Chapter 6: Backwards Time
It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition that it must be lived forwards.
(Kierkegaard 1999: 3)
In ‘The Typology of Detective Fiction’, Todorov distinguishes between the whodunit and the thriller on the grounds that the former is a double story and the latter a single one (2000: 139). The whodunit is double in the sense that it is the story of ‘the days of the investigation which begin with the crime, and the days of the drama which lead up to it’.
The simplicity of this observation is matched only by its importance, because it means that the whodunit goes backwards as it goes forwards, or more precisely that it reconstructs the time line of the crime in the time line of the investigation. In the thriller, on the other hand, the narrative coincides with the action in a single story. The experience of reading the whodunit is characterised by curiosity, since it proceeds from effect to cause, whereas the thriller is characterised by suspense and proceeds from cause to effect.
The hermeneutic circle of presentification and depresentification with which I have been characterising the relationship between reading and living can be seen here at work in the relationship between one type of fiction and another, insofar as the whodunnit works backwards from a known outcome while the thriller proceeds forwards into an unknown future. At first sight, the temporal logic of the whodunit is a paradigm for fiction in general, since the story of the crime unfolds in relation to a future event which is already known and lies in wait, whereas the temporal logic of the thriller is that of life, of an open and unpredictable future. But as is the case for most typological boundaries, this is a difference that is not easy to uphold. In the whodunit, the outcome may be known in the form of the crime, but not in terms of the identity of the culprit, so that we anticipate an unknown future in the whodunit no less than we may, through various forms of analepsis, take excursions into the past in the thriller, making curiosity and suspense a feature of both reading processes. In the case of the whodunit, Todorov also points out that the ‘second story’
is often told by a narrator who explicitly acknowledges that he is writing a book, or that it is the story of that very book. One of the reasons that the whodunit acts as a kind of typological model for much fiction beyond the genre of the whodunit is that its description seems to work very well for any narrative which involves an interplay between narrated time and the time of the narrative, where the time of the narrative functions as the site of self-conscious reflection both on past events and on the nature of writing about them. This is, after all, the double time of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and one of the recurring features of the Zeitroman as it is analysed by Ricoeur (1985).
The idea that moving forwards in time involves a backwards narration is more than just a novelistic structure, and might be thought of, with Proust, as the shape of time itself. It is possible to view ageing itself as a process of acquisition of memories, or the acquisition of a history, after the synchronicity and presence, or the hereness and nowness, of childhood. We have already discussed the phenomenon of archive fever, in which progress into the future is achieved through a continuous archiving of the present in order to relegate events to the past as quickly as possible. The structure of progression as regression, or of forwards and backwards narration, is particularly clear in the case of theoretical physics, in which one of the principal areas of progress over the last century has been the filling out of the story of the history and the origins of the universe, so that progress is made by reconstructing the time line of events leading up to the story which is now being told. We should not be too surprised that theoretical physics, when it translates its sums into narratives, should display the same structural or temporal logic as detective fiction, since the whodunit (perhaps we should say ‘whodunit or whatdunit?’) is the very structure of narrative explanation in general, whether it operates in fiction or in science. A narrative explanation, as many historiographers have observed, is always an account of the present, and an attempt to dominate the past by understanding it from the point of view of the present, as if progress is a continuous improvement of that understanding.
The detective and the historian share this structure of moving forwards by knowing the past. These two roles are combined with a comic megalomania by Graham Swift’s Waterland, in which Tom Crick, a fenland history teacher, explains a single incident, the murder of Freddie Parr in the summer of 1943, by reconstructing a time line that goes back to the earliest geological and biological history of the fens and works forwards through the entire family history and the broader social history in which they are embedded: ‘It’s called reconstructing the crime.From last to first.
It’s an analogy of the historical method; an analogy of how you discover how you’ve become what you are’ (2002: 312). Waterland is a novel which moves forwards by moving backwards, in a process of acquisition of fens history, of Crick history, and of a myriad of stories in general which operate as explanations of events to come. And it is not only the historian’s method that produces this temporal loop. History itself proceeds this way:
It goes in two directions at once. It goes backwards as it goes forwards.
It loops. It takes detours. Do not fall into the illusion that history is a welldisciplined and unflagging column marching unswervingly into the future. Do you remember, I asked you - a riddle - how does a man move? One step forward, one step back (and sometimes one step to the side). Is this absurd?
No. Because if he never took that step forward - Or - another of my classroom maxims: There are no compasses for journeying in time. As far as our sense of direction in this unchartable dimension is concerned, we are like lost travellers in a desert. We believe we are going forward, towards the oasis of Utopia. But how do we know - only some imaginary figure looking down from the sky (let’s call him God) can know - that we are not moving in a great circle. (1984: 135)
This narrator knows what he thinks about time, and regularly formulates theses such as this which underlie the narrative form of the story itself. Waterland is therefore a novel full of explicit theorisation which finds its application in the storytelling itself: a novel which explores the theme of time through the temporal logic of storytelling. To this effect, the possibility that we are moving backwards, or in a great circle, when we think we are progressing forwards is pitched against the view of time as a river, or as the flow of water, with which it has been associated since well before Plato. The explicit theorising, or philosophising, about time in Waterland is typical of a certain kind of contemporary novel, and the discussion that follows aims to identify, diagnose and explain what it is that the contemporary novel has to tell us, if anything, about time.
