Others’ Time/ Prolepsis - PowerPoint Presentation

1. Others’ Time/ ProlepsisRicoeur, Currie, Woolf

2. ProlepsisSunset Boulevard (1950)

3. Christian Metz, ‘Notes Toward a Phenomenology of the Narrative’, cited in Maureen Turin, Flashbacks in Film: Memory & History, p. 10[Narrative is] a doubly temporal sequence, ... There is the time of that which is told and the time of the plot (the time of the signified and the time of the signifier). This duality is not only that which makes possible all temporal distortions that are commonly found in narratives (three years in the life of the hero summarized in two lines of a novel or in a few shots of a montage sequence in cinema etc.); more fundamentally it invites us to remark that one of the functions of narrative is to create one time in another time. […] the perception of the narrative as real, that is, as being really a narrative, must result in rendering the recited object (its subject) unreal.

4. Metz, ‘Notes Toward a Phenomenology of the Narrative’, cont. …an event must in some way have ended before its narration can begin. […] in the case of strictly simultaneous accounts [e.g. live TV coverage] spatial displacement – that is, the fact of the image itself – can assume the role of temporal displacement (which is the predominant feature of traditional narratives), thereby alone ensuring the correct functioning of narrative unrealization (otherwise how could one explain the remarkable absence of traumatism in the television-viewer?) See also: Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema-------------------, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema-------------------, Language and Cinema

5. Duration (Genette) Discourse timeStory timeTime spent to narrate the event Real time that has passed for an event to take place‘5 years later’ could take a second to write and to read; represent a second of discourse time. ‘5 years later’ a lengthy story time

6. Duration (2)Story time usually longer than narrative/discourse time. Several million years are covered in 2001: A Space Odyssey by 161 minutes of film. Proust – many years covered, but not chronologically, and it is a long, many-volume book! Mrs Dalloway: one day in a narrative that might take 4-5 concentrated hours (?) to read.

7. Duration (3) Relation of timeRelative durationExampleScene(‘real’ time)story-time and discourse-time are closest, and may be ‘equal’ (e.g. in dialogue)‘When did you last see her?’‘On the bridge.’ ‘Alone?’‘No, with a man.’ Summary(speed up)Story-time is longer than discourse-timeSo they lived happily for the next 20 years. Stretch (slow down)Discourse-time exceeds story-timeShe suddenly realised how very much alone she was with her favourable opinion of the young visitor and how much opposition she would have to content with later from her querulous aunt. All this took no more than a split second and there was no hesitation in her movement as she came forward to welcome him.

8. Relation of timeRelative durationExampleEllipsisDiscourse-time skips to a later point in story-timeTen years later we meet the little girl again, now a handsome woman. PauseStory-time comes to a standstill while discourse-time continues. This usually involves a description or narrator’s comment: Cecilia entered the library with a heavy heart. But before we follow her and enter upon the events which were to follow, let us consider her position in life. Cecilia had grown up an orphan under the care of a retiring uncle very much preoccupied with his studies. As soon as she was able to deal with them, the cares of the household had fallen to her and had curtailed the freedoms of her childhood. This information imparted to the interested reader, let us return to Cecilia on the threshold of the library.

9. Ted Underwood, ‘Why Literary Time Is Measured in Minutes’, ELH, 85 (2), (2018), 341-365Critics have a predilection for “condensing evidence into a resonant moment”. (Titles can often create a tableau: ‘The Madwoman in the Attic’.) A “brief episode from which you can unfold a larger structure of feeling.”“Leaping over scales of time; lending immediacy to the past.”[Sympathy between critics and modernist fiction? Woolf’s ‘scene’, ‘moment of being’, a single day from which to construct a life.]Why is experience measured in seconds or minutes more literary than experience measured in months or decades?

10. Where and when does the idea of brief experiences as particularly literary arise?Romantic lyric? Poe, 1848: A long poem a “contradiction in terms.”Modernist stream of consciousness?Influence of telephone, urbanization, Bergson’s theory of time? [Train travel, air travel?] Genette: begins with Proust – who cuts out summary, juxtaposes one scene with another (via ellipsis -- gaps). Beckett (From an Abandoned Work: “skipping days and weeks as I could not at the time but had to get through them somehow…”

11. Samuel Beckett, From an Abandoned Work I get on to some other day at a later time, nothing to add before I move on in time skipping hundreds and even thousands of days in a way I could not at the time, but had to get through them somehow.

