They overheat like the old computers. Maybe because inside they are full of powder.” “I’m not full of powder”, I laugh. “I have lungs, pancreas and heart.” (53)

Despite integrating almost every aspect of his daily life with digital devices, despite having his lifespan radically extended by digital technology, and despite identifying with technology on a deep level, as the above excerpt suggests Ramiro still feels himself to be essentially a biologically embodied human. The previous section looked at how his psychophysiological connection to digital technology altered his experience of time; this section will look at what happens when his focus shifts back to his bodily state, where he reconnects with his body as a biological subject. Here his sense of time slows, becoming once again the analogue stream of human time perception.588 Though both temporalities he experiences are mediated by the body, this slowed time is more explicitly so, born from Ramiro’s close attention to his physical senses and form. An analysis of time shows Ramiro’s switching between feeling like a technological object, and a biological subject, as the accelerated nonlinearity of ‘digital time’ is interspersed with pockets of slowed time with an extended focus on close bodily and sensory attention, reengaging the analogue of normal human chronology.

Part of the reason why this ‘bodily’ time is experienced as slower, particularly in contrast to the acceleration of ‘digital time’, is that attention to bodily, sensory information dilates the sense of passing time: research has shown the ‘existence of multisensory interactions in the perception of duration’.589 As Matthews et al. explain, there is ‘an intrinsic association between large or intense stimuli and long durations’.590 More recently, David Eagleman and Vani Pariyadath have suggested that subjective duration depends on the efficiency of neural coding, with more intense stimuli seeming to last longer because they evoke a larger neural

588 There is a lot of interesting work that could be done on how Ramiro’s time changes depending on the body that he is burned into, how different bodies affect his subjectivity. However, in the space of this chapter I have only focused on the experience of TS with technology, since this seems to consistently affect the characters in all his different human bodies, providing an overarching thread that runs throughout narrative. 589 Virginie van Wassenhove et al., “Distortions of Subjective Time Perception Within and Across Senses,” PLOS ONE 3, no. 1 (2008): e1437, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0001437. 590 William J. Matthews, Neil Stewart, and John H. Wearden, “Stimulus Intensity and the Perception of Duration,” Journal of Experimental Psychology. Human Perception and Performance 37, no. 1 (2011): 303, https://doi.org/10.1037/a0019961. 199

response.591 This is particularly evident in Ramiro’s intensified sensations in a new body after a hundred years: ‘The body that I inhabit never ceases to surprise me; I thought that I was going to be fascinated by having a vagina, but it is the hole of my mouth that hypnotizes me’ (67). He is transfixed by his body, making him stop and observe himself; in doing so, his time slows until there is a sense of pause, of suspension: ‘I pause in front of the bathroom mirror: I see a short and fat woman, supernaturally beautiful’ (13). Ramiro’s connection with his own body is often connected to consumption – his love of his body is almost cannibalistic: ‘I could put my whole arm in cream and lick and bite it down to the bone’ (67). Even though objectively the few days that he has spent in the real world is much shorter than the century spent in flotation, the increase in bodily stimuli creates intervals where his perception of time is drastically slowed, and at times it seems that these few days have been longer than the hundred years, until it is difficult for Ramiro to even remember what being inside flotation was like: ‘A few days outside of the state of flotation, saturated with so many soft surfaces and sour aromas and acidic flavours, and I’ve already forgotten what it was to be inside’ (16). As a counterpoint to the idea of ‘digital time’ described in the previous section, this slowed bodily time is experienced as a continuous stream of moments passing. As Anthony Wilden notes, the analogue clock – whether a sundial or a display with hour, minute and second hands – is analogue because it represents a continuum.592 In Bodies in Code, Mark Hansen speaks of human perception – not only of time perception but also of touch, taste, feel smell etc. – as analogue: ‘This is the analogue in a sense close to the technical meaning, as a continuously variable impulse or momentum that can cross from one qualitatively different medium into another, i.e. a continuum of time’.593 This overlap between perception and analogue time is shown in Los cuerpos through the scenes of simultaneous focus on bodily sensation and the slowed passage of time, moving through moment by moment in a linear stream.

