The Waste Land: Time

Question 1

Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ exposes the ‘narrating instance’ of the author. How does Laura Marcus summarise the effect of this?

Answer 1

“once the fabricating work of a narrator become fully audible, then the time of fiction need no longer follow the time of causally linked events, time’s straight arrow”

Question 2

How did Gerard Genette believe that the exposure of poetic construct disrupted the hegemony of the poetic event?

Answer 2

• it exposes that the execution of the poem and the creation exist in different times and are not temporally/ hegemonically aligned

Question 3

What two books of Ford Madox Ford have relevance in relation to time?

Answer 3

‘The Good Soldier’ (1915)

‘Parade’s End’

Question 4

How do both of Ford’s novels ‘The Good Soldier’

and ‘Parade’s End’ serve to liberate time?

Answer 4

TGS - disregards chronology, invokes one event and then describes another etc.

• novel is told in a series of flashbacks in non-chronological order
• indicated his pioneering developing of literary impressionism

P’s E - time is supple and reversible, characters appear and then disappear until several chapters later, the violence of rupture takes over where important events are elided etc. (like Woolf’s ‘To the Lighthouse’)

Question 5

How does war impact the treatment of time?

Answer 5

• the ‘time’ of war is aligned with catastrophism - lengthy delay for anything to happen until events have become destabilised

Question 6

Ford believed that the shift in consideration of narrative time was really located in the shift in ‘narrator’s time’ - why is this?

Answer 6

• the change in narrative time was due to the faithful recreation of how a narrator would tell a story in life - stumbling, digressing, recovering, stalling etc.

Question 7

What sense/ evidence do we have that time was becoming denser?

Answer 7

• Ulysses
• To the Lighthouse
  (ie. dense enough for a very short period to stretch over an entire book)
• due to the contraction of time - railways and trains etc.
• technology of violence - automatic weapons eg. rifle/ machine gun of WW1
• Freud’s ‘the unconscious’
• memory - Marcel Proust ‘In Search of Lost Time’

Question 8

When did Henry Bergson put forward his idea of ‘duration’? Summarise what he said

Answer 8

• 1889: Time and Free Will
• our sense of duration defies spatial terms as in science
• duration is variable

Question 9

How does the Proustian revolution reflect what Virginia Woolf discusses in ‘Modern Fiction’?

Answer 9

• he reconstructs an experience from within the mind of a single individual

Question 10

How does Virginia Woolf’s ‘To the Lighthouse’ reflect her struggle between lived time and the time of the universe?

Answer 10

• slows time to the expansion of a single day and then speeds through 10 years in almost the same space

Question 11

How is time examined in Husserl’s phenomenology?

Answer 11

• Husserl developed a theory of ‘retention’ - attempts to describe the duration of ‘immediate experience’

Question 12

How did Heidegger radicalise Husserl’s thoughts on time?

Answer 12

• stated that all the modalities of time receive authentic meaning in relation to the conception of futurity as a temporal projection towards death
• we need to accept death in order to achieve authentic life

Question 13

How does Wyndham Lewis develop a counter-temporal novel on the basis of his view that the ‘time-cult’ of modernist was a distraction and a mysticism?

Answer 13

• his novel ‘the Childermass’ follows no coherent structure, no plot, no logical succession of incident

Question 14

Modernism does not reach a consensus or solution on the problem of time ie. looking back to the distant past for some glimpse into the future - what might be the dividing line?

Answer 14

• whether there was an achievement of synthesis or equilibrium

Question 15

How did Lawrence reflect on the confusion of Modern relationship to time?

Answer 15

• there is the maintenance of a confident projection into the future while a simultaneous disbelief in any redemptive course for a fallen modern humanity

Question 16

How does Darran Anderson summarise Modernism’s relation to the past?

Answer 16

“to make a great leap forwards, sometimes you have to take a few steps back, or look in another direction”

Question 17

How did Henri Bergson believe we experienced life?

Answer 17

• not as a succession of separate conscious states along an imaginary line
• actually as a continuous flow with no clearly demarcated beginnings and ends

Question 18

How does Virginia Woolf invert Proust’s technique (as influenced by Henri Bergson)?

Answer 18

• she condensces a pivotal moment in the subjective lives of her characters by placing it in brackets in Time Passes
• subordinates these events to the objective time of the calendar

Question 19

Why did Wyndham Lewis have such an issue with Bergson?

Answer 19

• distanced hmself from these ideas because he believed Modernists had fallen into a ‘time-cult’ that was deeply Romantic and distanced from the reality of life

Question 20

Where does Bergson locate the distinction between spirit and body?

Answer 20

• (as opposed to Descartes who makes the distinction in spatial terms)
• spirit is the abode of the past, body of the present

Question 21

What is the distinction that Bergson makes between the two types of memory: automatic memory and true memory?

Answer 21

• automatic memory is utilising the memory for a utilitarian purpose - non-reflective and mechnical repetition
• true memory is registering the past in the form of ‘image rememberance’ - a contemplative and fundamentally spiritual kind of memory

Question 22

How does Eliot characterise the benefit of referring to earlier forms of literature?

Answer 22

“shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history”

Question 23

How does modernism’s relationship to time differ from that of postmodernism?

Answer 23

• modernism maintains the homogeneity of the present

- distinguishes between past and present

Question 24

What did Levi-Strauss’ 1962 ‘The Savage Mind’ say?-

Answer 24

Lévi-Strausscoined the term bricolage and described himself as a bricoleur

Question 25

What is a good quotation from ‘The Good Soldier’ to indicate disruptions of time?

Answer 25

“I don’t know how it is best to put this thing down—whether it would be better to try and tell the story from the beginning, as if it were a story; or whether to tell it from this distance of time”