However much the novel might philosophise explicitly on the subject of time, its difference from philosophy is marked by narrative form. The novelistic treatment of the question of time differs from the philosophical treatment in having at its disposal all the temporal resources of narrative fiction as a complement to the resources of reasoned argument.
If a philosophical discourse is fundamentally constative in its approach to time, in the sense that it makes arguments and statements which may be judged true or false on the subject of time, the narrative fiction is fundamentally capable of being constative and performative at the same time. Of course a novel might not openly philosophise about time, and equally might not deploy its temporal resources in any notable way: such a novel might be thought, at the constative and the performative level, to be a novel which is not about time.
But the focus of the first part of this discussion will be on the contemporary novel which explores the theme of time in both constative and performative ways. In this light we might ask whether the explicit philosophising about time in Waterland is in some way corroborated by the temporal structure of its narrative. The example above poses the question of the direction of time in terms of a tension between circular and linear understandings of time, as well as the apparent contradiciton between forwards and backwards motion. If this is the explicit reflection from the narrator, it takes little effort to establish that this is also the temporal structure of the narrative, and therefore that the narrator’s reflective commentary and his method of storytelling exist in a relation of mutual corroboration. If the entire span of narrated events is taken into account, the chronological sequence of Waterland begins in prehistory and ends in 1979, yet the novel begins and ends in 1943. The events of 1943 are explained by a considerable quantity of historical detail, particularly Crick family history from the mid-eighteenth century, and in turn offer an explanation of events subsequent to 1943, and ultimately for Tom’s predicament in the time locus of the narrator in 1979. This impressive chain of explanation is constructed through a kind of perpetual anachrony as the narrator refers forwards and backwards from the novel’s central events. The corroboration in question, between the philosophy of time that the novel advances through the mouthpiece of its historian narrator and the method of storytelling employed by that narrator is explicated in passages of commentary which repeatedly link the question of history with the mode of narrative both in general, and in relation to this specific narrative itself. The philosophy of time which views history as backwards and forwards motion is both enacted by and explicitly linked to the anachronistic temporal structure of the narrative.
In fact the constative and the performative modes of Waterland’s consideration of time - this cooperation between narrative commentary and fictional form - should be understood as nothing more than self-analysis: as the narrator contemplates the structure of his own story he is at the same time directed into flights of speculation about the connection of self-narration to history, about the cyclical nature of history in general, and about the shape of time.
If the theme of time and the temporal logic of storytelling seem to be inseparable here, we ought not to view this as a necessary condition. It is only necessary to think of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, or of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, to recognise that a novel is equally capable of espousing one view of time while performing another. But for Waterland, the corroboration is apparently absolute, and particularly so because the reciprocity between the novel’s formal structure and its explicit theorisation of time is largely forged by its tropological system, according to which the landscape of the fens, and in particular its rivers, provides a symbolic landscape through which philosophical arguments about time and narrative can be advanced. Hence, the discovery of Freddie’s body in the lock in July 1943 - that singular event around which the novel’s whole chain of narrative explanation is constructed - offers the lock as the analogue for a moment of presence, in which the flow of the river is artificially arrested. The novel’s images of water, particularly those of the irreversible flow of water, of rivers that cannot flow upwards, and of water being pumped upwards for the purposes of land reclamation assemble an allegorical network for the representation of, among other things, incest, explanation and the relationship between fact and fiction.
Cleverly, even the circularity of time can be incoporated by the metaphor of the river:
The Ouse flows on, unconcerned with ambition, whether local or national.
It flows now in more than one channel, its waters diverging, its strength divided, silt-prone, flood-prone. Yet it flows - oozes - on, as every river must, to the sea. And, as we all know, the sun and the wind suck up the water from the sea and disperse it on the land, perpetually refeeding the rivers. So that while the Ouse flows to the sea, it flows, in reality, like all rivers, only back to itself, to its own source; and that impression that a river moves only one way is an illusion. And it is only an illusion that what you throw (or push) into a river will be carried away, swallowed for ever, and never return. And that remark first put about, two and a half thousand years ago, by Heraclitus of Ephesus, that we cannot step twice into the same river, is not to be trusted.Because we are always stepping into the same river.
(145-6)
Such metaphors for the movement of time, in this case operating against the ordinary conception on time, require no great interpretative effort on the part of the reader. The narrator’s own commentary performs much of the interpretative work to identify the philosophical, or doctrinal, function of images drawn from the East Anglian landscape. As a result of this self-conscious, self-interpreting commentary, the novel’s rivers belong no more to the literal content of the work than they do to the explicit theorisation of time, and the relation of reciprocity which exists between Waterland’s narrative form and its theory of time, these images acquire a double function, representing both the operations of the narrative itself, and the philosophy of time it advances. From this point of view, what the novel says about time and what it does with the arrangement of its plot, with its loops and detours, are forged together like the vehicle and tenor or an elaborate metaphorical landscape.
