A Thesis Entitled Space, Time and the Self in 20Th Century Literature By

Home , In Search of Lost Time

A Thesis

entitled

Space, Time and the Self in 20th Century Literature

Jordan Ellington Cook

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the

Master of Arts Degree in Philosophy

______Dr. Ammon Allred, Committee Chair

______Dr. Jeanine Diller, Committee Member

______Dr. Benjamin Grazzini, Committee Member

______Dr. Amanda Bryant-Friedrich, Dean College of Graduate Studies

The University of Toledo

May 2018

This document is copyrighted material. Under copyright law, no parts of this document may be reproduced without the expressed permission of the author. An Abstract of

Space, Time, and the Self in 20th Century Literature

Jordan Ellington Cook

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of the Arts Degree in Philosophy

The University of Toledo

May 2018

The following is an investigation into representations of temporal and spatial relations in literature and how they change the conception of the self. I compare literary discourses of time and space with those found in philosophical metaphysics and epistemology, most prominently Kant and Poincaré. The thesis provides evidence for a relationship between scientific and philosophical epistemology and the way time, space, and self are expressed in fiction. I detail this relationship using the work of Borges,

Proust, and host of other authors to emphasize that the use of epistemology in literature is not limited an isolate case concerning a few authors, but a general tendency within fiction.

iii

I memory of Pippen.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my Grandmother, Mother, Father, Uncle Lloyd, Aunt Lydia,

Uncle Tony, Aunt Donna and the rest of family. I would also like to thank Dr. Allred and

Dr. Muntersbjorn for their patience in helping me formulate this thesis. I must also extend my gratitude to Dr. Diller who helped me with this thesis on such short notice. Lastly, I would like to thank Dr. Graziani for his helpful suggestions as a worked on my thesis.

Table of Contents

Abstract ...... iii

Acknowledgements ...... v

Table of Contents ...... vi

1 Chapter 1: Introduction ...... 1

1.1 What is Literature ...... 7

1.2 Butor and Kundera ...... 10

1.3 Philosophical Critique in Literature ...... 15

2 Chapter 2: Space ...... 20

3 Chapter 3: Time ...... 28

3.1 Proust ...... 30

3.2 Borges ...... 37

4 Chapter 4: The Self ...... 41

4.1 Borges, Malaparte, Qian ...... 42

References ...... 51

Chapter 1

Introduction

Thomas Mann, in his novel The Magic Mountain, describes the subjective sense of time though his character Hans Castorp. The beauty of this “Excursus on the Sense of

Time” as he calls it, is the seamlessness with which it fits in the novel. The Magic

Mountain takes place in a sanatorium, all the characters there are in a sense condemned to death. While in the 20th century modernists the themes of time, space and the self become more pronounced, we will soon see that without at least some vague understanding of time and space a novel cannot successfully be composed. Temporality and spatiality are grounded in human thinking and it is not possible to conceive of an art which does not take that into account, even if it is only in a rudimentary fashion. To return to Mann, his “Excursus” details some of the themes we will be discussing.

The first idea which is of importance to us for now is the relationship between spatial and temporal relations and how it is related to our emotions. Ennui or boredom, according to Mann, can both compress and expand time. Or rather, emotions are important when discussing our subjective experience of time. Mann describes a situation

in which our habits influence how we experience time. Without continual reinvigoration, our life may pass us by in what feels like an instant:

…A great many false ideas have been spread about the nature of boredom. It is generally believed that by filling time with things new and interesting, we can make it “pass,” by which we mean “shorten” it; monotony and emptiness, however, are said to weigh down and hinder its passage. This is not true under all conditions. Emptiness and monotony may stretch a moment or even an hour and make it “boring,” but they can likewise abbreviate and dissolve large, indeed the largest units of time, until they seem nothing at all...What people call boredom is actually an abnormal compression of time caused by monotony—uninterrupted uniformity can shrink large spaces of time until the heart falters, terrified to death. When one day is like every other, then all days are like one, and perfect homogeneity would make the longest life seem very short, as if it had flown by in a twinkling. Habit arises when our sense of time falls asleep, or at least, grows dull; and if the years of youth are experienced slowly, while the later years of life hurtle past at an ever-increasing speed, it must be habit that causes it. We know full well that the insertion of new habits or the changing of old ones is the only way to preserve life, to renew our sense of time, to rejuvenate, intensify, and retard our experience of time—and thereby renew our sense of life itself.1 This at first may appear to have primarily a literary function. Of course, Mann is describing the relativity of time in the colloquial sense. It is still a reflection of a certain mode of thinking which persisted and continues to persist due to the achievements of philosophy and science during that time and the proceeding period. There are certain developments within narrative fiction which make this possible. The first of which is the abandonment of pure story telling. The novel becomes a space where the novelist may engage in theoretical speculation as well as storytelling. There will be more on this point in the section on Don Quixote, which is widely considered to be the first western novel.

The second development which makes the novel (and by extension the modern short story) important is that from the beginning it seeks to assimilate the knowledge of other

1 Mann, Thomas, and John E. Woods. The Magic Mountain. New York: Everyman's Library, 2005, 122-123 2

disciplines to construct a coherent fictional world. As we can see from Mann, temporal and spatial conditions have an impact on our conception of self. Regardless of the many forms it takes, a central preoccupation of modernist literature is space and time. I will argue that this preoccupation expresses itself by creating a continuity between the way in which the artist expresses time and space and the way which epistemologists conceptualize time and space. This continuity created a situation in which literary figures contributed something valuable to our conception of time and space because they were in direct engagement with the broader intellectual tradition.

If time and space are fundamental to the way the self interprets the world; it should come as no surprise that they are important to the narrative and pictorial arts. Art in many ways is about the peculiar perception of those that create it. When discussing art, we are talking about perception and perception begins in space and time. Artists, whether explicitly or implicitly, have made time and space their subject in many interesting ways.

Naum Gabo, the Russian sculptor, for instance, thought that his work had been revitalized by Einstein’s theory of relativity. Linda Dalrymple Henderson records Naum’s impressions: “Space and time are re-born to us today… The realization of our perceptions of the world in the forms of space and time is the aim of our pictorial and plastic art.”2

Henderson goes on to write:

As the first sculpture in the history of art to incorporate motorized motion, Gabo’s Kinetic Construction is a milestone in the development of the tradition of kinetic art that would reach its height in the 1950s and 1960s. In a 1957 interview, Gabo

2 Galison, P. L. (2008). Einstein and 20th-Century Art: A Romance of Many Dimensions. In Einstein for the Twenty-first century: His legacy in science, art, and Modern Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 111. 3

affirmed his continued commitment to the temporal fourth dimension: “Constructive sculpture…is four-dimensional in so far as we are striving to bring the element of time into it.3 Science and technology are important drivers of the arts. This is a truism, but one that sometimes we forget. The broader epistemological environment is the driving force of artistic development. We can sometimes understand certain developments in the style of an artist by finding architypes in the past, however, this is not always satisfactory.

Sometimes the changes in the broader environment are so great that the artist does indeed radically transform that artistic tradition in they are situated. As in the case of Naum, a writer or artist may have an influence outside of the traditional literary canon.

It may be said that what we call literary modernism was in part influenced by the changes in the conception of time and space which occurred during the 19th and 20th centuries. The styles of the major modernist were in part configured in response the spatial and temporal theories which were developed during their lifetimes. While this may appear at first to be controversial, there is a theorist came close grasping this insight and understood its implications. Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin in his essay “Forms of

Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” describes the process. Bakhtin goes on to explain what the “chronotope” is:

We will give the name chronotope (literally, "time space") to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature. This term [space-time] is employed in mathematics, and was introduced as part of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. The special meaning it has in relativity theory is not important for our purposes; we are borrowing it for literary criticism almost as a metaphor (almost, but not entirely). What counts for us is the fact that it expresses the inseparability of space and time (time as the fourth

3 Ibid., 111 4

dimension of space). We understand the chronotope as a formally constitutive category of literature; we will not deal with the chronotope in other areas of culture.4 While there has been much use and abuse of scientific terms in literary theory and

Bakhtin sometimes lacks analytic precision, the space-time or chronotope may help us to understand what the modernist were hoping to achieve in their works. Bakhtin, after all, does not concern himself with the 20th century. He is more interested in the configuration of space and time from the ancient Greeks to Rabelais. That is not what I hope to do. I am more interested in established a pattern of influence which shows that scientific and philosophical culture have a profound impact on the way literary artist express themselves and that they contribute a form of knowledge as a result of this encounter with other modes of inquiry. However, this does not mean we should dismiss Bakhtin.

