I am currently reading through T. H. White’s The Once and Future King for the very first time, and I must admit that as I read, I’m constantly distracted by thoughts about time, temporality, and how Merlyn can live backwards through time while still functionally conversing and building relationships. As someone who has long been interested in how literature can play with time and temporality, I’ve decided to share my thoughts, questions, and puzzles in the hopes that doing so will clear my mind of them. It’s a rich story, with many layers of satire and political commentary to work through and critique, but I just can’t seem to focus on anything but the mechanics of the story’s temporal flow.
Note: I wrote this to an assumed audience of people who have read the novel rather than giving context for each example and question. I also wrote through my thought process, such that some of what I say early on I reject by the end.
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Merlyn explains early on (p 35) how time works for him:
…Now ordinary people people are born forwards in Time, if you understand what I mean, and nearly everything in the world goes forward too. This makes it quite easy for the ordinary people to live… But I unfortunately was born at the wrong end of time, and I have to live backwards from in front, while surrounded by a lot of people living forwards from behind. Some people call it having second sight…
…You see, one gets confused with Time, when it is like that. All one’s tenses get muddled, for one thing. If you know what is going to happen to people, and not what has happened to them, it makes it difficult to prevent it happening, if you don’t want it to have happened, if you see what I mean?
While I can understand the notion of “second sight”, the problem of conversation, which he indicates slightly here in his reference to tenses, remains a puzzle to me. Beyond the issue of word choice, temporal flow is an ordered thing, and so is the English language, and so if Merlyn is living backwards through time, does he a) say and hear all of his words backwards? Is “hello” “olleh” to him, as is suggested when he summons Neptune to turn the Wart into a perch (p 45)? The example reads thus:
Snylrem stnemilpmoc ot enutpen dna lliw eh yldnik tpecca siht yob sa a hsif?
Which rendered forwards reads:
Merlyn’s compliments to Neptune and will he kindly accept this boy as a fish?
This raises the next question, then, b) why aren’t the words presented in backwards order? Theoretically, Merlyn saying “Well hello there!” should actually be “!ereht olleh lleW” but this spell seems to hinge on just the words themselves being backwards as they fall in forwards order. Side question: does this mean that Neptune also progresses backwards through time? Because otherwise my next theory doesn’t quite work.
One possibility is that Merlyn lives through snippets of time in a forward motion and then jumps back. This example indicates that the jump happens on a word by word basis, but if that were the mechanism, then he possibly would not be able to move temporally unless he was speaking. Or maybe he can control, at least to a certain extent, when he experiences things in a forward motion, and when he lets time pass him naturally. This could very well be related to his ability to leave the Wart with the Geese for what felt to Wart like days while only passing one night in Wart’s “real” life (p 170), and also for his ability to seemingly shift dimensions or travel through space:
There was something magical about the time and space commanded by Merlyn, for the Wart seemed to be passing many days and night among the grey people, during the one spring night when he had left his body asleep under the bearskin.
The question then remains to what extent he can control this, for his ability to answer questions seems to rely on it; perhaps he can live as much as a day in forward motion, but then wakes up a day earlier, which would give him just enough temporal congruency to build sensible conversations – for instance, how else would he be able to know that Wart was “Still sighing” (p 180) before he actually sighed (from a backwards temporal progress), or that the Wart is going to ask about the knighting ceremony? How else could he laugh at a joke or scoff at an inane remark?
But that seems fundamentally wrong as well, for he laments when he meets the Wart for the first (for the last) time the limited time he has remaining (also p 35, appearing in between the two paragraphs I quote at the top of the post). Merlyn also here seems to be a little puzzled about the ordering of things, as if he is just simply living a consistent temporal flow just like our own, except in reverse, which is, I think, the real and confusing truth of the matter:
“Have I told you this before?”
“No, we only met about half an hour ago.”
“So little time to pass?” said Merlyn, and a big tear ran down to the end of his nose. He wiped it off with his pajamas and added anxiously, “Am I going to tell it you again?”
Besides completely breaking my heart, this scene is one that gave me pause – I read it over again a few times, and tried to imagine playing it out from Merlyn’s point of view. He knows the end of his tutelage of Arthur is coming, as I imagine that the Wart tells him of it later on when he is older and better understands Merlyn’s temporal flow (though I’ve not finished the book, even if it does not come up in the prose I can imagine it happens in an “off screen” moment). But where later on Merlyn always seems to know exactly what is coming and responds just exactly right, here he breaks a little, exposing the complexity and confusion of his temporal progress.