Rejecting ChronologyWhat
we have in Waterland then is an explicit discourse on the subject of time, working alongside a narrative form which corroborates and reflects its observations. This cooperation of the constative and performative is strengthened at the level of imagery which carries a set of doctrines about time and which is also the subject of an explicit interpretative commentary which decodes the novel’s metaphors into theoretical propositions about time. The novel presents something more associative, more layered and less logocentric than the straightforward constative statements that characterise analytical and philosophical approaches to time. It may be that the presentation is of something more logically vague: Waterland may not be sure exactly what it thinks about time, and it may be saying several different things about time at the same time. In the two citations above, for example, a central plank of the claim about time, articulated in the first place in explicit commentary and in the second instance by the metaphor of the circular river, is that it might be an illusion to view time in linear and monodirectional ways. We are, in the terms of the first example, like travellers lost in the desert, who think they are moving forwards when in fact they are moving in an enormous circle, and in terms of the second, we are misled by the appearance that a river moves in one direction to the sea, since, viewed from a greater distance, the line is a circle. Interesting though this proposition is,
it ought not to be viewed as a startling one in the context of a novel. It could be more persuasively argued, perhaps, that this is the most standard, most conventional proposition that a novel advances about time: that the linearity of clock time is somehow placed in question by the circularity of some version of mind time, whether it be recollection, the explanation of a detective or the anachronicity of plot more generally.
The novel, characteristically and typically, produces a tension between the chronology of events it describes and the anachronicity of their representation in the mind of a character, or of the plot itself. This is exactly where the power of the novel lies, according to Ricoeur and others. The philosophy of time, for Ricoeur, will always run up against some version of the dichotomy between clock time and mind time and experience this dichotomy as a kind of aporia. The philosophy of time from Zeno to Derrida can be read as a failure to escape the tensions involved in these aporias, or to banish the dualism from which they derive. But these tensions and aporias are the very fabric of the novel: the tensions between narrated time and the time of the narration, chronology and plot, objective and subjective time, cosmological and phenomenological time, time as topic and time as technique, and the constative and performative layering of the novel’s dealings with time make it the discourse in which the dynamics and dialectics of time are most faithfully and properly observed.
It might seem reasonable to suppose that contemporary fiction has something new to say about time insofar as these temporal tensions have been placed in the foreground and openly contemplated. But Ricoeur has a warning here which is, I think, much more complicated than it sounds:
Rejecting chronology is onething,
the refusal of any substitute principle of configuration is another. It is not conceivable that the narrative should have moved beyond all configuration. The time of the novel may break away from real time. In fact, this is the law for the beginning of any fiction. But it cannot help but be configured in terms of new norms of temporal organization that are still perceived as temporal by the reader, by means of new expectations regarding the time of fiction . To believe that we are done with the time of fiction because we have overturned, disarticulated, reversed, telescoped, or reduplicated the temporal modalities the conventional paradigms of the novel have made familiar to us, is to believe that the only time conceivable is precisely chronological time. It is to doubt that fiction has its own resources for inventing temporal measurements proper to it. It is also to doubt that these resources encounter expectations in the reader concerning time that are infinitely more subtle than rectilinear succession. (1985: 25)
The simple point here is that novels which are experimental in their use of time are, at best, establishing new novelistic conventions for the configuration of time, and at worst, actually reaffirming the notion of real time as rectilinear succession. It would be foolish to assume that the detours and loops involved in the narration of Waterland present any real challenge to the predominance of chronology as a model of time. In fact it would be safer to claim that the active efforts of a reader in the reconstruction of a time line function to reinforce linear causality in a novel like Waterland, the active reconstruction of causation and succession being more participatory than the passive mode in which the reader receives a linear plot. (The claim that Waterland is establishing ‘new norms of temporal organization’ would be an inflated one, and somewhat out of line with the novel’s own tenets about time and its self-knowledge as a conventional story.) The complication of this warning, however, lies in the notion of ‘configuration’ itself. A novel, says Ricoeur, ‘may break away from real time’, but it cannot break away from configuration. This is an important argument for my discussion here because it helps to define the way in which a novel might both say and do something new in relation to time.
Ricoeur’s account of configuration is introduced in Volume 1 of Time and Narrative and plays a prominent part in his account of mimesis.
Configuration is the central and most important part (mimesis 2) of the three stages of mimesis proposed by Ricoeur and is derived from Aristotle’s notion of muthos or ‘emplotment’: it is, in Aristotle’s words, the ‘organization of events’. The interesting thing about configuration in relation to time is that it takes its place in a hermeneutic circle whereby the organisation of events in a narrative fiction modifies the understanding that a reader may have of real time, and this changed understanding in effect comes to be part of the world of action which subsequent narrative fictions may then reflect. This circle of prefiguration, configuration and refiguration might also be understood as a concept of mimesis coupled to a concept of reverse mimesis, according to which a fiction may be seen to imitate the world of action and in so doing, produces a reverse mimesis in which the world of action ‘imitates’, or is modified by, fiction.