Even though the definition of the chronotope is still hotly debated and no one can settle upon a precise definition of without argument, the term can still be used quite literally to mean the configuration of time and space within fiction. Literature borrows from the spatial and temporal theories of its time and aestheticizes them. Bakhtin in remarking on ancient Greek romances says that:

The world of these romances is large and diverse. But this size and diversity is utterly abstract. For a shipwreck one must have a sea, but which particular sea (in the geographical and historical sense) makes no difference at all… The adventuristic events of the Greek romance have no essential ties with any particular details of individual countries that might figure in the novel, with their social or political structure, with their culture or history. None of these distinctive details contribute in any way to the event as a determining factor; the event is determined by chance alone, by random contingency in a given spatial locus (a given country, city and so forth). The nature of a given place does not figure as a

4 Bakhtin, M. M. The dialogic imagination: Four essays. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981, 84. 5

component in the event; the place figures in solely as a naked, abstract expanse of space. All adventures in the Greek romance are thus governed by an interchangeability of space; what happens in Babylon could just as well happen in Egypt or Byzantium and vice versa. Separate adventures, complete in themselves, are also interchangeable in time, for adventure-time leaves no defining traces and is therefore in essence reversible.5 The Greek romance does not concern itself space and time in the manner that

Rabelais or the modernist does. It does not want to be “tied down in time and space”.6

The space time configuration as an effect, as we can see, on the way characters and societies are depicted within fiction. In an ancient society with less developed scientific notions of time you see less precision in the way fiction worlds are developed. The most sophisticated writing from Ancient Greece, Plato’s dialogues, while being literary masterpieces, do not belong to literature proper and indeed express an opposition to literary art. Bakhtin says that world of the Greek romance is an “alien” one.7 Meaning that it is not meant to truly express the real world which the author inhabits. Its intentions are not mimetic. The Greek romance, expresses causality, or in this case “chance” in a manner which we would not be able to recognize in our world. Bakhtin says that we do not get a subjective notion of time until around the beginnings of chivalric romances:

In general the chivalric romance exhibits a subjective playing with time, an emotional and lyrical stretching and compressing of it… Such a subjective playing with time is utterly foreign to antiquity. In fact, time-at least within the boundaries of individual adventures-was characterized in the Greek romance by a dry and considered precision. Antiquity treated time with great respect (it was

5 Ibid., 100

6 Ibid., 100

7 Ibid., 101 6

sanctioned by myths) and did not permit itself the liberty of any subjective playing around with time.8 The implication from Bakhtin is that the eventual eroding of religious dogma from the scientific sphere was also changing literature. This point is something of truism, however, embedded in it is the idea that by the time of Cervantes literature has grown to the point where it is no longer concerned merely with literature particular, but with ideas in general. This does not mean the aesthetic element does not remain important. Rather, it is to say that literature becomes a vehicle for ideas in a more explicit manner.

1.1 What Is Literature?

Borges ‘story “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote” is often read as allegory on the nature of artistic creation and originality. It undoubtable is that, but not in clear manner.9 The story also appears to be concerned with time and how it acts upon an artwork. Borges sets up a fictional debate between himself two imaginary academics.

What concerns them is Menard’s reproduction of the ninth and thirty-eighth chapters of the Don Quixote, which they consider to be a superb aesthetic achievement. The narrator tells us how Menard intends to reproduce the Don Quixote:

The initial method he conceived was relatively simple: to know Spanish well, to re-embrace the Catholic faith, against Moors and Turks, to forget European

8 Ibid., 155

9 This is Borgesian trope which is meant to blur the distinction between the fictional and the nonfictional. By composing it in the form of an academic paper, a person that is uninitiated might mistake it for a genuine academic article. This is mean to call attention to the authority we give certain works as supposed to other. 7

history between 1602-1918, and to be Miguel de Cervantes. Pierre Menard studies this procedure…but rejected it as too easy.10 He abandons this path merely because he does not want to be Cervantes simply.

Menard realizes paradoxically that this method is attainable in therefore impossible.11

Menard admits to himself that the obstacles to composing the Don Quixote in the 20th century are nearly insurmountable. The first is the obstacle of memory Menard writes

“…My general memory of Don Quixote, simplified by forgetfulness and indifference, is much the same as the imprecise anterior image of a book not yet written” The second is simply that the composition of a book, even if the words are the same, changes within time. The book is subject to the reason of its readers which cannot be the same throughout the centuries.12 Even if one were to plagiarize the work of master, it would not be the same. It is its own aesthetic achievement and should be treated as such.

Literature is composed of other literature; it cannot achieve originality or invention without building upon things past. This story might seem extremely bizarre to someone who has never encountered Borges, but he is building upon some essential Emersonian insights; especially upon those that appear in “Quotation and Originality.”

Emerson is usually seen as an advocate for originality and the shedding of tradition. While there is an argument to be made by that view, it has to be nuanced by the fact that Emerson saw himself as being in continuity with a greater human tradition.

Emerson writes:

10 Borges, Jorge Luis. Ficciones. New York: Grove Press, 1962, 49.

11 This is paradox within the text; I am not trying to confuse the reader.

12 Themes similar to this in Abbas Kiarostami’s film Certified Copy 8

Our debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive, our protest to private addition so rare and insignificant---and this commonly on the ground of other reading or hearing, ---that, in a large sense, one would say there is no pure originality. All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment…By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight we all quote.13 In this essay, we find something suspiciously akin to Harold Bloom’s concept of the “anxiety of influence.” It is not quite as nuanced, but the genesis of the idea is still there. If we may again take Menard into consideration, his mode of expression was not that peculiar. We all quote, but we most dare not quote an entire book. We should not be outraged by Menard, instead of concentrating on his prolonged quote we should ask the question: Who did Cervantes copy? Emerson continues on to say:

…the debt is immense to past thought. None escapes it. The originals are not original. There is imitation, model, and suggestion, to the very archangels, if we knew their history. The first book tyrannizes over the second. Read Tasso, and you think of Virgil; read Virgil, and you think of Homer; and Milton forces you to reflect on the narrow limits of human invention. The “Paradise Lost” had never existed but for these precursors; and if we find in India or Arabia a book out of our horizon of thought and tradition, we are soon taught by new researches in its native country to discover its foregoers, and its latent, but real connection with our own Bibles.14 What then does originality consist of? It certainly does not consist of simply finding a starting point from which all original ideas flow. An artwork, if we take Borges and Emerson seriously, is something which transcends time. Not in the sense that it is eternal, but rather it is something which builds upon the past and creates possibilities for future creation. Emerson says that “It is being, being one’s self, and reporting accurately

13 Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 8 (Letters and Social Aims). Boston & New York: Fireside Edition, 1909, 171.

14 Ibid. 172 9

what we see and are”.15 What could this possibly mean? If I may interpret, originality is not radical disassociation with the past. Indeed, what Borges and Emerson appear to both be offering is the idea that the past is embedded in the present.

1.2 Butor and Kundera

“The world, for the most part, appears to us only through the intermediary of what we are told about it.”16 This sentence begins Michel Butor’s “Research on the Technique of the Novel”. What is he calling our attention to? The short answer is that he wants us to understand the way in which narrativity is an integral part in forming an understanding of what is around us. However, this idea becomes tinged with gloom when Butor tells us that narrative also promotes the distortion of reality when he says, “Narrative gives us the world, but inexorably it gives us a false world”.17 Butor puts forward the idea that our conception of reality if narratological in form, but this form inevitably gives us an imperfect picture of reality. We are instead catching glimpses of the real which are shrouded in fiction and misapprehension. Butor’s main quest however is not to create an objective picture of reality, a feat which cannot be performed by novelist and should not be attempted. He is instead intrigued by how fiction, in this case the novel, helps us to interpret our “reality”. He calls the novel “…the phenomenological realm par

15 Ibid. 191

16 Michel Butor, Inventory: Essays (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970) 15

17 Ibid., 17 10

excellence…” because it allows human beings to “study reality as it appears to us”.18 It is in his words “a laboratory of narrative”.19 Fiction from Butor’s standpoint is research of a phenomenological sort into the varieties of human experience. The story need not be

“realist” in the formal sense. A writer that explores the fantastic participates in this

“laboratory of narrative” by exploring human reaction the unfamiliar.

Butor’s use of scientific metaphor is not an accident. What the implication appears to be is that literature can due for phenomenological experience what science does for objective world. Butor’s point is that this experience is entangled with narrative and that the novel performs this function better than a work of formal philosophy. There are problems with this account, the first being that the novel is an amorphous form. There are novels which take the form of the essay, the prose poem, the collage, the letter, the dialogue. What makes the novel (and the short story) a special form is that it is able to assimilate the various aspects of writing and make them cohesive. Some of Borges’ narratives are relatively indistinguishable from academic articles and passage of Proust may read like a formal essay. However, this does not weaken Butor’s point. It is likely that this lack of restriction is what makes the novel a superior form. It can assimilate the various forms of human knowledge, in a manner which a formal philosophical essay may have difficulty doing.

18 Ibid., 27

19 Ibid., 27 11

Milan Kundera approaches the problem in a similar manner to Butor. His Art of the Novel begins with a description of the father of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl and the European crisis of knowlege during the 1930’s. Kundera writes:

The rises of the sciences propelled man into the tunnels of specialized disciplines.