If we were to experience it from his point of view, the ordering would be something like this (excepting for the backwards flow of individual words, for a moment, and sticking to phrases):
“So little time to pass?” said Merlyn, and a big tear ran down to the end of his nose. He wiped it off with his pajamas and added anxiously, “Am I going to tell it you again?”
“No, we only met about half an hour ago.”
“Have I told you this before?”
We can suppose that Merlyn, knowing the time already, asks only out of emotion, but there is in his demeanor a general sense of wishing to be contradicted, suggesting that his ability to converse is not solely based on reports from others about what has already been said. It seems rather that Merlyn is not only responding to the conversational points of his future (and our past), but that he is suggesting and engineering them to some degree.
Let’s take another example from the end of Merlyn’s conversation with the Wart about the process of becoming a Knight, wherein he once again gets a bit confused (p 181-182). Here is the selection in forward motion:
“If I were to be made a knight,” said the Wart, staring dreamily into the fire, “I should insist on doing my vigil by myself, as Hob does with his hawks, and I should pray to God to let me encounter all the evil in the world in my own person, so that if I conquered there would be none left, and, if I were defeated, I would be the one to suffer for it.”
“That would be extremely presumptuous of you,” said Merlyn,” and you would be conquered, and you would suffer for it.”
“I shouldn’t mind.”
“Wouldn’t you? Wait till it happens and see.”
“Why do people not think, when they are grown up, as I do when I am young?”
“Oh dear,” said Merlyn. “You are making me feel confused. Suppose you wait till you are grown up and know the reason?”
“I don’t think that is an answer at all,” replied the Wart, justly.
Merlyn wrung his hands.
“Well, anyway,” he said, “suppose they did not let you stand against all the evil in the world?”
“I could ask,” said the Wart.
“You could ask,” repeated Merlyn.
He thrust he end of his beard into his mouth, stared tragically at the fire, and began to munch it fiercely.
There are some aspects of this that are simple to comprehend. Merlyn knows what troubles the Wart will face in the future (Merlyn’s past), and feels the emotion of his memory. I am guessing that there is also some anxiety about protecting the Wart as long as possible, as he lamented back in his first (last) conversation with Wart (p 35): “If you know what is going to happen to people, and not what has happened to them, it makes it difficult to prevent it happening, if you don’t want it to have happened…”. But it also seems clear that this is not a conversation that Merlyn is going through by rote memory, but that is rather unfolding for him in the moment just as it is for the Wart. Let us look at the selection in reverse, once again by phrase rather than word (we are still reading in a forward motion, after all).
He thrust he end of his beard into his mouth, stared tragically at the fire, and began to munch it fiercely.
“You could ask,” repeated Merlyn.
“I could ask,” said the Wart.
“Well, anyway,” he said, “suppose they did not let you stand against all the evil in the world?”
Merlyn wrung his hands.
“I don’t think that is an answer at all,” replied the Wart, justly.
“Oh dear,” said Merlyn. “You are making me feel confused. Suppose you wait till you are grown up and know the reason?”
“Why do people not think, when they are grown up, as I do when I am young?”
“Wouldn’t you? Wait till it happens and see.”
“I shouldn’t mind.”
“That would be extremely presumptuous of you,” said Merlyn,” and you would be conquered, and you would suffer for it.”
“If I were to be made a knight,” said the Wart, staring dreamily into the fire, “I should insist on doing my vigil by myself, as Hob does with his hawks, and I should pray to God to let me encounter all the evil in the world in my own person, so that if I conquered there would be none left, and, if I were defeated, I would be the one to suffer for it.”
It makes rather a lot of sense, as a conversation. It also makes sense, going “forward”, that Merlyn then goes on to describe the ceremony of achieving knighthood. Hearing the Wart speak of the vigil of knights would definitely prompt it. The meaning is quite different in this order, though – it is rather as if Merlyn is wistfully and hopelessly pondering a different future for the Wart than the one he knows will come to pass. Merlyn, giving in to the reality of what he cannot prevent, vaguely suggests that the Wart will understand when he is older. Then when the Wart asks about staying young in mind, Merlyn tells him he would be conquered, and suffer for it. But in this order, we see the Wart not cowed with caution against presumption, as seems to be Merlyn’s aim in the forward facing version of the conversation, but inspired to even greater and more tragic idealism, as he takes up a romanticized ideal of sacrificing himself for the sake of others.
The mechanics of it all still elude me, but the sad beauty and magic of Merlyn’s reverse temporality have become more a little more evident to me through writing this, leaving me in a more pleasant state of puzzlement than before. This seems like a fine place to end this reflection, and get back to reading.
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