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    • Time, Temporality, and T. H. White

      Posted at 8:09 pm by Michelle Joelle, on July 11, 2016

      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.

      ———-

      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.

      Posted in Essays | 13 Comments | Tagged arthuriana, books, literature, longreads, philosophy, reading, T. H. White, temporality, The Once and Future King, time
    • Final Thoughts on Literary Time Consciousness

      Posted at 12:00 pm by Michelle Joelle, on July 11, 2014

      In lieu of Philosopher Fridays this week, I’m offering some concluding remarks of my thematic mini-series on Literary Time Consciousness. It’s been a lot of fun to focus my posts for the past few weeks, and I’ve learned a lot from writing through C.S. Lewis, Boethius, Heraclitus, Husserl, and Kafka, as well as from reading comments and suggested articles.

      If I had to sum up the series in brief, I’d be left with more questions than answers. Are we better off describing the temporal experience of streaming as an eternal presence, as Husserl suggests, or to conclude that “There is No Now” at all, as is argued by Marcelo Gleiser (article pointed out to me by SelfAwarePatterns, special thanks for the fascinating find!)? Does “objective time” bind us in a non-reciprocal way that grounds our phenomenological experience, or can we unground that by the way we approach life – and literature?

      While I’m certainly not done with these questions of time and narrative temporality, I’ll need to do a lot of reading before I continue, and so my aim here is to suggest where this inquiry might take me next.

      1) For a general overview of time and temporality as philosophic concepts, check out the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entries on time and temporal consciousness. How Stuff Works has a fun little introduction to the science of time that nicely complements the SEP’s take.

      2) If you’re looking for another pre-Socratic view on time as the measure of temporal consciousness, you’ll want to look into Antiphon the Sophist.

      3) Turning to the post-Socratic, I can’t help recommend my favorite philosopher, Saint Augustine, particularly Book Eleven of Confessions (or if you’re feeling a little lazy, there’s this. I found it because a student plagiarized it, but it turned out to be a pretty decent summary) and this nice little commentary from the Harpers Magazine Blog (fun fact: I used to fantasize about working as an editor or writer for Harper’s).

      4) Jumping radically forward in time (and right past Kant, for the present – though I should probably mention him too) I found this 80’s-tastic educational video about Newton and Einstein’s understanding of time to be extremely accessible. The combination of creepy synth music and the fuzziness of the image makes your feel like you’re getting lectured by a soft-spoken ghost, though. For more depth, I like the SEP’s entry on Newton, a Discovery Magazine article for an overview on Einstein. I’m not sure how I feel about this post on Einstein’s understanding of time from the site Everything Forever, but it’s worth a look.

      5) Those looking to continue the conversation about time and temporality as literary constructs, look here, here, and here. I’m still mulling over some of the points in these links, but perhaps sometime I’ll be able to put together some commentary.

      So there you have it. With that, I bring Literary Time Consciousness to a close here at Soliloquies, but I would love to see what other have to say on the topic. If you find yourself moved to post about subjective narrative time and temporality (particularly in literature) I invite you to post a link in the comments here (or Pingback to this post) so I can find it!

      Posted in Series | 2 Comments | Tagged Augustine, einstein, links, literary time consciousness, newton, philosophy, Physics, temporality, time
    • Philosopher Fridays: Husserl On Time Consciousness, Part Two

      Posted at 12:00 pm by Michelle Joelle, on July 4, 2014

      Welcome back to Philosopher Fridays. This week, I’ll be continuing to explore Husserl’s Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness as a part of my thematic mini-series on Literary Time Consciousness. Last time, I set up some vocabulary terms – specifically “protention” and “retention”, and this time, I’ll be looking at what this means for Husserl in greater depth. Additonally, for this post, I draw heavily from my undergraduate philosophy thesis on time, and as such I owe much of my understanding to the professors who guided me.