The more he advanced in knowledge, the less clearly could he see either the world

as whole or his own self, and he plunged further into what Husserl’s pupil

Heidegger called… ‘the forgetting of being.’20

Kundera makes the point that while philosophy and science may have “forgotten about being” the engagement with subjective human experience and with the phenomenological still survives in literature. A great point that point that is made by

Kundera that literature has often been limited to serving a kind of ethical function. The purpose of the novel is to “…discover what only the novel can discover. A novel that does not discover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality.”21 The primary function from the view of Kundera is epistemological. Also, according to Kundera, the epistemology is relativistic one.

Man desires a world where good and evil can be clearly distinguished, for he has an innate and irrepressible desire to judge before he understands. Religions and ideologies are founded on this desire. They can cope with the novel only by translating its language of relativity and ambiguity into their own apodictic and dogmatic discourse…This “either-or” encapsulates an inability to tolerate the essential relativity of

20 Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel (Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2003), 4.

21 Ibid., 6 12

thing human an inability to look squarely at the absence of the Supreme Judge. This inability makes the novel’s wisdom (the wisdom of uncertainty) hard to accept and understand. 22

We should now consider the following; What is it that literature does which philosophy is restricted from doing? Kundera when he says that philosophy and science have forgotten about being and that western literature is continually concerned about it, he may possibly mean that science and philosophy have extracted from there disciplines any notion of metaphysics. Metaphysical notions, particularly after logical positivism, have been dealt a significant blow. As Carnap is often quoted

Metaphysicians are musicians without musical ability. Instead they have a strong inclination to work within the medium of the theoretical, to connect concepts and thoughts. Now, instead of activating, on the one hand, this inclination in the domain of science, and satisfying, on the other hand, the need for expression in art, the metaphysician confuses the two and produces a structure which achieves nothing for knowledge and something inadequate for the expression of attitude.23 This may not be a misunderstanding of metaphysics on the part of Carnap, but is certainly a misunderstanding of art. Art often aspires to the domain of the theoretical and interested in connecting concepts and thoughts, with the aim of producing a kind of knowledge. Not universal knowledge which must be true of all possible worlds, but something which is simply true of human experience. Most major figures in 20th century literature did not simply conceive of their art merely as expression, but rather as valid

22 Ibid., 7

23 Ayer, A. J. "The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language." In Logical Positivism,New York: The Free Press, 1959, 60-81. 13

critique of the epistemological and metaphysical questions of their day. This is truly evident in Borges when he says the following:

“I tend to be always thinking of time, not of space. When I hear the words ‘time’ and ‘space’ used together, I feel as Nietzsche felt when he heard people talking about Goethe and Schiller—a kind of blasphemy. I think that the central riddle, the central problem of metaphysics—let us call it thinking—is time, not space. Space is one of the many things to be found inside of time—as you find, for example, color or shapes or sizes or feelings”24 Time, not space, is the most important question of metaphysics for Borges. Why is this the case? Part of the thesis will be spend answering this question, but what is important here is the emphasis which he places on metaphysics. Borges, if we take him seriously, appears to be linking metaphysics with thinking. He believes it to be an essential aspect of how we think and eradicating it entirely would impoverish art. In his typical paradoxical fashion Borges also adds, “I believe Henri Bergson said that time is the capital problem of metaphysics. If that problem were resolved, everything would be resolved. Happily, I do not believe there is any danger of it being resolved.”25 He is aware of the impossibility of solving the question but is aware of the aesthetic possibilities of a non-resolution.

Carnap, in his effort to do away with metaphysics, trivializes the metaphysical element within art. Of course, we are not being entirely fair to Carnap, he was not an aesthetician, but setting up a strict dichotomy between the metaphysical and artistic does

24 Borges, Jorge Luis, and Richard Burgin. Jorge Luis Borges: Conversations. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998, 123.

25 Johnson, David E. Kant's Dog: On Borges, Philosophy, and the Time of Translation (SUNY Series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture). State University of New York Press, 2012, 27 14

seem sloppy. According to Borges and Kundera artists are metaphysicians who do not call themselves philosophers.

1.3 Philosophical Critique in Literature

Plato and Cervantes appear at first to have no relationship to one another. Plato is well known for his critiques of mimetic arts and Cervantes would appear to fall under that critique. However, the literature of the early modern period is substantively different from that of ancient Greece. It has shed itself of religious convention and is beginning to exhibit some autonomy. While it is still fundamentally concerned about the aesthetic, but now it able to launch a critique of ideas and engage with philosophy at a theoretical level.

In his Republic, Plato, in the voice of Socrates states that “...we must supervise the makers of tales” (377b)26. The writers of imaginative literature are to be treated with suspicion. Plato is concerned with the education of the young. His argument essentially is that poetry (literature) harms the mental faculties of young people. The poets do not represent correctly the images that they conjure in their poetry. In Book III of the

Republic, Socrates continues his polemic against poetry by stating that the reading of poetry can give rise to the imitation of the characters within the poem (395d)27. Any work of literature that attempts mimesis will enhance the effect on the reader and he will give rise to people who attempt to act out the false fables that they are exposed to in fictional

26 Plato, and Allan Bloom. The Republic of Plato. (New York: Basic Books, 1991) 55.

27 Ibid. 74 15

writing or painting. The creation of poetry according Plato is an act of imitation and therefore removed from reality.

Cervantes' Don Quixote is in many ways a parody of the Platonic view of literature. Don Quixote, is a man of an advanced age, who has gone mad from reading too many chivalric romances. Cervantes writes that he spends most of the year, in leisure, reading devotional poetry and tales of chivalry28. In order to fulfill his fantasies, Don

Quixote proceeds on his quest to become a knight errant. In other words, he is a victim of the mimetic quality contained in literature the Plato warned against.

When his neighbors begin to realize that he has lost his reason, his niece conspires to burn the contents of his library. The niece says “there's no reason to pardon any of them [the books], because they have all been harmful...”29. Her idea is objected to by a priest and a barber who are ciphering through the books with her. The Priest and the

Barber have both been exposed to chivalric romances and are familiar with the works in the library. None of the gentlemen went mad and they recognized the works as great works of art. One of the books found in the library of Don Quixote, is a work by

Cervantes himself (this is very similar to technique Borges' often uses to place himself in the story, no doubt adopted from Cervantes). The Priest says not to burn Cervantes' work, but in the end he decides that the rest, except for a few exceptions, should be burned.

What might Cervantes be trying to tell us by placing himself in the story? Cervantes'

28 De Cervantes, Miguel, and Edith Grossman. Don Quixote. (Reprint ed. New York: Harper Perennial, 2005). 20.

29 Ibid. 46 16

works are among the ones that are saved. He might be trying to say, that some literature can participate in a higher discourse. Not all of it appeals to lower instincts. The Quixote, is not a piece of mimetic art. There is an unreal quality to Don Quixote as a character that does not appear to be an imitation of the world. The madness which Don Quixote exhibits is so unreal it could only happen in fiction.. This position becomes clearer when we look at a scene from later in the book.

One aspect of Don Quixote which is often overlooked is whether or not Don

Quixote is actually mad. In a conversation with Sancho Panza in Chapter XXV of Part I, after a series of adventures, which call into question the reason of the protagonist, we gain some insight into Don Quixote. Don Quixote tells Sancho Panza: “have I not told you already...that I wish to imitate Amadis [Amadis of Gaul], playing the part of one who is desperate, a fool, a madman, thereby imitating as well the valiant Don Roland when he discovered in a fountain the signs that Angelica the Fair had committed base acts with with Medoro, and his grief drove him mad …”30. Sancho responds by saying “It seems to me… that the knights who did these things were provoked and had a reason to do senseless things and penances; but what reason does your grace have for going crazy”31.

To which Don Quixote responds, “Therein lies the virtue… and the excellence of my enterprise, for a knight errant deserves neither glory nor thanks if he goes mad for a

30 Ibid. 193

31 Ibid. 193 17

reason. The great achievement is to lose one's reason for no reason, and to let my lady know that if I can do this without cause, what should I not do if there were a cause”32.

It is clear, that from this exchange, Don Quixote is less of madman and more a play actor. An essential feature of madness is that the afflicted has no insight into their condition. He is completely conscious of the effect that he is having on the people he is interacting with. While Cervantes is mocking chivalric romances, he is certainly also mocking the Platonic idea the literature will corrupt you. As exemplified by the Priest and the Barber in the story there are some among the common people who are not affected by literature in the same way as Don Quixote and Don Quixote himself, while his behavior is certainly peculiar, does not seem to have entirely lost his reason.

There is problem when people say that scientific progress made modern fiction more “real” or “true”. It is more proper to say that the epistemological environment helped Cervantes, produce a fiction which contorts reality in a different way. The modernist in the 20th century are in many ways heirs to Cervantes in the ways they distort time and reality. This may seem mad, but this point has been echoed by scholars like

Chad Gasta.