Sensory perception is a significant preoccupation of Los cuerpos. There is a hyperawareness of and detailed focus on the body – posture, movement, and sensations. This is signalled even

591 David M. Eagleman and Vani Pariyadath, “Is Subjective Duration a Signature of Coding Efficiency?,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences 364, no. 1525 (2009): 1841–51, https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2009.0026. 592 Wilden, “Analog and Digital Communication: On Negation, Signification, and Meaning.” 593 Mark Hansen, Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media (New York: Routledge, 2006); Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). 200

from the first line of the narrative: ‘It’s good to have a body again, even though it’s this fat woman’s body that nobody else wanted, and to leave to walk along the sidewalk to feel the rugosity of the world. The heat saturates my skin’ (11). Observations of Ramiro’s body recur frequently throughout the narrative: ‘The body has other demands and I must do morning exercises to fortify my muscles. Septiembre writes while I lift weights; in her silence I can hear the grinding of my arms’ (19); ‘my fat heart vibrates, I feel it in my fingertips’ (41). The wet secretions of the body receive particular attention: ‘I swallow saliva more viscous than normal’ (96); ‘I settle the weights on the tiles and wait, sitting on the little bench that sticks to my shorts. A drop of sweat runs between my tits; I slide a finger up and bring it to my mouth. It is salty’ (20); my back sweats and one of the straps of my backpack slips off my shoulder; everything is sweaty’ (74). Such a focus makes a targeted rebuttal to disembodied theories of mind: this is the ‘leaky, moist, material body’ that, as Siri Hustvedt points out, computational models of mind try to dispense with.594

Even the state of flotation itself – though it is never shown through the narrative perspective – is described in physical, sensory terms: – the internet is ‘viscous’ (20); when Ramiro describes his own body within flotation, it is as ‘a fish’ (15) or a ‘jellyfish’ (20). Ramiro says that his ‘mind interprets the end of the state of flotation like the end of a cramp’ (13). Even the name ‘flotation’ is an explicitly physical state, suggesting that it is, rather than disembodiment, simply a new kind of embodiment. Although it would be interesting to explore how the novel figures different, non-biological forms of embodiment, the discourse time skips past this, and only details Ramiro’s perspective while he occupies physical bodies. Without much detail from the book about this state, I limit my discussion to the biological embodiment represented in the novel.

In this focus on bodily sensation, Los cuerpos is reminiscent of other Latin American science fiction novels. For example Prado Bassi’s Lóbulo, in which an examination of the changes wrought by technology is grounded in a hyperawareness of the human body: ‘Rummaging in the most distant spaces she searches, she opens her legs, then her toes, a manner of feeling more fully each space of her flesh. It would be enough to relax her body, that would be enough to be calm, to think’.595 In Los cuerpos, Ramiro is minutely aware of ‘the daily

594 Hustvedt, The Delusions of Certainty, 149. 595 Prado Bassi, Lóbulo, 14. 201

effort… of maintaining all the muscles together and all the nerves coordinated, both eyes pointing in the same direction, the tongue out of the way of the teeth, the penis active in front of the toilet, of the precise inhale and the necessary exhale’ (23). In this focus on the body, the breath to breath updates of sensations, Ramiro feels the continuity of time in the analogue continuum of his bodily perceptions: ‘I can almost feel how each muscle in the face is ordered’ (34). The temporal slippage of the digital time is displaced by a feeling of physical presence persisting through time: ‘I look at my arms and my legs: the bones did not run off [huyeron], the joints remain [permanecen]’ (38). In fact, the connection between bodily sensation and the experience of time is sometimes made explicit as bodily actions are metonymically substituted for time: ‘the thick splashes last on the ground for one and a half blinks’ (38). Ramiro also explicitly comments on how bodily experience has eluded technological control, even in a world where it is integrated with digital technology: ‘even in summer it’s cold at sunrise and the sun delays in coming out. These bodies are like ripe fruit, but the skin is still not immune to the temperature of the environment; nor to feelings’ (98). Technology has not been able to override the body, either physically or psychologically. In this way the novel describes, in the words of reviewer de Angelis, ‘the space not illuminated by the overwhelming glow of the monitors’.596

These intervals of slowed, bodily time are revealed through descriptions of Ramiro’s movements, dialogue, and direct observations of time. At times, Ramiro’s exhibits ‘slow and profound movements [movimientos lentos y profundos]’ (13). His experience of the slowness of bodily time is exaggerated by his obese body: ‘I get up as quick as I can: too slow. Everything is transformed into an obstacle by my obesity’ (74). More than simply fat and clumsy, however, his movements are often distinctly slowed or stilled: ‘I remain still, at the edge of the garden’ (14); as he sits outdoors, watching the other family members play, he says, ‘I don’t want to move: neither to go to the bathroom nor leave the sun’ (14); ‘I remain staring until my own eyes hurt’ (40). As mentioned above, much of Ramiro’s connection to his body is experienced through ingestion. Accordingly, the connection between slowed time and the body is often shown through acts of consumption, where detail-filled descriptions effect a sense of slow or pause in his flow of time: ‘I part the peel with slow movements; I remove the white seeds of the segments before eating them. I separate with my tongue the segments into smaller sections. I suck the seeds as if they were caramels; I spit them as if

596 de Angelis, “Un paseo por el futuro.” 202 they were chewing gum’ (13); ‘I don’t want to get up, even less so to ask that they bring me a knife; I chew an under ripe pear, with the skin, without noise, with sticky fingers’ (33). Stylistically, layered adverbial phrases in these descriptions of Ramiro’s bodily experiences create a slowed discourse time, which parallels his subjective sense of time.