      For Husserl, the act of knowing is dependent on a temporal construction of consciousness, since meaning is derived only in reflection and expectation and cannot be ascribed to an isolated moment, which in itself has no “real” existence as anything other than a conscious reconstruction of the streaming present. We perceive “real” objects in a stream of primal impressions that exist in a fleeting way, their coherence half dependent on the fact that something came before, and half dependent on the fact that something will come after. It’s like a string of twinkling lights; when one is lit, it casts a dim light on those to which it is immediately adjacent. There is nothing fundamental in this casting that indicates which light will light up next and for how long, nor does it tell you which light came before. It’s not random, but is also is not (while we’re perceiving it) bound by any teleological causal order.

      IMG_5057

      Recalling a past event (or remembering which light came on before), and looking forward to what you expect to happen in the future requires an act of intention. Knowledge only makes sense for Husserl in terms of teleological intentionality, which is the meaningful stringing together of otherwise meaningless moments. What time objectively is and how we intentionally perceive it are two different things, laden with hidden assumptions and assertions, under which we operate every day, and it’s not entirely clear for Husserl whether or not we can read an “essence” of time outside of our own subjective, temporal perception.

      The question, simply stated: Is temporality a mere trapping of the act of consciousness, or does it have objective existence outside of the act of perceiving?   

      In other words, which is more real – some notion of “pure truth” which exists outside of the perceptive quality of duration (i.e.: “the essence of time itself”), or the intention of the act, which is defined by that streaming quality?  When examining the nature of a teleologically structured temporality, under which we all generally operate on a day to day (if we’re to be productive at all) basis, what exactly are we looking at, for Husserl? Are we examining a pure truth?  And further, can such a pure truth exist without the act of consciousness that intends it? When Husserl works to make the “distinction between the temporal act of knowing and the atemporal nature of ideality,”[1] under which category does he place that very temporality?

      The teleological purpose that we give to perceived time is as an “object” of our knowledge, broken free from its streaming perception and held apart from time so that we might examine it, as we examine any object we seek to know. An object of knowledge is in this way atemporal, its durative qualities frozen in favor of some evaluation.

      However, the act of knowing cannot be anything but durative, since it is an act that requires intentionality (reflection and expectation). But this doesn’t mean, for Husserl, that there is no reality outside of our psyches; in fact, he soundly rejects psychologism, which is a method of epistemology that says that all that we know is rooted in the psyche, including those things that are considered to be purely theoretical in nature – math, logic, and ontology.  Husserl says instead that there is a difference between the empirical and what he calls the “ideal,” (the “pure truth”) but he draws the line between empirical phenomena and the objective real in a fairly unique way.  To Husserl, “Real” phenomena are those which can be empirically sensed, while psychical knowing is merely a subjective, nonempirically valid (aprioristic) entity. So far, not so unique.

      However Husserl goes on to argue that the conscious act of perceiving requires both in a way that suggests interdependence, rather than a hierarchy. Dan Zahavi writes in his work, Husserl’s Phenomenology :

      Although the principles of logic are grasped and known by consciousness, we remain conscious of something ideal that is irreducible to and utterly different the real psychical acts of knowing.[2]

      This isn’t – as it is for others with similar views (in his time and before) – something we can overcome by using our rational minds, but a necessary entanglement. The very qualities which allow us to engage in the act of knowing are the same qualities which prevent us from examining our own knowing powers. Its a struggle that can be seen in Augustine’s attempts to know himself as made in the image of God, in Aquinas’ exploration of self-knowledge, and Rousseau’s frustration with philosophy. As the latter says in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, “It is by dint of studying man that we have rendered him unknowable.”

      So what does this mean for Husserl’s understanding of internal time consciousness?