Time in Don Quixote is fleeting and illusory. Both the narrative sequence of events and the psychological time frame of the protagonists are often inordinate and anachronic throughout the work. The novel’s flow of time, for example, is constantly interrupted through a variety of techniques including deliberate pauses, asides, interpolated stories, the intrusion of multiple narrative voices, or even intentionally, well-placed ambiguity about times and dates. Hence, Don Quixote

32 Ibid. 194

is built around a confusing narrative arrangement that places emphasis on characterization and plot over chronology.33

While in Cervantes, there is not elevation of time to the level of a protagonist as there is in Proust. We do see that time is already at this point being self-consciously reflected upon in literature. In other words, we are seeing how time can be subjectively experienced. After Cervantes there are more explicit references to time and how it functions in literature.

33 Gasta, Chad M. "Cervantes’s Theory of Relativity in Don Quixote." Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 31, no. 1 (n.d.), 51-82. 19

Chapter 2

Space

Haig Khatchadourian, in a discussion of film, says that “space and time are the primary organizing or structuring principles of a film; indeed, in different ways space and/or time are organizing principles of all art…they provide the basic framework of the world and of subjective reality.”34 The conditions in which space and time operate in the arts may differ depending upon the art, whether it be visual, literary, or performative, but it does seem that as Khatchadourian put it, they order our perception of subjective reality.

Michel Foucault, in an unpublished essay called “Of Other Spaces”, discusses the spatial relationships which he believed were becoming more important when discussing the contemporary world:

We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein. One could perhaps say that certain ideological conflicts animating present-day polemics oppose the pious descendants of time and the determined inhabitants of space…Yet it is necessary to notice that the

34 Khatchadourian, Haig. "Space and Time in Film." British Journal of Aesthetics 27, no. 2 (n.d.), 169. 20

space which today appears to form the horizon of our concerns, our theory, our systems, is not an innovation; space itself has a history in Western experience…35

Foucault here is describing what he believes to be the condition of postmodernism, or the contemporary society in terms of time and space, or rather, the privileging of space over time. The implication here is that the early 20th century was more concerned with time as a fundamental force. Figures such as Proust and Joyce are known for their themes of time within their fiction. This temporal disposition seems to give way to a more spatial orientation the further we leave Proust and enter our own time.

Foucault, perhaps due to the fact he never finished this essay, may have stated the case too generally. Modernist literature is full of spatial representation, it simply does not, in most cases, privilege time or space, but is rather more concerned with the relationship between the two. However, later in the essay, Foucault rightly points out that Galileo was an important figure for the opening of space:

This space of emplacement was opened up by Galileo. For the real scandal of Galileo’s work lay not so much in his discovery, or rediscovery, that the earth revolved around the sun, but in his constitution of an infinite, and infinitely open space. In such a space the place of the Middle Ages turned out to be dissolved, as it were; a thing’s place was no longer anything but a point in its movement, just as the stability of a thing was only its movement indefinitely slowed down. In other words, starting with Galileo and the seventeenth century, extension was substituted for localization.

This point made by Foucault on the nature of Galileo work is crucial. It created the conditions for what is considered the first modern novel, the Don Quixote. Scholars have made the connection between the humanistic science of Galileo and the

35 Foucault, Michel. "Of Other Spaces." Diacritics 16, no. 1 (n.d.), 22-27. 21

development of the modern novel. This has perhaps best been pointed out by Roberto

González Echevarría in the following passage:

Cervantes was a profoundly Christian writer. But, at the same time, it draws attention to his debt to renaissance ideas, particularly Italian humanism and the scientific advances of the likes of Copernicus and Galileo. Cervantes and the humanists had developed a system of parallel truths whose uneasy if not impossible convergence was prudently left untested. Church dogma and human knowledge as that achieved by the new thinkers coexisted in his writings. Cervantes’ ironic stance in Don Quixote, a book in which God is never involved (there were no pious books in the knight’s library), is not so much a personal defense (he had no trouble with the Inquisition) as a program for living under new, rapidly evolving ideological conditions. It was also an ethics and aesthetics for the genre he virtually created single-handedly: the modern novel.

As we have seen in a previous section, Cervantes fundamentally changed what was considered to be literature by involving discourses traditionally considered to be outside of its scope. Literature after Cervantes must be interdisciplinary, but not in sense that the author must have a firm grasp of physics and mathematics to write. Rather, the writer must consider they ways in which time and space function in the society they inhabit. Part of the madness which is Borges’ story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”. A story in which an eccentric Frenchman attempts to reconstruct the

Quixote perfectly in a time estranged from the Quixote involves that fact that “ideological conditions” as Echevarría put says, have changed drastically. Our conception of time and space, the very plane which the characters inhabit has been altered drastically. This does not mean we cannot enjoy older works, but rather it means attempting to reproduce without taking into account epistemic change is impossible.

In Borges’ “The Library of Babel” the universe, referred to by Borges as the “The

Library,” is an infinite space which contains all logical possibilities. The first description

of the library that Borges gives is of a spatial variety. He says that the library “is composed of an indefinite, perhaps an infinite, number of hexagonal galleries, with enormous ventilation shafts in the middle, encircled by very low railings.” The spatial descriptions are not mere extraneous detail. Borges’ story is some way connected to our spatial awareness and how we perceive the world.

According to both W.H. Bossart and Bill Richardson, the story is also concerned with the insufficiency of human reason to comprehend our reality.36 In other words, they postulate, that Borges believes there to be fundamental flaw in our cognition which does not allow us to comprehend the vastness of the universe. Indeed, the universe as a totality is understood by the narrator in spatial terms. This is clearer when the narrator postulates an idealist interpretation of the spatial arrangement of the library: “The idealist argue that the hexagonal halls are a necessary form of absolute space or, at least, of our intuition of space. They contend that a triangular or pentagonal hall is inconceivable”. The narrator means is that the hexagonal nature of the library is not transcendentally true. A creature different from the human being, which organizes space differently may perceive the library as having a different nature.

Indeed, the point is essentially Kantian. Space and time, according to Kant, are fundamental to human perception. Space, in Kant’s view, is “a property of our mind, we represent to ourselves objects as outside of us, and all without expectation in space.”37

36 Bossart, William H. Borges and Philosophy: Self, Time, and Metaphysics. New York: P. Lang, 2003, 22.

Richardson, Bill. Borges and Space. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012, 168.

That is to say, space is not an absolute object, as our caricature of Newton tells us, but rather it is something that helps order human perception. Kant goes on to explain that space is not an “empirical concept” that we learn from experience.38 It is rather that thing which makes experience possible. Without it, I would not have a conception of something being outside myself and would not have the ability to create empirical concepts. Therefore, it is something more basic. Kant writes, “Space is nothing but the form of all appearances of outer sense.”39 It is the thing which allows to experience appearance.

So, when Borges in this particular story discusses space, He has in mind this

Kantian conception of it. Richardson in his work Borges and Space puts forward something different what I have been describing; He argues that the “ Library of Babel is:

… essentially a spatial universe, not a temporal one. It suggests a conception of spatiality that is consistent with accounts of absolute space, classically summarised in Newton’s 1687 definition, quoted earlier: ‘Absolute space, in its own nature, without regard to anything external, remains always similar and immovable.’ In this passage in the Principia Mathematica, Newton was simply contrasting absolute space with relative space (which looks at how an entity moves in relation to another moving entity) and was not arguing against the significance of time, but the terms in which he describes absolute space are curiously reminiscent of Borges’s story.

Borges, in my view, does not appear to be privileging space or time as being more prominent in human experience. While he does use more spatial metaphors in the story,

37 Kant, Immanuel, and Norman Kemp Smith. Critique of Pure Reason, Second Edition. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 67.

38 Ibid., 68

39 Ibid., 71 24

we see that time is an ordering mechanism in the universe. For example, the narrator describes “…books, which were concerned with future people, people who were perhaps not imaginary”.40 This sentence indicates that there is a flow of time. Also, there are mentions of the narrator being old and close to death. If time were not at least an internal mechanism in this universe, the narrator would have no chronlogical intuition with which to tell the story. Time in this universe has a subjective reality, it may appear to have no bearing on the library, but if we conceive of time as inner sense, we will see that it helps us to understand the story. Indeed the narrator remarks that the library may continue to exist without humanity. However, if we remember what the idealist thought earlier in the story, that reality appears hexagonal to human intuitions of space. The same can be said for time.