The effect is again created in a scene where Ramiro’s granddaughter-in-law teaches him how to put on makeup:

Then comes the foundation, which has to be of the same tone as the skin or as close as possible; you put it on with a sponge or with your fingers, also at the start of the ears and on the neck. A powder on top of the base to fix the makeup; it is translucent so that the face doesn’t shine so much and it maintains the colour. Now the eyes: first, shadow in the four strategic places of the eyelid; after, outline the eyes and put mascara on the lashes. Everything that goes under the eyes has to be done with little touches with the brush, because the skin of the lower lid is very weak, and the index and middle fingers are too forceful. Pass a cotton ball over the eyebrows to remove the makeup that remains, and, on the way, brush them upwards or wherever you want. (49)

During this moment of intimate and elaborate attention to the body, layered details and clauses stylistically reflect the slow-moving time, so that this moment seems to be lasting forever. Such a sense is figuratively invoked in Septiembre’s comment after she has finished doing Ramiro’s makeup: ‘I should take a photo or freeze you like this, as you are’ (49). Her metaphor echoes Ramiro’s own, in which he describes how unusual it feels to inhabit the slowed analogue of bodily experience: ‘At times it seems that I came out of the state of flotation frozen… I want to shout at myself, give myself orders, shake the pieces of ice stuck to my hair and teeth’ (27). Although at times the limits of the body are frustrating for him, as with Kit’s character in The Life of Houses, which I explored in chapter two of this thesis, this slowed time allows Ramiro to closely observe his body and his position within his environment: ‘I wait seated in a chair in the dark; from there I can observe Cuzco calmly. He is finishing washing up the plates from dinner; when it is midnight, he is going to retire to pass the weekend elsewhere. The bugs stick to the kitchen lamp. The family sleeps’ (70). Like Kit, these intervals of dilated time give him space to reassess and regain his sense of self after flotation. Though the slowed bodily time isn’t a critique of the fast-paced technological 203

time – as I’ve said, the novel doesn’t come to simple conclusions – the former allows Ramiro a space to navigate the questions of identity which confront him: feeling his physical parameters, his place in the family, and his position in a new society.

The distinction between the sense of digital vs. body time is also illustrated through the other characters. The room of Ramiro’s son, Teo, is ‘the only room in the house that doesn’t have connection’ (15). In this room, away from computers and from the internet, time seems to pass slower than in the rest of the house. Teo himself embodies this, with his slow speech and movements: ‘Teo is seated on his bed; his phrases are short, and are even separated into syllables’ (15). His dialogue is formatted with hyphens to denote the pauses and extended words: ‘el chu-bas-co’ [squall] (15). He ‘gesticulates a lot but slowly’ (15). In other instances in the novel, there is an evident connection between an absence of digital technology, increased awareness of the body, and physical stillness combined with heightened observation of world around: all of which lead to a slower experience of passing time. ‘In the patio it is already dark but the light doesn’t turn on; the computer of the studio must be turned off, which is unusual. The night is humid. A mosquito sips from my naked torso; I stay still’ (96). The novel exaggerates the separation between the spaces and scenes influenced by digital technology, and those not, which emphasizes the distinction between the two temporalities that Ramiro experiences. Teo’s room and Gorila – a rogue province at the outskirts of the city – are the only two places in the novel where there is no stable connection to the internet: ‘The news modules repeat that Gorila is the only place in the city without access to the internet’ (72). Where there is internet access in this ramshackle metropolis, it is ‘precarious’ (72). Here the absence of digital technology and its influence on the characters’ sense of time is very evident: Ramiro’s walk through Gorila, though only lasting an hour or so in the objective time of the story, takes up an entire chapter. The discourse time, filled with minutely detailed descriptions of both Ramiro’s surroundings and his own bodily experience, shows how his subjective time is decoupled from the frantic, erratic pace of the digital technology and reconnected to his analogue physical perceptions. ‘The houses are of wood and sheets, improvised shacks of cardboard or fabric, returned garbage containers. They co-exist with the farms and with the crypts; the butcher is next to the crematorium, the only place of the old cemetery that still continues to function’ (72). During this time he is hyper aware of his body: ‘I feel my muscles stiffen… my back sweats and one of the straps of my backpack slips off my shoulder; everything is sweaty: my hands, the railings, the bottles, the whole villa perspires’ (74). 204

These descriptions of Ramiro’s physical surroundings while in Gorila are at variance with those of the rest of the novel. In contrast, as he travels through modernized spaces infiltrated with digital technology, time passes very quickly. The close, moment-to-moment detailed descriptions of the environment are missing. Furthermore, while in these spaces Ramiro’s attention is not focused purely on his physical surroundings but divided partly between his own memories, and images that he has seen on the internet:

It is the first time that I’ve been to the centre in just under a hundred years. The figure doesn’t tell me anything. The chauffeur makes conversation but his words dissolve in front of the urban paradise. The buildings that aren’t there anymore superimpose on my head like tracing paper over the top of reality. I assimilate the new constructions; many I know thanks to the maps on the internet. 70 hours of news diving inside the streets and underground that reproduce everything. (50)

These two attentional modes – the slow of bodily focus compared to the acceleration of digital technology – are characterised by a shift in self-conceptualisation: the former as a technomorphic object, the latter as a biological subject. The duality is reflected in the quote at the beginning of this section. Those of Ramiro’s kind – individuals that have died and then been returned to new bodies – are referred to through technomorphic metaphors: ‘the dead… overheat like old computers’ (53). However, this is immediately contested, as Ramiro asserts his biological self: ‘I have lungs, a pancreas and heart’ (53). In this manner, Ramiro’s sense of himself as technological object is interspersed with distinct moments of reclamation of the body (often signalled by the replacing of impersonal definite articles with possessive adjectives – mi mente/my mind; mi cuerpo/my body’). This shift between subject and object often occurs within a single scene. For example, there is a scene where Ramiro describes wetting his pants. Initially the sensation is so defamiliarized that he interprets it as unconnected to himself, the phenomena of a machine – an action of which he is not the agent. However, in this scene, it becomes apparent that the sensory experience eventually reconnects Ramiro to his body: ‘I smile as I piss. I interpret it as a leak, like I would upon hearing a little noise coming from inside a car; then I enjoy it, standing, in an increasingly strong noon’ (14). Though at first the action is distanced from himself, after the semicolon we see his embodied, physical enjoyment makes him reclaim his own subjecthood. Ramiro feels 205

more like a biological subject, and, along with this, his sense of time slows, the present moment dilating: ‘I don’t want to move: not to go to the bathroom nor to leave the sun’ (14).

Colanzi recognizes this defamiliarization between Ramiro and his physical self, as his body is relegated to object status: ‘There is a preoccupation with the way in which new technologies defamiliarize our relationship with our body. In the case of Castagnet’s novel, this defamiliarization reaches such a point that the identity of individuals now does not pass by the body: the subject is moved to the internet’. Colanzi sees ‘the disappearance of the body in the conception of the “I”'. 597 Within this characterisation the hierarchy between information and materiality is obvious, with the human subject essentially reduced to a string of code, its relation to the body at best contingent and at worst redundant. In contrast, I see Ramiro’s movement between subject and object, the familiar and unfamiliar, as mediated by his body. The difference comes not only in acknowledging the moments when he feels himself as a biological subject, but also in my account of the defamiliarization itself: even when he feels like a technological object it is still due to an embodied identification with technology, and so it is through the body that his experience of time changes. The back and forth between subject and object, between technological time and bodily time, is part of the evidence that the novel is saying something more complicated than just humans will become ‘zombie cyborgs’ as Colanzi says.

Notably, not all of Ramiro’s bodies are human. At the end of the novel, Ramiro has been burned into the body of a horse. No longer able to interact with digital technology, he feels himself not only slipping out of a human way of thinking, but also disengaging from the technological embodiment which caused him to synchronise with the accelerated time of the digital world. He begins to inhabit a purely bodily time, slowed into a stream of present-tense perception, engaging with all of his physical senses and sensations:

I am a yellow horse; or maybe red. My eyes look in both directions. The horizon is wide and flat. I can see my food; I see what I need and, what I don’t see, I smell, I hear and I feel. Footsteps, wheels, whistles, voices and storms. (106)

597 Colanzi, “Of Animals, Monsters, and Cyborgs: Alternative Bodies in Latin American Fiction (1961- 2012),” 122. 206

Relative to the pace and slippage of his previous life, immersed in digital time, this bodily time is exaggerated in its dilation – it becomes a pause, a suspended moment: ‘… when I am in pause, with my four hooves suspended in the air. Here I am also happy. The heat of the sun; suspension [suspensión]’ (107). Indeed, ‘suspensión’ is repeated three times in this final page of the novel. Despite its contradictions and dichotomies, ultimately Los cuerpos ends on a note that affirms a slowed, analogue time informed by physical sensation. While this doesn’t go as far as a bioconservative stance – an explicit critique of technological advances that alter the human body598 – it is a crucial reminder of the importance of the biological body in our understanding of human experience.