12. All scene: slow motion [Underwood, see above]

13. Frequency (Genette) Event occursEvent is narrated Example Once Once (singular)Tonight I went to the bar. N timesOnce (iterative) I used to go to the bar. OnceN times (repetitive)Tonight I went to the bar.She went to the bar. The girl’s mother went to the bar. N timesN times (multiple)I used to go to the bar.She goes to the bar. I went to the bar last night. Lots of people saw her walk into the bar.

14. Genette, Narrative Discourse – narrative time (categories)

15. Mrs Dalloway passages A (Ricoeur: Big Ben and social time) – Peter, Whitehall (pp. 52-56)B (Ricoeur: Clarissa, Septimus, death) – Septimus’s death and report of death [snapshot: pp. 164-165 – death at the party]C (Currie: on Mrs Dalloway; against (?) Ricoeur) – Septimus, Bradshaw, time? [snapshot: p. 63: “Time split its husk…”]D (Currie: prolepsis; Mrs Dalloway: suicide, Peter anticipating reporting his love to Clarissa) – Peter and Clarissa (storylines) [snapshot: p. 40: “He had deposited his garland.”]

16. Group 1 (Kaikor, Vanessa, Andrea, Ella)Big Ben – example of what it means for the characters. Link to power/ social system? Are we more or less subjected to ‘monumental time’ today?Group 2 (Luke, Evelyn, Lauren, Lili) How are Clarissa and Septimus linked? How is time related to this? How does S’s death shape their relative timelines/storylines?Group 3 (Ellie, Nikhita, Nasheik, Amarachi)Currie: time cannot go backwards; memory in Mrs D not true anachrony. How far is he disagreeing with Ricoeur? Does it feel like anachrony? Group 4 (Isla, Hannah, Lera, Leyre) Does the novel/ do we as readers anticipate Septimus’s suicide? Clues/ evidence? How far do the characters in the novel/ do we live our lives in the anticipation of looking back at them (Currie’s idea of inbuilt prolepsis)? Give examples.

17. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative II, 100-112 What function do the repeated references to Big Ben serve in Mrs Dalloway as Ricoeur sees it? How are they meaningful for the characters? Give us a couple of examples. How might this relate to Woolf’s intention for the novel, discussed in her diary, as being “to criticise the social system, to show it at work at its most intense.” (Diary, June 1923, 248)[for us today] Are there equivalents today? Is our experience of time more scattered, less homogeneous? Does the idea of ‘monumental time’ still pertain, and if so, how and by what mechanisms?

18. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative II, 100-112 What links does Ricoeur see between Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith? How is time related to these connections? How does Septimus’s death shape retrospectively (and prospectively) their relative times/temporalities? Do we get a sense of Ricoeur’s own point of view on their respective attitudes to life (and time)? Woolf had originally intended Clarissa to kill herself – any thoughts on how that would have changed things?

19. Mark Currie, About Time, ch. 3, ch. 5What are the main point(s) Currie is making about the temporality of Mrs Dalloway (in the comments on pp. 76-77, and p. 36)? How might he be challenging Ricoeur, and how agreeing with him? Does this go beyond simply a commonsense understanding of time’s one-way directionality?

20. Mark Currie, About Time, ch. 3: anticipationWhat is Currie’s argument about the idea that prolepsis is ‘built in’, pervasive, in the tense of classical narrative fiction (p. 30) – that we encounter, in Peter Brooks’s words, the “anticipation of retrospection” when we read? Do you think we (or the narrative) anticipate(s) Septimus’s suicide? How do we read Peter’s laying the news of his being in love like a ‘garland’ before Clarissa? (a few pages after the passage we read together in weeks 1+2)? Did he live that love affair, do we think, “in a mode of anticipation of the act of narrating [it] afterwards” (Currie, 40)? [We constantly shape our lives as narratives – looking forward or back; who are the audiences (real or virtual) we choose for those stories?]

21. Week 4: Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel’, The Dialogic Imagination Read the whole thing, but concentrate in preparing for the seminar on the Concluding Remarks and the examples of chronotopes there. Find a passage in Mrs Dalloway that brings time and space into an interesting relationship. Find a chronotope from Mrs Dalloway or Ali Smith’s The Accidental (a motif or narrative feature that ‘thickens’ or brings to the fore the idea of time) and explore its operation in relation to the meanings of the novel (and if possible make links to other instances of the same chronotope in other fiction/ narratives of any kind), to present for 5 mins in the seminar.