Kant writes that “Certainly time is something real, namely, the real form of inner intuition. It has, therefore, subjective reality in respect of inner experience; that is, I really have a representation of time and my determinations in it.”41 In other words, without a subject, time cannot be said to exist in the sense that we normally use. Space and time for

Kant are not dependent upon an empirical intuition. For Borges, it would appear that he is following in the line of Kant and Schopenhauer. There is no privileging of space or time is this story due the fact that space and time, according to Kant, Schopenhauer, and

Borges, are in the mind and do not have an external reality. Borges ends the story with the following paradox,

40 Borges, Jorge Luis. Ficciones. New York: Grove Press, 1962, 83.

41 Kant, Immanuel, and Norman Kemp Smith. Critique of Pure Reason, Second Edition. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 79. 25

It is not illogical, I say, to think that the world is infinite. Those who judge it to be limited, postulate that in remote places the corridors and stairs and hexagons could inconceivably cease--a manifest absurdity. Those who imagined it to be limitless forget that the possible number of books is limited.42

He finished the story by saying that “The Library is limitless and periodic.”

However, the spatial relation of the library we learn from a footnote is not dependent upon an actual physical manifestation of a structure.

Letizia Álvarez de Toledo has observed that this vast Library is useless: rigorously speaking, a single volume would be sufficient, a volume of ordinary format, printed in nine or ten point type, containing an infinite number if infinitely thin leaves. (In the early seventeenth century, Cavalieri said that all solid bodies are the superimposition of an infinite number of planes.) The handling of this silky vade mecum would not be convenient: each apparent page would unfold into other analogous ones; the inconceivable middle page would have no reverse.43

The library could take numerous forms. There is not a spatial relation which is intrinsic to the library. Borges is not a Newtonian, but rather is line with his modernist siblings such as Woolf, Proust, and Joyce. Borges in the latter essay would go on to refute time.44 The Library of Babel may be titled a “Refutation of Space.” Following, in a

Kantian vein, time and space have no reality outside of the subject.

In Proust, we have a similar phenomenon in regard to the organization of space.

We all know that In Search of Lost Time, is about the recovering of lost perceptions in time. It is something which is known about the book before attempting to read it. The

42 Borges, Jorge Luis. Ficciones. New York: Grove Press, 87

43 Ibid., 88

44 I am referring to a “A New Refutation of Time” found in Otras inquisiciones 26

novel is equally about space and place. As it is described by Georges Poulet, “ We see clearly then, from the first moment-one could almost say also: from the first place- in the account, the work of Proust asserts itself as a search not only for lost time, but also for lost space.”45 This is case, if only for the reason that our memories of others conjure not only the feeling that time has elapsed, but also that the space in which they inhabited is forever gone, only to be partially rescued by the memory. What I am describing is portrayed by Proust, most strongly in the final volume when the narrator Marcel describes the various loves which he had in his life:

I guessed her to be beautiful, [sic] I fell in love with her and constructed for her an ideal body which towered above some landscape in the region of France where I had read Annuaire des Châteaux… In cases, however, where I had met and known the woman, the landscape against which I saw her was at the very least, double. First, she rose, each one of these women, at a different point in my life, with the imposing stature of tutelary local deity, in the midst of one of those landscapes of my dreams which lay side by side like some chequered network over my past, the landscape which my imagination had sought to attach to her; then later I saw her from the angle of memory, surrounded by the places in which I had known her and which. Remaining attached to them, she recalled to me, for if our life is vagabond our memory is sedentary and though we ourselves rush ceaselessly forward our recollections, indissolubly bound to the sites which we have left behind us…46

The memories of persons are situated in the spatial arrangements which they inhabit. Our narrator Marcel, uses continually the image of a landscape to evoke feeling that memory is equally spatial as it is temporal. The association with painting cannot be missed.

45 Poulet, Georges. Proustian Space. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977, 12.

46 Proust, Marcel, C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and D. J. Enright. In Search of Lost Time. New York: Modern Library, 2003, 441. 27

Chapter 3

Time

Angela Yui, in her edited collection of stories, Three-Dimensional Reading, explicitly states the connection between modernism and time and space quite clearly.

“Modernism rejects the memetic function of art through the re-imagination of the human experience, and this includes new forms of presentation in space and time.”47 What does it mean to reject the mimetic function? She goes on to say that “…impressionist and post-impressionist art privileges the new conception of space in its departure from a representation of objective reality, while modernist fiction privileges the individual experience and presentation of temporality in is rejection of linear chronological time.”

The important aspect we must remember about modernist story telling is that it rejects the mimetic function. It is no longer interested in depicting reality or the “thing in itself”, but rather concerned with how reality is subjectively experienced. This does not mean the thinkers in other areas besides literature did not pick up on this insight. Ernst Mach, for

47 Yiu, Angela. Three-Dimensional Reading Stories of Time and Space in Japanese Modernist Fiction, 1911-1932. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2013, 2. 28

instance, understood this quite properly and it is more than possible that figures such as

Proust picked it up from him:

A motion is termed uniform in which equal increments of space described correspond to equal increments of motion with which we form a comparison, as the rotation of the earth. A motion may, with respect to another motion, be uniform. But the question whether a motion is in itself uniform, is senseless. With just as little justice, also, may we speak of an "absolute time"-of a time independent of change. This absolute time can be measured by comparison with no motion; it has therefore neither a practical nor a scientific value; and no one is justified in saying that he knows aught about it. It is an idle metaphysical conception.48 Of course, the idea of absolute time was beginning to be undermined in the work of Immanuel Kant before the 20th century. Kant writes in the Critique of Pure Reason, that time has an “empirical reality” but not an absolute “transcendental reality”.49 This is not as extreme as the Borgesian refutation of time we shall see later on, but Kant does initiate the undermining of absolute time which comes to an apotheosis in Borges. Kant does not abandon the reality of time, in the manner Proust does implicitly and Borges does explicitly. However, any consideration of time must take him into account because it is not probable that Newton was a conduit for his own ideas. Kant is a person through which Borges and Proust may have received these ideas, and then transformed them aesthetically. Kant writes that:

Certainly time is something real, namely, the real form of inner intuition. It has therefore subjective reality in respect of inner experience; that is, I really have the representation of time and my determinations in it. Time is therefore to be

48 Ernst Mach, The Science of Mechanics: A Critical and Historical Account of Its Development (Chicago: The Open Court Publishing, 1989),272-273.

49 Kant, Immanuel, and Norman Kemp Smith. Critique of Pure Reason, Second Edition. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 79. 29

regarded as real, not to be regarded as real, and not indeed as object but as the mode of representation of myself as object.50 Kant’s move to consider the subjective reality of time becomes a stepping stone for 19th & 20th century thinkers that were to come after him. Mach’s quotation from earlier is very much a reiteration of what Kant had postulated previously. However, the main concern of this thesis is how this matters aesthetically. How do ideas which are the domain of epistemology and metaphysics make themselves pronounced in literary works?

We have already to some extent covered that in the section on space. Now we are on to see how it operates in time.

3.1 Proust

Marcel Proust received a degree in philosophy from the Sorbonne.51 While he did take some courses in literature it was philosophy that animated Proust while he was a student. This is not peculiar to Proust, many writers in the modernist period received their degrees in disciplines outside of literature: Kafka received a degree in law, Robert

Musil a PhD in philosophy, Alfred Doblin and Mikhail Bulgakov were medical doctors.

This list is by no means exhaustive. One thing that is typically ignored is not simply their interdisciplinarity, but rather their interest in grounding these varied subjects systematically. In the case of Proust, he did this by grounding himself in epistemological and metaphysical debates. Jean-Yves Tadié, Proust’s most prominent biographer writes in a discussion of Proust’s philosophy lessons:

50 Ibid., 79.

51 Jean-Yves Tadié, Marcel Proust: A Life (Penguin, 2006) 204. 30

In his lesson, as well as covering the course work, Darlu [Proust’s Tutor] had impressed on Marcel the notions of faith in the human spirit, Kantian idealism, belief in a ‘thing in itself’, in a reality hidden behind appearances, and in the rigors of analysis which flew in the face of misty imprecision dear to the Symbolists and sometimes to Bergson. This is what prevented Proust from being and inheritor of German Romanticism…52 The influence of Bergson on Proust is often overestimated. The debates concerning time, memory, cognition, and causality which Proust indulges himself in are very much in line with the philosophical tradition in which he was grounded. I suspect the reason why in 1922 there were comparisons between Einstein and Proust is because of shared Kantian and Humean tradition. 53 While Proust did have his own spiritual concerns, which attracted him to figures such as Emerson and Ruskin, when he was approaching empirical matters or trying to approach epistemological topics he avoided

Emersonian opaqueness.