In thematising the importance of bodily, analogue perception in a digital world, the novel resonates with Buckley’s comments:

I wish to underscore … that bodily intelligibility is coextensive with the inability of the digital to supersede and nullify the analogue. This point is significant because it problematizes the succession-logic informing the notion that, in the twenty-first century, bodies are moving inexorably towards (or have inexorably entered) a ‘digital age’.599

My analysis intervenes in the conclusion of teleological disembodiment (the idea that humans will be inevitably reduced to digital data) that readers and critics alike have attributed to the novel. Articulating this central issue, in a review of Los cuerpos, Piccioni asks, ‘Are we mere data that can be burned into whatever receptacle?’600 Taking the novel’s premise at face value – with the ‘psychic structure’ of human minds able to be uploaded and downloaded into different bodies – does seem to point towards this conclusion. However, as I have argued, Los cuerpos shows the body’s role in producing subjective experience, underlining embodied engagement with both the technological and biological. Highlighting these two focal points underlines the novel’s central ambivalence about technology and its effects on human

598 Sandel, “The Case Against Perfection.” 599 Buckley, “Believing in the (Analogico-)Digital,” 1. 600 Piccioni, “¿Cómo Quemar Un Cuerpo En El Verano?,” 124. 207

experience, urging us, in Castagnet’s own words, ‘to appreciate the world, but also to appreciate the internet’.601

Concluding thoughts

In this chapter, I have demonstrated a new way to explore the novel’s literary phenomena and elucidate its philosophical position on embodiment in the technological age. An analysis of time reveals that two temporalities are at work in the novel – an accelerated, non-linear time influenced by identification with digital technology, and a slower, analogue time created by close attention to the physical senses. However, both are mediated by the body, and can be elucidated through a neurophysiological understanding of embodied minds and their feedback systems. Evidence of these two modes of time in the novel disputes critical stances on the novel which see its rhetorical conclusion as teleological disembodiment. I argue that the body plays a large role in Ramiro’s subjectivity: his body constitutes his experience and concept of self, rather than simply an empty receptacle. Despite, or perhaps through, its experimental premise, the novel shows how subjectivity is woven out of an assemblage of body, brain and environment. An analysis of time – such an important part of mental life – shows the novel’s nuanced exploration of the role of the body in a technological age. Los cuerpos suggests, in concert with much current discourse, that ‘the material substrate of bodies… resist[] the purity of symbolic abstraction’,602 creating a story of a human subjectivity that is too complex to fit into disembodied zeros and ones. As I will continue to discuss below in the conclusion to my thesis, this is important for understanding the book and important to my thesis as a whole, which has foregrounded the embodied mind and its engagement with the things in the surrounding world: whether person, house, or computer.

601 Lamberti, “‘No tengo ningún respeto por la ciencia ficción’: Interview with Martín Felipe Castagnet.” 602 Marvin and Sun-ha, Place, Space, and Mediated Communication, 105. 208

Final Thoughts: Time, Bodies and Objects

‘The nature of time is rooted in our body’. Daniele Di Lernia et al., 2018603

My purpose in this thesis has been twofold – to show how a cognitively informed analysis of subjective time can reveal things about literary works, and how these literary works can reveal things about the cognition of subjective time. These reciprocal moves demonstrate how cognitive science and literature can both benefit from paying attention to each other, in a bidirectional dialogue which doesn’t impute an epistemological hierarchy and takes as an advantage the methodological and philosophical differences between the two spheres of knowledge. Through a cognitive critical analysis of a number of contemporary novels, I have demonstrated the insights that an interdisciplinary focus on temporal synchronisation can offer. With a cognitive understanding of the unconscious process of temporal synchronisation, I have explored literary phenomena – style, character, plot and the continuities between them – that haven’t before been properly addressed: this has, in the words of Lisa Zunshine, opened up my texts ‘in new ways’,604 suggesting both new readings and new ways of reading. The novel interpretations that this approach has produced suggests the productivity of this cognitive-informed methodology, offering a style of analysis which can be used to understand other texts that treat the issues of time, place, and bodies. In turn, this new understanding of literary phenomena highlights literature’s insights into the human experience of time, bodies and environment. In sum, to literary criticism I have offered not just a terminology but also a framework with which to highlight and explore the influence running between physical surroundings, embodied minds, and time, and have demonstrated its effectiveness in producing new readings of texts. My analytical approach has used the discursive specificity of literature to examine the fluctuations and implications of changing subjective time, and suggest new aspects of the phenomenon of temporal synchronisation

603 Di Lernia et al., “Feel the Time. Time Perception as a Function of Interoceptive Processing.” 604 Zunshine, “From the Social to the Literary,” 179. 209

which haven’t before been established. In particular I have emphasized literary representations of anthropomorphic temporal synchronisation, a neurophysiologically plausible phenomenon which hasn’t been confirmed by cognitive science, yet populates narratives from Australia to Argentina: a continuity which suggests its biological basis. As a further project arising from my thesis, a collaborative study with cognitive neuroscientists may provide a deeper understanding of how ATS operates in real minds, bodies and brains. This further research may reveal how, in this instance, literature has been able to lead the way in cognitive explorations of the mind. The relationships between humans and objects take time to develop and involve complex emotional and physical dynamics hard to reproduce in a clinical setting. Here literature may be able to fill a gap in our understanding of the factors which play into the experience of time.