      Essentially, it means that we don’t just perceive time as it is – first we intend it. In order for us to know time as an object, it must be held separately from its “pure truth”, which is inescapable as we perceive ourselves in act, and then it becomes something which we then perceive. As Husserl puts it, “a value has no position in time,”[3] and so any time we take a perception and add something to it, we remove it from its position and effectively reposition it as a new perception for our knowing selves. Says James M. Edie in his critical commentary on Husserl:

      This is the realm of fundamentally experienced and irreversible temporal synthesis (phenomenal time) on the basis of which we objectify our perceptual realities….[4]

      All recollections and expectations are made up of the content we have perceived in this way, requiring some conscious revision in order to allow us to take that which is perceived and make it into an object of our knowledge. The notion of time as an inescapable measure of the perceptual world is still just a part of the perceptual world.  According to Barry Smith and David Woodruff Smith in The Cambridge Companion to Husserl:

      …whatever apodicity might seem to be present in reflection on experience, all phenomenological analyses of structures of experience are in principle revisable.[5]

      While the process itself is ontologically fixed and passively received, that which is objectified by the teleological structuring of recollection and expectation is not. It is important to note the inherent revisability of objectified perception. It isn’t simply a single revision, that is to say, this does not mean that there is a “real” version and then we make up a new one. Instead, there is a “real” version that has no fixed meaning that we passively receive as an impression, and then as we come to know it, we turn it into something that is fixable by our own active determination. No valuations are “real” and as such cannot be passively received – only built. And naturally, the same can be said for our perception and examinations of time itself, giving rise to the distinction we create between fixed time and streaming temporality.

      However, that doesn’t mean we can override this passive streaming – our internal time consciousness is what sets us up for us a model which we can follow intentionally through reflection. Even as is causes a separation between the “real” that we perceive and the “object” that we know, Zahavi says:

      It is, as [Husserl] writes, because of the retention that consciousness can be made into an object.[6]

      Through the act of knowing, we are able to reflect on past acts of knowing as atemporal bits of knowledge because of the linear model. Reflection is dependent on this relationship with passive retention and protention, and is indeed made by it. Because of our internal streaming temporality, we are able to construe “objects in subjective time,” and according to Zahavi:

      It is only the moment we start to thematize these acts, be it in a reflection or recollection, that they are constituted as object in subjective, sequential time.[7]

      We use one to create the other within our conscious flow, leaving room not for wholesale rejection (as many philosophers argue) of our temporal nature, but for suggestibility. The very revocability that our streaming consciousness enables is one that can be reapplied to itself, leaving us somewhat in control of how we perceive that very streaming.

      And I wonder: could we construe a subjective reality and intentionality without expanding the streaming model to a thematically teleological phenomenon? Could we exist in the present moment (as I suggest in my dance example from last week’s post and as is promised by proponents of meditation) and allow ourselves respite from the inexorable march of active revision? Does the subjectivity of time, so dependent on our conscious intention diminish the power of its hold on the way we live our lives, and the way we think and write, leaving the possibility open for more than just the deadline driven, phase driven, clock driven, order driven experienced reality?

      And that’s that for Husserl! *phew*. I’ll continue this exploration next Wednesday, when I will tackle these questions in terms of literature, and in particular, the literature of Franz Kafka.

      —

      [1]  Dan Zahavi.  Husserl’s Phenomenology.  Standford : Standford University Press.  2003.  9

      [2] Zahavi 9

      [3]  Edmund Husserl. The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness. Ed. Martin Heidegger. Trans. By James. S. Churchill. Intro. By Calvin O. Schrag. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1964. 126

      [4] James M. Edie. Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology: A Critical Commentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. 97

      [5] Barry Smith, and David Woodruff Smith.  “Introduction.”  The Cambridge Companion to Husserl.  Ed. By Barry Smith and David Woodruff Smith. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press.  1995.  35

      [6] Zahavi 89

      [7] Zahavi 89

      Posted in Series | 1 Comment | Tagged husserl, internal time consciousness, literary time consciousness, phenomenology, philosopher fridays, philosophy, temporality, time
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