Adorno when remarking upon Proust conjectured that Mach may be a possible influence upon Proust’s conception of the self. Mach’s scientific and psychological lectures were readily available in European languages, so it is possible that Proust may have happened upon it. However, what is more likely is that Proust and Mach arrived at similar conclusions due to a similar intellectual heritage:

The supremacy of time provides the aesthetic demonstration of Ernst Mach's thesis, derived from Hume, that the ego cannot be salvaged; but whereas Mach and Hume rejected the ego only as the unifying principle of cognition, Proust presents the full empirical self with the bill for its non-identity. The spirit in which that occurs, however, is not only akin to that of positivism but also opposed

52 Ibid. 204

53 Richard Davenport-Hines, Proust at the Majestic: The Last Days of the Author Whose Book Changed Paris (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006), 244. 31

to it. Proust carries out concretely what poetics usually only sets up as a formal requirement-the development of the characters. In the process it becomes clear that the characters are not characters: a frailty appears in what is stable, a frailty ratified but by no means produced by death . This process of dissolution, however, is not so much psychological as it is a fugitive series of images. In them Proust's psychological work attacks psychology itself. What changes in people, what becomes alien to the point of unrecognizability and returns as in a musical repeat, are the images into which we transpose them.54 Whether or not Proust’s work, “attacks psychology” is a claim that we shall investigate later. However, for now, it is best to understand the point which Adorno is making. Adorno rightfully points out that Proust’s conception of the self, while radical, is prefigured in the work of previous thinkers. Not so much in aesthetic sphere by other novelists, but by philosophical figures in metaphysics and epistemology. This appears to be what makes the modernist writer somewhat different from his precursors. This tendency to aesthetically demonstrate epistemological findings in other disciplines. It possible to find antecedent of this attitude in earlier writing, but in modernism it becomes a general tendency and the connections are easier to make. Later in Adorno’s notes we find a point similar to what Kundera and Butor have made previously in this essay… that there is something which literature can grasp that the singular data points in the social sciences have difficulty understanding. He writes:

Proust knows that there are no human beings in themselves beyond this world of images; that the individual is an abstraction, that its being-for-itself has as little reality as its mere being-for-us, which the vulgar prejudice considers an illusion. From this point of view, the infinitely complex structure of Proust's novel is an attempt to reconstruct, through a totality that includes psychology, personal relationships, and the psychology of intelligible character, or the transformation of

54 Adorno, Theodor W. and Rolf Tiedemann and Shierry Nicholsen. Notes to Literature, Volume 1. Columbia University Press. 1991, 177. 32

images, a reality which no view oriented toward mere psychological or sociological data for the sake of isolating them can grasp.55 Part of the Proustian project, according to Adorno, is to break through illusion.

The job of the writer is not to enforce a view of reality, but rather to show us different ways of interpreting the real, if such a thing as the real exists. Adorno’s concentration of

Proustian images is also worth taking note of. An image is a representation or approximation, it is elusive because it does not allow to us see something in its totality.

What is interesting in In Search of Lost Time is its panoramic view of subjects which are in its purview. The parade of images allows us, if however hazily, to glimpse into the nature of time, memory, love, and jealousy.

While there were at the time of Proust’s death comparisons to him and Einstein it is unlikely that Einstein exercised any direct influence upon him. However, this cannot be said of Henri Poincaré. Poincaré is mentioned by Proust in The Guermantes Way briefly and given the popularity of his essays it is likely that Proust had some familiarity.

Arguments indicating this have been made by the scholars Alan Thiher and Nicola

Luckhurst.56 The work by Poincaré that is of primary interest is The Value of Science.

Poincaré begins in chapter two of that work with a notion that would later become

Proustian:

55 Ibid. 177

56 Luckhurst, Nicola. Science and Structure in Proust's A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000.

Thiher, Allen. Fiction Refracts Science Modernist Writers from Proust to Borges. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005.

So long as we do not go outside the domain of consciousness, the notion of time is relatively clear. Not only do we distinguish without difficulty present sensation from the remembrance of past sensations or the anticipation of future sensations, but we know perfectly well what we mean when we say that, of two conscious phenomena which we remember, one was anterior to the other; or that, of two foreseen conscious phenomena, one will be anterior to the other. When we say that two conscious facts are simultaneous, we mean that they profoundly interpenetrate, so that analysis cannot separate them without mutilating them.57 Poincaré is suggesting that under normal circumstances memory is quite capable of understanding the sequences of events. However, when two simultaneous events are perceived by the intellect they become muddled. Recall what Proust writes in the famous

Madeleine scene. An involuntary memory is triggered by the consumption of cookie.

Since the events occur at approximately the same time, it is difficult to establish causal relations. Proust is not saying that all of memory and time is opaque to us, he is not an obscurantist. What he wants us to know is that there as Poincaré put it “psychological time” in humans is often skewed and imperfect. I have reproduced a portion of the scene here :

And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling. And it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die. Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray, except what lay in the theatre and the drama of my going to bed there, had any existence for me, when one day in winter, on my return home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at

57 Poincaré, Henri. The Value of Science: Essential Writings of Henri Poincaré. New York: Modern Library, 2012. Kindle Edition. 210.

first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent for one of those squat, plump little cakes called “petites madeleines,” which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell. And soon, mechanically, dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow,… An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin…And suddenly the memory revealed itself.58 Poincaré writes that the manner in which we are able to label, and recall time psychologically is finite, and he uses the metaphor of “empty compartments” to describe the feeling of “discontinuity” we have when describing our personal psychological time.

The essay argues against an absolute time. Another element that Proust presumably picked up from Poincaré is his thoughts on the nature of causality. Poincaré writes

“…have we really the right to speak of the cause of a phenomenon? If all the parts of the universe are interchained in a certain measure, any one phenomenon will not be the effect of a single cause…” 59 Proust is not suggesting that cookies transform our conception time, but rather the tactile, gustatory, and olfactory senses contribute to the memory.

There a multiplicity of causes which led to him remembering Combray. He is calling attention to the fact that it is incorrect to ascribe to an event a lone cause.

However, most of Proust’s discursions on the nature of time occur in conjunction with his thoughts on sleep, or rather, his thoughts on the unconscious sphere of life. He saw sleep, something that we spend a third of our lives doing, as a playground where our perceptions of time and space mutated into something fantastic. He believed the

58 Proust, Marcel, C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and D. J. Enright. Swann's Way. New York: The Modern Library, 2003, 59-60

59 Poincaré, Henri, The Value of Science: Essential Writings of Henri Poincaré (Modern Library Science). Random House Publishing Group, 219. 35

description of the events that took place during this state to be the domain of literature. A kind of phenomenological account of the unconscious. Proust writes in Swann’s Way:

Suppose that, towards morning, after a night of insomnia, sleep descends upon him while he is reading, in quite a different position from that in which he normally goes to sleep, he has only to lift his arm to arrest the sun and turn it back in its course, and, at the moment of waking, he will have no idea of the time, but will conclude that he has just gone to bed. Or suppose that he dozes off in some even more abnormal and divergent position, sitting in an armchair, for instance, after dinner: then the world will go hurtling out of orbit, the magic chair will carry him at full speed through time and space, and when he opens his eyes again he will imagine that he went to sleep months earlier in another place. But for me it was enough if, in my own bed, my sleep was so heavy as completely to relax my consciousness; for then I lost all sense of the place in which I had gone to sleep, and when I awoke in the middle of the night, not knowing where I was, I could not even be sure at first who I was; I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal’s consciousness; I was more destitute than the cave-dweller; but then the memory— not yet of the place in which I was, but of various other places where I had lived and might now very possibly be—would come like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being, from which I could never have escaped by myself: in a flash I would traverse centuries of civilisation, and out of a blurred glimpse of oil-lamps, then of shirts with turned-down collars, would gradually piece together the original components of my ego.60 This passage highlights the essential instability of the inner and outer sense which we call time and space. By situating his discussion in the context of sleep he has shown us that the way in which we perceive time differs depending upon our state. Time according to Proust is not linear or circular, but rather it is fragmented. Another key moment is the end of the passage where he says that he had to “piece together the key components” of the ego. The implication that Proust is making here is that the concepts of time and space have important implications for the self. If in the Kantian sense, which is something I believe he is working from, time orders our inner perception and space our

60 Proust, Marcel, C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and D. J. Enright. Swann's Way. New York: The Modern Library, 2003, 4. 36

outer perception any distortion of those two forms of intuition would result in change in our conception of self.

3.2 Borges

The most explicit reference to time in Borges’ work is found in the essay ‘A New

Refutation of Time’. In this essay Borges refers to the work of Hume and Berkeley.

However, I will focus on what is original in his argument instead rephrasing his paraphrases of Hume. The boldest claim Borges makes is the following. “Hume denied the existence of absolute space, in which all things have their place; I deny the existence of one single time, in which all things are linked as in a chain. The denial of coexistence is no less arduous than the denial of succession.”61

The denial of time for Borges consist of two negations, the first being, “the negation of the succession of terms of a series” and “negation of the synchronism of the terms in two different series”.62 These two maxims Borges believes are the consequence of idealism if taken to its philosophical extremity. The denying of time results in the denying of self, which for Borges is also an illusion.

Borges’ conception of time is often shrouded in opaque language and curious parables. However, time does play an important role in many of his fictions. One example is a story called “The Circular Ruins”. Borges writes of a wounded man who

61 Borges, Jorge Luis, Donald A. Yates, James East Irby, and William Gibson. Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings. New Directions, 2007, 222.

62 Ibid., 232 37

finds himself in a circular temple, the god of which miraculously cures his wounds.