Such a project ought to be informed by the representations of ATS in literature across cultures. In this thesis I have grounded my biologically informed analysis in a cognitive historical investigation, which shows how cultures’ time and language might change the manifestation and representation of temporal synchronisation. In particular, my thesis has explored how the phenomenon has instantiated differently in novels from Western (America and Australia) and Latin American (Chile and Argentina) linguo-cultural regions. Following cognitive historicists like Mary Thomas Crane, my methodology acknowledges that ‘the power of culture to shape individual selves must be filtered through the material, biological constructs of the brain’.605 My research has tried to acknowledge this duality. In doing so, my work sits alongside, rather than displacing, the relativizing imperatives of poststructuralist and historicist approaches.

Although in one sense there is an explanatory aspect to my analysis, in that it accounts for literary phenomena in terms of a cognitive phenomenon, in an important sense my methodology is generative rather than reductive. Reading these novels through the lens of temporal synchronisation creates new ways of understanding them, offering new insights into the nuances of identity shifts, the relationships between people or between people and places, and the comments they make on the philosophy of time and embodied minds. I began with a classic postmodernist author, Don DeLillo, and examined his novella The Body Artist, showing how the protagonist Lauren’s personal identity development is mediated by her brief

605 Crane, “Cognitive Historicism,” 23. 210

relationship with the ghostlike Mr Tuttle who appears in her home. Lauren begins to embody Mr Tuttle, experiencing his nonlinear, liminal time. Although the feeling is radically disorienting – making her feel that she is close to losing her sense of self – it is ultimately productive as it throws her into a re-evaluative space where she is able to process the grief of her husband’s death and, in re-finding her place in the chronology of her life, reconstruct her identity. This process of identity construction is mirrored in The Life of Houses, as Kit’s – like Lauren’s – identity shift comes only after embodying the subjective temporality of an other. The two characters are able, through this experience, to get outside of their own perspective and re-evaluate their identities. Kit, however, is not temporally synchronising with another person, but with the old Sea House of her grandparents. In this way, the narrative of her identity shift strikes a chord with Alba’s story from La casa de los espíritus, whose development is deeply connected to the temporality of her grandparent’s house, The Big House on the Corner.

The two girls, Kit and Alba, who in the passage of these novels move through pivotal points in their childhood/adolescence, find themselves inhabiting not only spatial but temporal spaces created by the family houses in which they stay. The old house of Kit’s grandparents induces a slowing of her subjective time, to the point where it seems to have stopped – like the ghost which haunts its halls, it seems to be frozen in a moment in the past. Embodying this time means that Kit is positioned at a temporal remove from her own self, allowing a re- evaluation of her identity from an ‘outside’ perspective. In La casa de los espíritus, Alba’s Big House on the Corner has a temporality which is shaped by its cultural surroundings – its winding spiral staircases entwine with the circular polychronicity of its Latin American society. Alba grows up enclosed in this fantastical dwelling, and the impact that it has on her sense of time strongly mediates her changing connection to herself and her society. Her psychological and physical relationship with her domestic sphere is mirrored by Ramiro in Los cuerpos del verano. In this Argentinian text, Latin American magic realism is displaced by the ‘magic’ of science fiction technologies; yet, the novel’s subtext parallels that of the previous three, as it shows how time is shaped by the relationship between the characters’ minds, bodies and physical surroundings, and how crucial this is to their self-identities. The relationship that Ramiro develops with the technology in his environment creates a dualism in his time perception, facilitated by both his embodied identification of technology and close attention to his own biological body. He switches between accelerated, non-linear ‘digital time’, and the slowed analogue of time created by a focus on his bodily senses. The changes 211

in his perception of time develop his sense of identity: his self-concept as a biological subject that is physically embedded in his world, regardless of that world’s vision of a post-human, post-embodiment future. Despite their radically different genres, plots, styles and contexts, these novels all weave a similar narrative about bodies, minds, identity and time. It is a narrative which, I argue, must be drawn out and examined in order to fully understand both these novels and their insights into this important aspect of consciousness: subjective time.

So the lens of temporal synchronisation offers a new reading of these texts in showing that the plot and character trajectories are propelled, at least in part, by the changing experience of time wrought by people and objects surrounding the protagonists. But there is another aspect of my readings of these texts. Part of what a cognitive analysis of temporal synchronisation in literature reveals is that a range of disparate narrative phenomena – style, character, plot and themes – sometimes have overlapping motivations, linked together by the subjective time of the fictional minds. In this way, fictional representations of subjective time act as an analogy for real-life subjective time. That is, just as time links different events and experiences into a coherent whole in real life,606 in literature subjective time can weave together different levels of narrative features. In the novels that I have studied, this set of relations becomes clearer through a cognitively informed analysis of time, as elements from the punctuation to the thematic trajectory are revealed to be connected through their expression of the characters’ and narrative’s temporality.