In terms of time, this means that the temporality of fiction both reflects and produces the temporality of, for want of a better word, ‘life’: a kind of spiralling movement in which the fictional representation of time and the lived experience of time constantly modify each other. If this is so, how are we to make sense of the argument, offered in the previous paragraph, that a novel may break away from real time, but that it cannot break away from configuration? This would be to say that the emplotment of a novel - let us say the fragmented analeptic and proleptic excesses of Waterland’s organisation of events - may depart from the ‘real time’ of chronological succession, but it cannot break away from temporal organisation in itself. The problem with this is that it seems to be ontologically undecided on the question of whether real time belongs within configuration or lies outside it. On one hand, there seems to be an absolute presupposition that real time is chronological, and that this chronology underlies the conventional paradigms of the novel. On the other hand, the hermeneutic circle insists that the temporality of life is in turn an imitation of the temporality of fiction, and therefore that chronology is nothing other than configuration refigured. Ricoeur seems to be, on the one hand the phenomenologist who views time experience as the horizon of its reality and on the other hand to be offering the notion of real time as the referent which lies beyond that horizon. If Derrida’s critique of Husserl is that his theory of meaning constantly reintroduces the opposition of inside and outside of consciousness which the phenomenological reduction seeks to displace, my objection to Ricoeur is that for all the flag waving, his declared allegiance to the phenomenology of time-consciousness, his argument repeatedly reintroduces the idea of chronology as the outside of temporality.
This is important for the relationship between what a novel says about time and what it does. For Ricoeur, the very idea of a novel about time is bound up with the question of reference. Following Benveniste, he takes the view that the critique of reference, which is found in and follows from the work of Saussure, does not apply to the larger units of discourse from the sentence upwards: ‘With the sentence, language is oriented beyond itself. It says something about something’ (1984- 8:78; his italics). This is not a position on reference that I would reject, but the claim that language from the sentence upwards says something about something becomes confusing when that something is time. In Chapter 5 I considered the question of the inside and the outside of consciousness, and in particular the paradoxical relation between the mind and the universe that is posited in phenomenology: that time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river, as Borges puts it (1964: 187).
In less metaphorical language, this posits an account of time as an external, mind-independent medium which we live within at the same time as it posits the absolute internality of time to consciousness. The thing I am inside is inside me, just as the universe is something I am within and yet its only being is within my consciousness. If, with Heidegger, we were to view temporality not simply as internal timeconsciousness but, in Derrida’s phrase, the ‘internal pocket which is larger than the whole’, that is the thing which is inside us but of which we are a part, there can be no time which exists on the outside of temporality, since temporality in a sense names exactly the aporia of the inside and the outside. But for Ricoeur, the dialectic of time and narrative, the hermeneutic circle of their relationship, cannot operate from the Heideggerean position, and a certain distance from this position is required for the whole idea of a narrative which is about time to operate. For Ricoeur, the human sciences, and he names history and narratology (1984- 8:86), and indeed the physical sciences, would be disabled by the Borgesian or the Heideggerean aporia. Temporality, in Ricoeur’s study requires an outside - a real time - to which language in its discursive units above the level of the sentence refers. This is the way that the term ‘chronology’ operates throughout the argument, as the outside of temporality:
If it is true that the major tendency of modern theory of narrative - in historiography and the philosophy of history as well as in narratology - is to ‘dechronologize’ narrative, the struggle against the linear representation of time does not necessarily have as its sole outcome the turning of narrative into ‘logic’, but rather may deepen its temporality. Chronology - or chronography - does not have just one contrary, the a-chronology of laws or models. Its true contrary is temporality itself. (1984- 8:30)
If temporality is, as it must be, human time-consciousness, chronology, as its contrary, appears to take on the role of something more objective or cosmological here: something that exists on the outside of language, of discourse and of the mind. But if this is true, if chronology is the outside of human temporality, it takes on a rather contradictory set of meanings in relation to the novel, and specifically in relation to Aristotelian emplotment or Ricoeur’s configuration: chronology is real time and it is realistic configuration of discourse; it is the truth of the cosmos and the configuration which faithfully represents that truth. It is this unacknowledged doubleness of chronology, as both inside and outside the temporality of configuration, that makes Ricoeur’s earlier statement -that
the novel can break away from real time, but cannot break away from configuration - rather ambiguous (1984). The rejection of chronology in the contemporary novel, according to this ambiguity, becomes more than the mere rejection of an established set of norms that govern temporal organisation, since those norms are faithful to the laws that govern the universe. The notion of fiction which is about something, and specifically fiction which is about time, seems to demand this oscillation between the hermeneutic phenomenology which views chronology itself as a kind of emplotment, and the realism which views it as a brute fact of the universe. This oscillation can be seen as a model for a more general polarity in critical responses to novels about time, at one pole of which is the view that the novel has the power to ridicule the efforts of the physical sciences to comprehend time, and at the other, a belief in the absolute authority of the physical sciences in relation to which the novel attempts its imaginative alternatives.