However, this god, Borges states, is a god that “no longer receives the homage of men.”63

The man or the stranger, as he is referred to in the story, wants to dream another being into existence. In order to do this, he neglects his worldly needs and begins to sleep for good portion of the day. He succeeds in creating what he believes to be his son. Then one night he is awoken by two other strangers who inform of a prophecy about a man who can endure flames without being burned. He ponders this prophecy and fears for his newly created son who he is afraid will find out that he is a mere “simulacrum”.64 A twist in the story occurs towards then, and Borges’ position on time become clearer:

For what had happened many centuries before was repeating itself. The ruins of the sanctuary of the god of Fire was destroyed by fire. In a dawn without birds, the wizard saw the concentric fire licking the walls. For a moment, he thought of talking refuge in the water, but then he understood that death was coming to crown his old age and absolve him of his labors. He walked toward the sheets of the flame. They did not bite his flesh, they caressed him and flooded him without heat or combustion. With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he also was an illusion, that someone else was dreaming him.65 This story presents a cyclical view of time in which the human being is captive to past. The “son” that he was dreaming into existence was more than likely another version of himself, an illusion trapped in time. With this being said, Borges most sustained discussion of time besides “ The Refutation” is in his essay “A History of Eternity”. In this essay he remarks that one of the he doesgreatest complications presented by time is “ that of synchronizing each person’s individual time with the general time of

63 Borges, Jorge Luis. Ficciones. New York: Grove Press, 1962, 57

64 Ibid., 62

65 Ibid., 63 38

mathematicians.”66 If we recall this is similar to problem we find in Proust and Poincaré.

However, Borges introduced the concept of eternity into the discussion of time following after Plato and Augustine. He does not advance a positive notion of what he believes eternity and time be until the fourth section of the essay. He describes his theory of eternity as an “impoverished” one “entirely devoid of archetypes”.67 He titles his theory of eternity “Feeling in Death”. Borges writes:

I write it out now: This pure representation of homogenous facts--the serenity of the night, the translucent little wall, the small-town scent of honeysuckle, the fundamental dirt--is not merely identical to what existed on that corner many years ago; it is, without superficial resemblances or repetitions, the same. When we can feel this oneness, time is a delusion which the indifference and inseparability of a moment from its apparent yesterday and from its apparent today suffice to disintegrate. The number of such human moments is clearly not infinite. The elemental experiences--physical suffering and physical pleasure, falling asleep, listening to a piece of music, feeling great intensity or great apathy- -are even more impersonal. I derive, in advance, this conclusion: life is too impoverished not to be immortal. But we lack even the certainty of our own poverty, given that time, which is easily refutable by the senses, is not so easily refuted by the intellect, from whose essence the concept of succession appears inseparable. Let there remain, then, the glimpse of an idea in an emotional anecdote, and, in the acknowledged irresolution of this page, the true moment of ecstasy and the possible intimation of eternity which that night did not hoard from me.68 Perhaps the most striking feature of this section of text is Borges’ willing admission that he is unable to compose an argument for delusion of the time. The text is far different from his usual mode of expression. There stories where he provides a plausible argument for the most fantastic of notions. However, here he seems to have taken himself to his

66 Borges, Jorge Luis. Selected Non-Fictions. New York: Penguin Books, 2000, 124.

67 Borges, Jorge Luis. Selected Non-Fictions. New York: Penguin Books, 2000 Pg. 137

68 Ibid. 138 39

limits. Our senses tell us that time is a delusion, but the intellect in its need for concepts keeps succession as a principle and it is unlikely that we could do without it.

Chapter 4

The Self

Borges in his “The Nothingness of Personality” states explicitly that he wants to

“tear down the exceptional preeminence now generally awarded to the self…”.69 He goes on to say that “There is no whole self. Any of life’s present situations is seamless and sufficient.”70 What seems to be implied here is that our experience of time and space, which is bound to memory, creates a self that is fragmented or multiple. To speak of a consistent self is to misunderstand something fundamental about human nature. Borges says, “Those things which I can perceive the beginnings and the end are not my self”.71

The self is forever evasive. We do not remember the moment we were born, and we will shall never truly experience the moment in which we pass. The bookends of life are forever unavailable to us. While we do retain memory of some of life’s events, we do not retain all of them. These empty compartments of time, according to Borges, do not allow

69 Borges, Jorge Luis. Selected Non-Fictions. New York: Penguin Books, 2000, 3.

70 Ibid. 3

71 Ibid 8

us to perceive the self fully. However, they do provide for us a sense of the phenomenal self.

The phenomenal self is the material with which the artist works. It is often mistakenly thought the narrator is somehow a proxy for the author. There characters are considered inventions, but the narrative voice is somehow perceived as being mechanism with which they expose themselves. The narrative voice is also fiction and a very sly one.

Even in the most fantastic story the voice of the author gives a story an element of verisimilitude. I am reminded of a moment in Camus’ The Fall where the narrator Jean-

Baptiste Clamence discusses the writers of confessions, “…authors of confessions write especially to avoid confessing, to tell nothing of what they know. When they claim to get to the painful admissions, you have to watch out, for they are about to dress the corpse”.72

In this section we learn how the writer is dressing the corpse. The self for the writer in the 20th century is an indispensable fiction, but it also a proposition that they do not take very seriously. We will discuss how various authors each play with the self. We have to this point concentrated on space and time and how they interact with literature. However, we have not discussed how these intuitions perhaps distort the self.

4.1 Borges, Malaparte, and Qian

There is mode of expression I find peculiar in 20th century fiction. Combined with the themes of time and space there is the persona used by authors to communicate and

72 Camus, Albert. The Fall. New York: Vintage Books, 1991. Kindle Edition, 120.

express themselves as temporal beings. I am referring to a tendency to use the self as character explicitly in one’s own fiction. A prominent example of this is Proust and the fact the narrator of his novel shares the same name as him, “Marcel”. Proust keeps his narrator’s name a secret until the fifth volume of the work.73 It is revealed to us by

Albertine who serves as Marcel’s main love interest throughout the novel until her untimely death. Qian Zhongshu, a reader of Proust, in his short story “The Devil Pays a

Nighttime Visit to Mr. Qian Zhongshu”, employs a similar technique. As can probably be guessed from the title, a fictional Qian Zhongshu is visited by the Prince of Darkness one evening at midnight. Qian and the Devil engage in a cordial dialogue. The “Devil” says something insightful about the nature of biography and autobiography to Qian Zhongshu:

Writing biographies of others is also a type of self-expression, so there’s no reason not to insert your own views or write about others as a way of showing yourself off. Conversely, autobiographers invariably don’t have much of a ‘self’ to write about, so they gratify themselves by rendering a likeness that their own wife and child wouldn’t recognize. Or they ramble on about irrelevant matters, noting the friends they’ve made and recounting anecdotes about other people. So if you want to learn about a person, you should read biographies he’s written of others, and if you want to learn about other people, you should read his autobiography. Autobiography is biography.74

The artifice employed in fiction may in a way be more honest than the autobiographer. The Devil in Qian Zhongshu’s story points out that often we are not capable of accurate self-reflection. Writing about one’s self directly is not only a form of self-exaltation worth of the devil, it also is fraudulent in a certain way because we do not

73 Proust, M., C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, T. Kilmartin, and D. J. Enright. In Search of Lost Time Volume V: The Captive ; The Fugitive. New York: Modern Library, 2003, 91.

74 Qian, Z. Humans Beasts and Ghosts: Stories and Essays. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011, 34. 43

want to expose something too negative about ourselves. However, the maneuver of writing about the self with the understanding that it is “fiction” may reveal more about a human personality than pronouncements of an autobiography. This may be why a diverse array of writers employed the technique of the fictional self

This technique is also employed by Borges in various fictions, the most prominent of them being “Borges and I” is a brief fiction composed by a writer in conflict with himself. In this fiction he plays with themes of disassociation. The problem of the authorial self in Borges helps illustrate the problem of the self in general. Borges, the person as opposed to the author tells us “My taste runs to hourglasses, maps, eighteenth- century typefaces, etymologies, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Robert Louis

Stevenson; Borges shares those preferences, but in a vain sort of way that turns them into the accoutrement of an actor”.75 There is Borges the persona and Borges the man.. What is perhaps perplexing about this story is that unlike Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, there is no proper way of distinguishing between the two personalities. One is the doppelganger of the other. Borges remarks that he recognizes himself in the work of others more than he does in work that the other Borges composes. The narrator says “I shall endure in Borges, not in myself (if indeed, I am anybody at all), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others’ or in the tedious strumming of a guitar.”76 The story ends with the

75 Borges, Jorge Luis. Jorge Luis Borges: Collected Fictions. New York: Penguin, 1998, 324.

76 Ibid. 324

sentence “I am not sure which of us it is that’s writing this page.”77 The self in the case of

Borges becomes something which dramaturgical. This taken to an extreme in Curzio

Malaparte.