The continuity running through each novel involves a focus on human experience of consciousness, time, bodies and the environment – be it other people, houses, or technology. This focus foregrounds an understanding of the mind as not simply brain-based but rather distributed across brain, body and physical world. This understanding, though it has long intellectual roots, specifically springs from the new wave of models of mind – sometimes termed 4E (embodied, embedded, enacted and extended) cognition.607 As a corollary of motor empathy, temporal synchronisation supports, at the very least, a weak version of the

606 Matthews and Meck, “Temporal Cognition: Connecting Subjective Time to Perception, Attention, and Memory,” 865. 607 Newen, Bruin, and Gallagher, The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition. 212

theory of the embodied mind, which states that cognition is at least partially dependent on (extracranial) bodily processes.608 To quote Esther Thelen,

Cognition depends on the kinds of experiences that come from having a body with a particular perceptual and motor capacities that are inseparably linked and that together form the matric within memory, emotion, language, and all other aspects of life are meshed.609

I have explored this in my thesis – however, as a future project, there is potential interest in examining temporal synchronisation’s intersection with the related, but more controversial, extended mind hypothesis.610 The extended mind, according to Chalmers and Clark, sees cognition as constituted by the objects which it recruits – for example, a calculator or notepad. Though in a different way to a notebook or tool, the texts I analyse show how objects can become an extended part of the machinery of mental processes. The confluence of subject and object in temporal synchronisation suggests that cognitive processes can be constituted by things not just outside the brain but outside of the body, such as the people and objects which shape Lauren’s, Kit’s, Alba’s, and Ramiro’s subjective time. As the extended mind hypothesis claims, in these narratives it seems that ‘the actual local operations that realize certain forms of human cognizing include inextricable tangles of feedback, feed- forward and feed-around loops: loops that promiscuously criss-cross the boundaries of brain, body and world’.611 In The Body Artist, Lauren’s subjective experience of time – a cognitive process – is formed through her unconscious mimicry of Mr Tuttle. Through this other- embodiment, Lauren comes to experience Mr Tuttle’s sense of a radically non-chronological, liminal sense of time. In The Life of Houses, Kit’s subjectivity is shaped by her physical and psychological relationship with her grandparent’s sombre Sea House, as her sense of time comes to align with house’s temporal suspension, until she is inhabiting both the house and its ‘stopped’ moment in time. Her anthropomorphic relationship with the house partly facilitates the complex array of cognitive and bodily processes (e.g. embodied simulation,

608 Newen, Bruin, and Gallagher, 3. 609 Thelen, “Grounded in the World,” 4. 610 Chalmers and Clark, “The Extended Mind.” 611 Andy Clark, “Curing Cognitive Hiccups: A Defense of the Extended Mind,” The Journal of Philosophy 104, no. 4 (2007): 163–92. 213

emotional contagion and temporal synchronisation) experienced during her stay, positing the object’s role as potentially constitutive in these mental processes. Similarly, in La casa de los espíritus, Alba grows up both in and through her house. Her cognitive processes – such as the experience of time – are in part extended out to the physical structure around her, as The Big House on the Corner shapes the circular sense of time which she experiences. Finally, this role of external objects in shaping characters’ subjective time is once again evident in Los cuerpos del verano, as Ramiro experiences the acceleration and non-linearity of the digital technology in his surroundings.

In a related sense, the cognitive process of temporal synchrony in each of these representations lends itself to an enactive theory of mind, where cognition emerges from the interaction between acting organism and the environment in which it moves.612 In each narrative, the characters’ consciousness experience is not simply internal but produced through their bodies physically interacting with their world. In the words of Sukhvinder Obhi and Kielan Yarrow, ‘We do not usually experience the world as passive recipients of sensory information. Instead, we explore our environment through action’.613 Enactivism claims that cognition is constituted by a dynamic, mutual interaction between an organism’s sensorimotor capacities and its environment.614 Accordingly, as Lauren embodies the movements and speech of Tuttle, Kit walks through the dark, dusty halls of the Sea House, Alba discovers new rooms in the circular labyrinth of The Big House on the Corner, or Ramiro types on his computer – all of these physical interactions with the world create their sense of time, and show how a particular cognitive process is, in this sense, enactive rather than insular or wholly internal. Again, this may be an interesting direction for future research – to see how temporal synchronisation, in particularly ATS, and literature intersect with theories of the mind as extended and enacted. Without going so far as to claim that ATS is definitive evidence of 4E cognition in action, the concept of cognition which frames these theories of mind is also an interesting perspective from which to view both ATS in general and within the novels of my thesis in particular, intersecting as it does with their thematic concerns. It’s possible that novels such as the ones in my thesis offer a space in which to