In what relation do these imaginative alternatives stand to the chronological configurations of the conventional novel, and indeed to the chronological configurations of the cosmos? The novel whichdepends
heavily on analeptic and proleptic anachronies appears, above all, to confirm the intimate relation between chronology and sense, since the reader’s act of sense-making involves the rearrangement of events into a linear succession. In the case of Waterland, there is the intricate reconstruction of the time line in which events in 1947, encountered on a first reading in fragments, become intelligible. In the case of Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow, the effort to make sense of events narrated backwards often involves a strikingly literal kind of inversion of the inversion, such as the reading of letters from right to left, or of dialogue upwards on the page, in order to reconstruct the causal chain which is the basis of its intelligibility. Are we then to assume that the primary function of the fictional rejection of chronology is the affirmation ofchronology.
Given that the forward linearity of time ranks among the very highest of absolute human presuppositions, can we really attribute one of the principal characteristics of contemporary fiction to such a statement of the obvious, or such an affirmation of the presupposed? The stronger claim, which I have been rehearsing over the last few paragraphs, is that the novel is ultimately faithful to temporality rather than chronology, or that it rejects chronology in order to affirm a phenomenology of timeconsciousness. According to this claim, the analepses and prolepses of contemporary fiction might reflect a valorisation of mind time, an experience of time which subordinates the cosmological to the phenomenological, and which views chronology as a kind of noumenology without foundation. But this is not a satisfactory account either. It is just possible that the rejection of chronology in the Modernist novel might be viewed in this way as a rejection of external in favour of internal reality, and therefore as a shift from cosmological to phenomenological time.
But as I argued in Chapter 5 in relation to Mrs Dalloway, the temporality of indirect discourse, stream of consciousness or interior monologue, for all its temporal jumping, does not conform to Genette’s account of narrative anachrony. The recollections and anticipations of Clarissa Dalloway or Molly Bloom are not proleptic and analeptic as such, since the discourse faithfully adheres to a linear sequence of thoughts, and makes no excursions into the past or future out of turn. The contemporary novel, on the other hand, though it has preserved this interest in subjective reality and continued to develop means of rendering it, has been preoccupied with narrative anachrony of a more traditional kind, in the sense that it develops a preoccupation with such excursions into the past or future of a sequence, and likes to flaunt the freedom of the novel to roam in time. The explanation for this preoccupation does not lie in the rejection of chronology at some level of philosophical conviction, but in the relationship between narrative and explanation. Life, as Kierkegaardsays,
must be understood backwards but lived forwards. If philosophers tend to forget the second half of this adage, the proleptic novel effectively joins the forward motion of lived experience with the backward movement of narrative explanation.
From this point of view the rejection of chronology is not really about time in the sense that it places in question the forward motion of time as rectilinear succession. Rather it arranges events in such a way that the gap between the forward motion of life and the backwards motion of explanation are articulated to each other. Once again, it is the incorporation of self-distance within the lived present, and most significantly the installation of future retrospect in present experience, in which we find the most convincing explanation of the new norms of temporal organisation in the novel.
In Waterland, what the novel says about time is infinitely less interesting than what it does in the service of depresentifying, or installing future retrospect in the account it gives of the present. The following passage represents a typical strategy:
Why did fear transfix me at that moment when the boathook clawed at Freddie Parr’s half-suspended body?Because I saw death?
Or the image of something worse?
Because this wasn’t just plain, ordinary, terrible, unlookedfor death, but something more?
Children, evil isn’t
something that happens far off - it suddenly touches your arm. I was scared when I saw the dark blood appear but not flow in the gash on Freddie’s head. But not half so scared as when Mary Metcalf said to me later that day: ‘I told him it was Freddie. Dick killed Freddie Parr because he thought it was him.Which means we’re to blame too.
’ (2002: 35)
The dialogue that closes this passage is extracted from a scene which is still to be narrated in full (2002: 57) in which it becomes clear that Dick killed Freddie because Mary led Dick to believe that Freddie was the father of her unborn child. This is in effect an excursion forward to the answer to the mystery which faces the reader in this scene, but it is a cryptic visitation from the future, in which the referent of ‘it’ in ‘I told him it was Freddie’ is as yet unknown. It is a glimpse of the future which identifies the killer but not the motive. The narration of one moment, the discovery of Freddie’s body, has installed in it a moment which is, in chronological terms, to occur later that day, and for which the reader will have to wait twenty-two pages. This is one of the teleological projections whichis
built into the narrative voice, which was referred to in Chapter 3 as Prolepsis 1. A second kind of juxtaposition of moments occurs between the moment being narrated in 1943 and the time of its narration in1979, that
is the moment of Tom Crick’s final class to his children, of which Waterland is the text. This is Prolepsis 2, that is the foregrounding of the structural retrospect of the novel as a whole through reference to the here and now of the time locus of narration, achieved in this passage by the direct address to his audience as ‘Children’ at the start of the second paragraph. Though it is absent in this passage, the novel is also pervaded with instances of Prolepsis 3,
most obviously whenever Tom deals with an objection from Price, the novel’s surrogate reader, who regularly articulates within the story objections to Tom’s mode of historical explanation, which represent possible objections on the part of an external reader, and which can therefore be precluded. In this way, the present of past events, which a less proleptic narrative would presence, or presentify, according to the conventions of linear retrospect, is never permitted, in Waterland to escape from the teleological retrospect which these various forms of prolepsis build into narrated events. Every moment is looked back upon whether from the moment of its narration or from any other point between the time locus of the narration and the time locus of the narrated. If reading novels encourages us to experience the present as the object of a future memory, this relationship can also be internalised in the novel by prolepsis, which articulates any past moment to some known moment subsequent to it, in a constant repetition of the hermeneutic circle of presentification and depresentification. As if the structure of detective fiction were not in itself enough, or that it demanded too much patience on the part of the reader, prolepsis joins the backwards movement of explanation to the forwards movement of life in a way that seems to deprive us of the unmediated presence of fictional events, installing in the present a position of future retrospect from which an explanation of the present might be possible.
