Redefining "the Present": Bitter Bierce, James Joyce and H.G. Wells

I do not define time, space, place and motion, as being well known to all.  Isaac Newton, Principia, 1687

I had some lingering thoughts about my post from two days ago which briefly touched on Joyce's dreamy Finnegan's Wake (published in 1939, just two years before the author's death), which led me to the language-creating, never-endingness of one day in his Ulysses* (1922).  It is also a novel of time, reprocessing its time-units lile old Zeno, finding halves of time in regressive size and in greater numbers, roiling around like fly-swatted mercury; we never do get to the bottom of time although it does slow it down considerably.  It follows a slight but powerful literary history, treating time somewhat like the earlier (earliest?) Poe, and especially like that clock ticking in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment (1866), where action is laid bar to exhaustive and minute interpretation, waiting for no person. 

A little later on comes Ambrose ("Bitter") Bierce, a crummudeonly misanthrope with a razor eye for criticism for everything beyond himself.  My guess is that every other person in the U.S. past the age of 30 has read his Alabama-based "An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge" (1893) in which a lifetime or so could be lived in the moment that it takes for a man killed by hanging. (I have a feeling that this was a very apt way for Bierce to look at his own life, right up to the moment where he rode into infinity in the Mexican desert.)  The prgoression of time is interrupted to tell the tale, everything taking place in the time that it takes to travel eight feet. What I didn't know when I read the story for the first time was how unusual, groundbreaking, it was for the distortion of time in this way in literature.  Monet and Impressionism Inc.  were at it for a little from the 1860's or so, but it seems to me that in literature this fracturing of time was pretty scarce.

These authors were performing experiments with the vast horizon of time, creating a new space in the very slim spectrum that we call the "present".  In another way, Proust's Remembrance of Things Past explores past action in a way that redefines what we can think of as a "normal" present.  Looking forward, too, can have a pulling effect on the present, as we can see in the novels of the future by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. 

Time in physics is the orders-of-magnitude incendiary to this discussion--it is the fundamental, measurable scalar unit from which stuff like motion  and energy and fields are derived. Things get really interesting in the history of science once you move through Galileo and Newton and Maxwell and get to the time of Planck and Einstein and Minkowski .  Interestingly, the most significant changes occurring in the treatment of time and the definition of the present come in the period from 1865-1915--a particularly fertile period of revolution and modernity, where nearly every discipline undergoes a radical, fundamental change. Everything except political studies, where the only really new thing to come into the fray at that time was the introduction of the concentration camp during the Boer War.  Everything else changes in remarkable ways:  physics, mathematics, art, music, literature, theater, dance.  Astonishing.

If I was really clever I would find a way for this post to be circuitous, but I can't, so I'll just end by saying that I'm out of time.  

*I've included the first lines of the Joyce novels in the continued reading section, along with a few choice others. 

**For several years in the early 1980's I read all of Anthony Burgess' novels, collecting them as well.  I always liked A Clockwork Orange for its dark humor and inventiveness, and for each of  the few times that I met Burgess I had a copy of the book for him to sign.  He was always very gracious, signing my books with appropriate flourishes--with music, or Arabic, or whatever was implied by the subject of the book. The exploding orange is far and away my favorite.

First sentences of novels:

riverrun, past Eve and Adams, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth, Castle and Environs. Joyce, Finnegan's Wake

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. —James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)

Call me Ishmael. —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. —Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)

A screaming comes across the sky. —Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

Where now? Who now? When now? —Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (1953; trans. Patrick Bowles)

Money . . . in a voice that rustled. —William Gaddis, J R (1975)

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. —Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. —Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. —Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)

Comments

[Erin]

The last English prof I had before I graduated with my BA in English (what can you do?) told us that Ulysses was inspired by Mrs. Joyce giving Joyce a hand under the table at the pub on their first date. I still can't read it.

[Jeff]

You have to wonder about tales like that, although not too much, but one does wonder about what a well-bred young man's response to that would have been? A simple thank-you? Reciprocation? I don't know if I'd ever try Ulysses again. I like reading about it, though. Most recently was "The Delighted States" by Adam Thirwell, an impossibly young-looking scholar who writes almost ecstatically about Joyce, Sterne, Flaubert, Tolstoy, all connected in some way with other writers I didn't know about. A fun book.

[John Ptak]

JEFF: P_und had something very smart to say about Ulysses, but I don't quote him. I doubt too that I could devote time to JJ at this point. Maybe after all of this time there's so much more stuff to get in the way of reading it and understanding it that it just isn't worth the effort and the time. The Thirwell book sounds like something I'd like too and something that I'd probably forget the instant it left the nightstand.

[John Ptak]

ERIN: I dunno. I don't really understand your reaction.

[Jeff]

There's nothing to understand in Erin's reaction, although it made me smile. We could dissect it, try to explicate it, wonder if it meant that the Prof's little story about the first date was meant to provoke interest sufficient to read the entire novel, or wonder if the Prof was tired and sarcastically dismissing the novel, or wonder if Erin was aware of either or both of these possibilities, or wonder if Erin should be read with or without irony, or wonder if Erin likes Molly Bloom's soliloquoy, and if so, wonder if Erin is a girl or a boy, or ... wait ... John, is this what you mean by not understanding? Well, still, it made me smile.

[John Ptak]

Jeff: honestly, none of those six points occurred to me. The statement just got "all muddy" in my head. But Ive got to say that this way of getting your head wrapped around a question is what makes you a great librarian. And just about anything else. Now I'd like to hear from Erin....