In his remarks on Malaparte, Milan Kundera says that with his novel Kaputt,

Malaparte managed to write not only “an important book” but also that he “invented a form that is a totally new thing and that belongs to him alone”.78 What does he mean by a new form? Anyone who picks up the books will be immediately disoriented. The work serves as reportage on the eastern front, but as Kundera writes later “it is a literary work whose aesthetic intention is so strong, so apparent, that the sensitive reader automatically excludes it from the context of accounts brought to bear by historians, journalists, political analysts, memoirists.” What then are we to make of it? Malaparte acts as the narrator of his own work, however we should not assume that the Malaparte of Kaputt is the same as the real life Malaparte. Indeed, there was no “real life” Malaparte due to the fact Malaparte was the pen name of a man named Kurt Erich Suckert.

The biographical details of an author do not typically interest me, but they may be pertinent here. Malaparte began his political career as a follower of Mussolini, but quickly had a falling out with the fascist which led to a complete repudiation of fascism in the late 1930’s. Kaputt takes place during World War II and depicts the axis powers in all of their savagery. It is perhaps one of the strongest denunciations of fascism by someone who was involved in its Italian variant. After the war he became a communist

77 Ibid. 324

78 Kundera, Milan. Encounter: Essays. New York: Harper Perennial, 2011, 160. 45

and then before his death embraced the loving arms of the Catholic Church. While his denunciation of fascism is strong, it is not unreasonable to doubt the sincerity of some with such ideological flexibility. He explored the entire political map throughout his life.

However, we should not treat him with complete contempt. He was jailed for his anti- fascist activities and was for the most part accepted in Italy after the war. He is not comparable to a figure like Heidegger because when it mattered most he did oppose both

Hitler and Mussolini. Indeed, there is a shocking scene in Kaputt in which Malaparte disrespects Hitler by calling him the “Mother of the German Nation”, to attack the myth of fascist masculinity.79

As I stated before, the book is a novel masquerading as reportage on the Eastern

Front. Malaparte witnesses the Warsaw Ghetto, he engages in arguments with Hans

Frank the Nazi Governor of Poland, he witnesses the Jassy Pogrom. Malaparte rarely describes himself, instead he lets the other characters do the talking. In the opening chapter “Du Côté de Guermantes”, a nod to the Guermantes of Proust, Malaparte sets up his novel in a very Proustian manner. In order to display this, I will give a scene from

Proust. In the third volume, The Guermantes Way, Marcel, the narrator develops a fascination with the aristocracy. Our narrator Marcel at this point in the novel believes the nobility to be endowed with special characteristics, an illusion he will soon be disabused of. At this moment however, he is obsessed with the Mme de Guermantes.

Proust writes:

79 Malaparte, Curzio. Kaputt. New York: New York Review of Books, 2005, 66. 46

But as the traveller, disappointed by his first impression of a strange town, tells himself that he will doubtless succeed in penetrating its charm if he visits its museums and galleries, strikes up an acquaintance with its people, works in its libraries, so I assured myself that, had I been given the right of entry into Mme de Guermantes’s house, were I one of her friends, were I to penetrate into her life, I should then know what, within its glowing amber envelope, her name enclosed in reality, objectively, for other people, since, after all, my father’s friend had said that the Guermantes set was in a class of its own in the Faubourg Saint- Germain.80 Proust’s narrator Marcel reveals to us several things about himself through simply this passage. He is endowed with incredible gifts of perception, but what he has not been able to perceive, which he will understand later, is the sheer ordinariness of the people that his society and family taught him to deify. The novel is in part about a continual unmasking of illusion. However, another quote which is pertinent here is found in volume one the work when Marcel is discussing his family friend Swann:

…even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of other people. Even the simple act which we describe as “seeing someone we know” is to some extent an intellectual process. We pack the physical outline of the person we see with all the notions we have already formed about him, and in the total picture of him which we compose in our minds those notions have certainly the principal place. In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice as if it were no more than a transparent envelope, that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is these notions which we recognise and to which we listen.81

80 Proust, Marcel, C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and D. J. Enright. In Search of Lost Time: The Guermantes Way. New York: Modern Library, 2003, 29.

81 Proust, Marcel, C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and D. J. Enright. . In Search of Lost Time Swann's Way. New York: The Modern Library, 2003, 23. 47

It is said by Proust that our social personality, i.e., the self, is largely a construction of others. This would be a point that Sartre would pick up on much later. It is not something which belongs to me internally, it is not a soul or another such metaphysical entity. Borges, Proust, and Malaparte want to eradicate that notion within us. The self is a fictional phenomenon used to order our perception of the world which we gauge through time and space.

To return to Malaparte, the element which he picks up in Proust is that to describe the self or the narrator he shows prefers to show through dialogue rather than state explicitly. Malaparte’s personality is revealed in the exchange with Hans Frank.:

"Hitler is a superior man. Don't you think he is a superior man?" As I hesitated, he looked fixedly at me, and added with a kindly smile: "I should like to have your opinion of Hitler." "He is almost a man," I replied. "What?" "Almost a man. I mean, not quite a real man." "Ach, so," said Frank. "You mean that he is an Übermensch, nicht wahr?.—Superman, don't you? Yes, Hitler is not quite a real man,- he is an Übermensch." From his end of the table, one of the guests broke in: "Herr Malaparte has written in one of his books that Hitler is a woman." It was Himmler's man, the chief of the Gestapo of the government of Poland. His voice was cool, sweet, sad—a faraway voice. I raised my eyes, but I lacked the courage to look at him. That cool, sweet, sad voice of his, that faraway voice, had set my heart trembling slightly. "Just so," I added after a moment of silence, "Hitler is a woman."82

The scene tells us a few things. Yes, it shows us that he hates Hitler, but also it shows us how that while he believes himself to have lacked courage he in fact had it. At, this point in the book Malaparte is in Nazi controlled Poland. But it also shows us how

Malaparte wishes to present himself. Malaparte was indeed jailed for calling Hitler a woman. However, the narrative when taken in context, shows us that his bravery in the

82 Malaparte, Curzio. Kaputt. New York: New York Review of Books, 2005. 66 48

face of mass murderers is not true bravery, but a form of retribution for his participation in the origins of the movement. The self he wishes to construct is something like St. Paul in the gospels. A former wolf who sees the light and becomes the protector of lambs.

Malaparte is also great at unmasking the self of the people who he interacts with through conversation. Malaparte in continuing his conversation with the barbarian Hans

Frank reveals that Frank believes himself to be civilized. Indeed, he is referred to by the sycophants that surround him as a “great artist”.83 Malaparte remarks that “masters and barbarians are the same thing.”84 Instead engaging in a polemical battle against the forces of evil through his writing. Malaparte reveals his characters inner tendencies though their behavior. We learn that Hans Frank, while have detailed knowledge of the Italian

Renaissance is also cruel and evil in perhaps the most extravagant fashion imaginable.

In summation, the self is a contradictory concept that we cannot seem to do without. I will end with a few thoughts from Fernando Pessoa. Pessoa thought that the

“interior space” which we call the self might eventually become part of the scope of scientific inquiry and that the self should be understood in spatial and temporal terms:

I don’t quite know if this inner space will be just another dimension of the other space. Perhaps future scientific research will discover that everything, whether physical or spiritual, is just a dimension of the same space. In one dimension we live as body, in the other as soul. And perhaps there are other dimensions in which we experience other equally real aspects of ourselves. Sometimes I enjoy letting myself be carried away by this futile meditation on just how far this research might lead. Perhaps they’ll discover that what we call God, and which clearly exists on another level from that of logic and spatial and temporal reality, is just one of our ways of being, one of the ways we experience ourselves in another dimension of existence. This doesn’t strike me as impossible. Dreams

83 Ibid., 82

84 Ibid., 67 49

may also be another dimension in which we live or even an overlapping of two dimensions. Just as a body exists in height, width and length, who knows but that our dreams may exist simultaneously in space, in the ideal world and in the ego: their physical representation in space; their nonphysical representation in the ideal world; their role as an intimate aspect of ourselves in the ego. Even each person’s “I” may perhaps be another divine dimension. All this is very complex, but doubtless in time it will be resolved. Today’s dreamers are perhaps the great precursors of the ultimate science of the future…85

In Pessoa, as in the other major modernists, we see a tendency to link literary speculation with scientific and philosophical endeavor. Pessoa speculates that we might settle the mysterious of the self through scientific endeavor. He does identify some problems which are extratemporal, but in regard to the problem of the self, he follows the

Kantian line. What space then does this leave for literature? While it is nearly impossible to provide a definitive answer, it does seem that literature broadens the realm of the possible. It expands the mind in such a way that it opens theoretical possibilities for the other disciplines. Truth is imagined before it is discovered and literature, if I am right, is the queen of imaginative discourse.

85 Pessoa, Fernando, and Margaret Jull Costa. The Book of Disquiet. New Directions, 2017. 66-67.

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