If Waterland repeatedly offers us a present structured as the anticipation of retrospect, it also offers its converse, in the form of remembered anticipation. At the novel’s climactic moment, in which Dick plunges to his death, the event’s presence is compromised in the narrator’s memory:
‘Memory can’t even be sure whether what I saw, I saw first in anticipation before I actually saw it, as if I had witnessed it somewhere already - a memory before it occurred’ (2002: 356). The narrator is actually describing here, in the experience of a moment, what the narrative constantly performs: the installation of a future memory within the moment.
In this case, there is some uncertainty, since the memory of the event cannot distinguish for certain between the anticipation of retrospect and the actual retrospect to which the event is immediately consigned. If Waterland consistently performs what it attempts to say about time, it also seems to try to blur the distinction between saying and doing, or between the constative and performative proposition about time, and in this case, that blurring is achieved by the impossibility of separating the anticipation of a memory from the memory ofan anticipation
. It is clear that this blurring of actual and envisaged retrospect deprives this climactic moment of its presence, sandwiching the moment, as it does, between the forward movement ofan anticipation
and the backward movement of a recollection, so that once again the co-dependence of time and self-distance comes into view.
Time’s Arrow and Self-DistanceThe
relationship between self-distance and time, which is forged in prolepsis, is starkly demonstrated by fiction in which time runs backwards.
Saint Augustine’s Confessions, I have argued, offers an allegory about the temporality of first-person narration which runs alongside, and perhaps produces his explicit reflections on time, but all self-narration is about time and self-distance, since the word about is in itself incapable of the theoretical work which might separate the logic from the theme of storytelling. There is always an element of self-distance in first-person narration in the sense that it creates a schism between the narrator and the narrated, though they are the same person, and in this schism, there is often a cooperation between temporal and moral self-distance which allows for the self-judgement of retrospect. In Amis’s Time’s Arrow, the disjunction between the narrator and the narrated, however, is not a difference of location in time, but one of the experience of the direction of time. This is self-distance taken to an extreme, and often seems to function as a parody of the more conventional temporal logic of confession.
In confession there is a moral contrast between the narrator and the narrated, but when the narrator is travelling backwards through the same life that the narrated lived forwards, the moral distance could not be greater. In moral terms, this is true opposition, understood as the maximum of difference, since when cause and effect are reversed, everything that is good becomes bad and vice versa.
There is a strong case that this is not properly thought of as self-narration at all. The narrator in Time’s Arrow is a kind of doppelganger:
a
fellow traveller in Tod Friendly’s body barely connected to, and incapable of understanding, the character who lived the narrated events in the opposite direction. This means that while conventional self-narration offers a special kind of inside view, based in recollection, self-witnessing, and self-representation, this self-narrator has no access to the thought processes of the narrated character. Just as the schism of moral self-distance in conventional self-narration is ironically exaggerated by this device, so too, the theme of unreliability which so often dominates the traditional first-person story is here given an extreme expression in the form of a narrative in which the narrator and the narrated, though sharing a body, are complete strangers: the authoritative yet unreliable inside view has been ironically exaggerated into a world of self-knowledge dominated by misunderstanding and the impossibility of the inside view. The conventional pronouns of first-person narration also become ironically transposed, as the schism of self-reference in the third person is literalised into the self-reference between two secret sharers.
In the first few pages of the narrative the pronouns shift from first-person singular to first-person plural, and then to the consistent self-reference in the third person which operates throughout much of the novel. Tod becomes the name of the narrated, but not of the narrator. Whereas in the confessional narrative, the narrator and the narrated cannot coincide in time, since there will then be nothing to narrate except narration itself, for the I and the Tod of this narrative, there is a period of co-incidence (Chapters 5 and 6) as forwards and backwards time meet halfway, in Auschwitz, when the unity of the I is restored, and in which everything starts to make sense. Again, the opposition of forwards and backwards time produces a species of parodic irony in which the pronoun usage of conventional self-narration is defamiliarised.
It is well known, because it is written in the novel’s ‘Afterword’, that one source of inspiration for Amis’s narrative technique came from the famous backwards paragraph of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, in which a backwards-running Second World War film transforms the destruction of a bombing raid into an act of humanitarian repair. In this paragraph, and in the early parts of Amis’s novel, the reversal of time produces both comic and serious effects. If the reversal of cause and effect produces a moral inversion in which everything good becomes bad and vice versa, the humour of inversion itself becomes a form of moral critique. Amis’s novel turns many of our domestic habits and social institutions into absurdities and atrocities, especially in those cases where the forward motion of repair is inverted into an act of destruction. The most obvious example here is in the atrocity performed by hospitals in the postwar period of Tod’s life, and the moral contrast that these atrocities present to the narrator when compared to the miracles of Aushwitz, and its project to ‘make a people from the weather’ (128). Running backwards, the postwar hospital is an awful institution with no end of cruelties to perpetrate:
Some guy comes in with a bandage around his head. We don’t mess about.