612 Evan Thompson, “The Enactive Approach,” in Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of the Mind (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 13. 613 Kielan Yarrow and Sukhvinder Obhi, “Temporal Perception in the Context of Action,” in Subjective Time: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Temporality, ed. Valtteri Arstila and Dan Lloyd (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014), 455. 614 Thompson and Varela, “Radical Embodiment: Neural Dynamics and Consciousness.” 214

analyse the tensions and resonances between ATS and the paradigmatic examples of the 4E cognition. This is may be a secondary contribution of my work, in that it shows how new understandings of the mind as embodied, and possibly extended and enactive, operate throughout works of fiction. However, this is more suggestive than it is conclusive, as it merely gestures towards literature’s possible role in the question of how motor resonance, the mirror neuron system, and time relate to distributed cognition. Whether or not my research could be extended to these debates of 4E cognition, in the case of all of my textual analysis, the characters’ sense of time is altered by changes in their physical body and elements in their environment. This shows how, as Bakhtin noted, we can’t just address their characters and fictional minds as isolated, but need to consider them in conjunction with the other aspects of their fictional world –people, places and objects – and indeed other aspects of the text, such as style and structure. As such, these characters – and perhaps real-life minds – should be considered as a constellation or network of interactions.

Indeed, if this constellation is to be considered in its entirety, it ought to include the readers’ minds as well. As Makela points out, ‘in one sense, the minds of narrating or experiencing fictional agents always merge the representation with the represented: the mind is simultaneously both the performer and the arena of performance’.615 Although this thesis does not extend its analysis outside of the text, reader-oriented perspectives could also productively harness the insights of temporal synchronisation, investigating whether the empathetic resonance systems of readers might align their subjective time with that of the characters. Other cognitive critics draw upon aspects of cognitive science that have informed my approach – an understanding of the mirror neuron system, for example – from the perspective of reader response theory. For example Eric Kandel, Gabrielle Starr, and David Miall,616 or Catherine Connor-Swietlicki, who is interested in how ‘mirror neurons… help readers self-evaluate their capacities to imitate, to mirror, and thus to empathize, to learn, and conceptualize their own encounters with the arts’.617 Notably, Monika Fludernik looks at the representation of consciousness in literature, examining ‘the quasi-mimetic evocation of real-

615 Makela, “Cycles of Narrative Necessity: Suspect Tellers and the Textuality of Fictional Minds,” 148. 616 Miall, “Neuroaesthetics of Literary Reading”; Eric Kandel, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, From Vienna 1900 to the Present (New York: Random House, 2012); G. Gabrielle Starr, Feeling Beauty (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013). 617 Connor-Swietlicki, “Why Autopoeises and Memory Matter to Cervantes, Don Quixote, and the Humanities,” 40. 215

life experience’,618 with a particular focus on aspects of cognitive life that relate to my own framework, such as the embodiment of cognitive faculties and time perception. In this vein, there is a potential intersection between my framework and such cognitively informed reader response theory. This is an important research task to undertake. Although unfortunately within the scope of this project this reader-oriented perspective was not possible – due to time and word count limitations – it is a direction in which I hope to expand my research. This could combine empirical studies – fMRI imaging of individuals as they read, or neuropsychological studies where individuals estimate the duration of reading a particular passage, whether it be one involving people or anthropomorphised objects, to see whether an influence on their subjective time could be detected.

Despite following a number of other cognitive literary critics and cognitive historicists in this venture, the originality of my findings springs from several points: the novel interpretations that I offer for each of the texts; the fact that no one has looked at temporal synchronisation in literature before; the fact that no one in either literary criticism or cognitive science has investigated anthropomorphic temporal synchronisation; and – to the best of my knowledge – no one has used literature to suggest a new, specific cognitive process, such as the ATS I outline in my three chapters. These contributions are useful, I hope, for literary studies and cognitive science, in the new readings and insights generated, the broad methodological approach demonstrated, and in showing how literature can offer insights about the workings of the mind. In particular, these conclusions would be relevant to anyone interested in understanding the nuances of internal time or the specific bases of intersubjective experiences, either in literary criticism or cognitive science. My work in this area has aimed to help fill the gap, in both disciplines, in our understanding of the precise ways in which a connection to others can shape our sense of time, providing insight into this crucial aspect of fictional and actual minds. Throughout my thesis I have tried to show, above all, for both literature and real life, the importance our ability to ‘catch’ the time of other entities – be they human or object – and how this can illuminate the intersection of embodied minds, external worlds, and the time that weaves them together in the stories of our literature and our lives.

618 Monika Fludernik, Towards a “Natural” Narratology (London: Routledge, 1996), 12. 216

Works Cited