We’ll soon have that off. He’s got a hole in his head. So what do wedo.
We stick a nail in it. Get a nail - a good rusty one - from the trash or wherever.
And lead him out to the Waiting Room where he’s allowed to linger and holler for a while before we ferry him back to the night. (85)
This is the novel’s one joke, which it tells repeatedly in a number of forms, as it leads up to the central atrocity of Auschwitz. The fact that it is a joke leading towards Auschwitz is enough to indicate the serious moral purpose of its humour. This is a narrator rendered so unreliable by his inverted experience of time that he misreads Auschwitz as a miracle and postwar medicine as an atrocity. The moral distance between the narrator and the narrated, which characterises the confessional narrative is here transformed into an extreme of ironic moral distance, according to which the reader must translate the narrator’s every moral judgement into its opposite. This readerly participation in the reconstruction of the real time line also involves the reader in a perception, or a realisation, that the directionality of time is implicit in other aspects of our conceptual structure, and that the notion of moral action is rendered meaningless when the forward motion of time is inverted. Even in the case of the most morally neutral actions the novel shows that our conceptual structure is somehow dependent on the direction of time: a tennis rally which ends with the arbitrary pocketing of a ball is deprived of its competitive drive; a traffic system in which everybody drives backwards empties the act of driving of all free will. It is, in other words, far more than morality which is at stake in the inversion of time. Since the 1960s, physicists have theorised about the possibility of backwards time which seems inherent in the notion of an expanding universe, but often have to retreat from the conceptualisation of a world running backwards on the basis of its absolute unintelligibility to the mind which is adapted to the forward motion of time:
The arrow of time is so powerful and pervasive that its reversal would leave any being stuck with forward-time perception nonplussed and helpless.
Imagine witnessing broken eggs reassembling themselves as if by a miracle, water running uphill, snow melting into snowmen, water in unheated pans spontaneously boiling, and so on. These processes would not merely seem unnerving andsurprising,
they would strike at the very heart of rationality.
Prediction and memory play a vital part in all our activities, and a being who found these faculties operating the wrong way relative to the outside world would be utterly helpless. (Davis 1995: 222)
The injunction to imagine such a world is the starting point of Amis’s novel, and the effect is not only to show the utter helplessness of such a person, but to place every reader in such a position of utter helplessness from which the defence of rationality must entail the reassertion of forwards time. It is, in other words, not only the physicist who retreats from the unintelligibility of a backwards world. But whereas the physicist tends to view the second law of thermodynamics as a foundation for the forward motion of time, others prefer to view the laws of thermodynamics, according to which the entropy of a closed system of energy can only increase and never decrease, as merely an instance of time’s asymmetry in our system of rationality. Hence, in Richard Menke’s reading of the novel (1998), the notion of time’s arrow, as it is understood in A. S. Eddington’s The Nature of the Physical World, is a field of metaphor which the novel uses to demonstrate the dependence of other aspects of rationality, such as historical understanding, on forward-time perception, rather than as its determining law. Similarly, in the philosophy of time, the laws of thermodynamics are generally understood as a co-dependent aspect of a conceptual system, without according foundational importance to them.
Paul Horwich, for example, in Asymmetries in Time, includes the laws of thermodynamics in a list of ten temporally asymmetric phenomena which operate in our conceptual system.
Seen in this way, where the irreversibility of time is inseparable from rationality itself, the argument against backwards time tends to be expressed in terms of consequences, or the fear that time reversal is paramount to irrationality. J. R. Lucas, for example, argues that the conceptual cost of time reversal is very high indeed:
A world in which we could, like the White Queen, remember the future and could alter the past would be one in which our ordinary concepts of memory, knowledge, explanation, aspiration, ambition, action and achievement would be inapplicable. Although attempts have been made to account for these conceptual asymmetries, as well as our experience of the passing of time, by reference to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which in turn is alleged to stem from the initial conditions which happened to obtain at the time of the Big Bang, the enterprise is uncalled for and unsuccessful. Scientists have abstracted from our ordinary conception of time a surrogate that is not only homogeneous but isotropic, and have then sought to put back into the new concept the directedness that they had removed from the old. But the Second Law of Thermodynamics, though of great significance for our understanding of time, cannot explain all time-directed phenomena . nor canitself
be derived from purely fortuitous factors obtaining at the dawn of creation. (1989: 5-6)
Time reversal may begin as a joke, and may read like a joke, but as the novel sets out to demonstrate in its movement from comic set-pieces to the undoing of Auschwitz, not only because morality is inverted. The conceptual cost of backwards time is so high that it must be contained in fiction, in order to specify the distance between fiction and the rational world. In the arguments of Menke, Horwich and Lucas there is also a subversion of the foundational importance of the second law of thermodynamics which suggests that we might as well consider narrative order to be determined by the second law of thermodynamics as consider the second law of thermodynamics to be the mere elaboration of narrative order, and view it, along with the Big Bang, as nothing more than a story.
Time’s Arrow demonstrates the conceptual consequences of time reversal at a level of detail for which the philosopher has no patience. But the key word here is ‘demonstrate’. Time’s Arrow is more performative than constative in its inquiry into time, tirelessly demonstrating the absurdity of a backwards universe without staking any claims about time, and so without risking the adjudication of its knowledge on the basis of truth. It is therefore impossible to know, and pointless to ask, which aspects of this demonstration are conscious and which are accidental consequences of time reversal. The effect of time reversal that Time’s Arrow seems least in control of is the relationship between the meaning of words and the forward direction of time. There is a sense in which the novel has compromised on time reversal from the start, demonstrating at first a rigorous inversion of the phonetic structure of words (‘Oo y’rrah?’ = ‘How are you?’)before
retreating to a more readable blend between forward and backward movement. It is clear that the direction of reading, from left to right within a word or sentence, from the top to the bottom of a page, and from the left to the right page, must be preserved in order for linguistic significance to survive at all. Even at a less literal level, the reversal of time deprives words of their sense, whenever those words refer to a temporal process:
Around midnight sometimes, Tod Friendly will create things. Wildly he will mend and heal. Taking hold of the woodwork and the webbing, with a single blow to the floor, with a single impact, he will create a kitchen chair. With one fierce and skilful kick of his aching foot he will mend a deep concavity in the refrigerator’s flank. With a butt of his head he will heal the fissured bathroom mirror, heal also the worsening welt in his own tarnished brow, and then stand there staring at himself with his eyes flickering. (63)
The words ‘create’, ‘mend’ and ‘heal’ refer to acts conventionally designated with words such as ‘destroy’, ‘damage’ and ‘wound’, but there is no logical reason that this should be so. The narrator and Tod are, in the mind of the narrator, living life in the same direction, since the narrator’s backwards time is produced by the perception that time for everything and everyone else is also reversed. The arbitrary relation between a signifier and a signified functions just we well in backwards time as it does in forwards time, so that the word ‘mend’ can be used to designate either the act of damaging or repairing a refrigerator. According to this argument, ‘mend’ will mean something positive to Tod and negative to the narrator: the signifier will be shared but the signifieds will diverge into opposition according to the difference between the conceptual structures of forwards and backwards time. The novel doesnot,
and in fact could not use language in this way, and requires us instead to ignore the fact that between the narrator’s language and Tod’s, there is no possibility of comprehension.
The narrator, in other words, is stuck with a language in which the meaning of words in general, and the positive valences of words such as ‘mend’, are adapted to the forward motion of time, so that the very words he uses to describe the backward movement of time have inscribed in them the impossibility of that movement. Even more than for the backward phonetic structure of ‘Oo y’rrah’, which can simply be read backwards, what is in question here is the intelligibility of language itself. The use of a forward-moving language for the description of backwards time is in fact necessary for the perception of any moral difference between Tod and the narrator, since the rigorous representation of backwardness, in which the same signifier was used to represent divergent, or even opposite, signifieds would render the difference between forwards and backwards time as invisible as the signified is invisible behind the signifier in general. The semantic compromise, like the phonetic one, might be viewed as necessary for the readability of the text, but this is not some innocent or pragmatic decision. It is paramount to the recognition that the forward motion of time is embedded in language itself, and not merely one aspect of conceptual structure which can happily co-exist with others. In fact, Time’s Arrow seems above all to generate confusion out of the tension between the forward motion of language and the supposed backwardness of time that it represents. Why, for example, should the narrator think that Mikio, who is Japanese, reads a book in the same way as he does, and that they are in the minority in doing so? If the narrator is living backwards, and therefore perceiving the world in backwards time, it is the majority of Americans and Europeans who will read in the same direction as the narrator, and Mikio’s reading would still appear different. To assume otherwise is to assume that the narrator himself perceives his difference from forward-living people, and therefore destroys the narrative’s most basic assumption that he is unwittingly experiencing time in reverse. How can this narrator say of Mikio’s reading practice that he ‘begins at the beginning and ends at the end’ (51)
if
the implication is that others begin at the end and end at the beginning, an implication which would also destroy the narrative’s most basic assumption. This is not a problem that Vonnegut faced in his famous backwards paragraph in Slaughterhouse Five, because there is no inconsistency between language and temporal reference when a forwardorientated language system describes a backward-running film. The problem only arises when the temporality of consciousness itself is imagined in reverse, because the language which purports to describe it is itself the direction of time for consciousness. From this point of view, Time’s Arrow offers a striking example of a contradiction between what the novel does and what it says. In the attempt to represent backwards time, the novel constantly affirms the forward direction of time and this is not only because the reader must participate in the reconstruction of events in the opposite direction in order to understand them. There is something more fundamentally wrong with a backwards narration which suggests that the forward motion of time and the forward motion of language together might be the very basis of intelligibility of our words and concepts.
Notes
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Author: Mark Currie
