Chapter 7: Fictional Knowledge
When it comes to the internal consciousness of time, the novel picks up where philosophy leaves off. But does the novel therefore know something about time which is beyond the reach of philosophy? Perhaps knowledge of time is in some way the domain of philosophy, so that wherever it is that the novel goes with time, by being beyond the limits of philosophy, it cannot be an adventure in knowledge as such. There are two intimately related questions about knowledge involved in this. The first is the oldest question of all, the question of the relationship between philosophy and literature, and of the special kind of knowledge, if that is the right word, that literature might possess. The second is probably no younger, but has a more urgent contemporary application, and is the question of what use or value fictional narrative might hold for a philosophical understanding of time.
The idea that fiction might know something, perhaps something more than philosophy, has come back into focus recently in literary studies in a number of ways. An interesting case, particularly in relation to fictional knowledge, is Michael Wood’s Literature and the Taste of Knowledge (2005). Wood’s discussion of knowledge begins from Peter de Bolla’s ‘brilliant brief statement’ of the question of knowledge in art:
De Bolla is looking at a Barnett Newman painting (Vir Heroicus Sublimis) in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He has decided that the usual critical questions - what does this painting mean?,
what is it trying to say? - are the wrong ones. He offers one or two not all that appealing alternatives (‘how does this painting determine my address to it?,
how does it make me feel?,
what
does it make me feel?’) and says that ‘beyond these questions lies the insistent murmur of great art, the nagging thought that the work holds something to itself, contains something that, in the final analysis remains untouchable, unknowable’. Then de Bolla arrives at what I find the truly haunting question: ‘What does this painting know?’ (2005: 8)
This is a question that Wood wishes to put to literature rather than to painting, and to fiction in particular, and it will be a version of this question that will guide the discussion in this chapter. At the moment of posing this question, however, Wood recognises some of its implications and its dangers: the question implies that the painting might know something more than the painter, and that it might not be prepared to yield this knowledge to us; and it risks an accusation of metaphoricity, or more specifically personification, attracting the objection that a novel cannot know anything. The recognition of this danger, which seems to me to lie at the heart of a notion of fictional knowledge, is not developed by Wood at this point. In a moment reminiscent of Paul de Man’s Introduction to Allegories of Reading, when he leaps free from the problems of linguistic reference on the grounds that its ‘precise theoretical exposition’ lies beyond his powers, Wood leaves the question, and the figure of speech ‘to hang in the air, like an old tune, or the memory of a mood’ (2005: 9). There are however some further observations to be made about the question ‘What does this novel know?’ One observation is that, in the transition from a painting to a novel, the question loses some of its figurative force or its metaphoricity because we are back in the domain of words. As Wood himself argues later in the work, there are many (he names seven) kinds of knowledge that can be conveyed by fictional narrative, some of which may be closely akin to what philosophy would considerto be
knowledge. When a narrator or a character reflects upon a topic, or provides information, or most obviously, philosophises openly, the idea of a novel as a receptacle of knowledge looks far from implausible. Something of the force of de Bolla’s question, formulated for the mute, non-verbal significance of paint, is undoubtedly lost when it is brought to bear on the novel. Another important implication of de Bolla’s question which Wood does not develop is the idea that, in the comparison between philosophical and artistic knowledge it is possible that the latter will not emerge with much credit. In a scenario in which an academic contemplates a painting it is difficult to ignore the force of insult that this question can hold, and which admonishes the painting for its unsystematic and vague efforts to know (What do you know, stupid painting?). It might be argued that this is a wholly inappropriate question to ask of a painting, or a novel.
There may be a kind of hostility towards art in such a question which seeks to assess its greatness in such knowledge-based terms, as if to award an honours degree classification for what it knows. Nevertheless, it is this issue of the adequation of art in terms of knowledge, the difference between philosophical and fictional knowledge, and the attribution of knowledge to a work, and not to the mind of an author or a reader, that de Bolla’s question offers to Wood as a focus for the question of what a novel might know.
Support for the idea that a novel might take up where philosophy leaves off in the matter of internal time-consciousness - that it might know more about time than the philosopher - becomes easier when knowledge is thought of in this way. Questions such as ‘What do novels know about time that philosophy cannot know?’ or more specifically ‘What does this novel know about time?’ are clearly asking for some conception of knowledge which goes beyond the mere inclusion of reasoned discussion in the novel, so that something of the personification of de Bolla’s question, dependent as it is on the notion of knowledge without the presence of a mind, is preserved. When Wood comes to consider the question of fictional knowledge more closely, he distinguishes, with the help of Roland Barthes, between knowing something and knowing about something.
Barthes’s claim, quoted by Wood, is as follows: ‘The knowledge (literature)marshals is
, on the other hand, never complete or final.Literature doesn’t say it knows something, but that it knows of something; or better still it knows about something - that it knows about men’ (2005: 38).
How does this shift from knowledge of to knowledge about modify or qualify Ricoeur’s position on the difference between tales of time and tales about time? Wood analyses Barthes’s position in the following way:
There is a difference, in French and in English, between knowing of and knowing about. Knowing of suggests mere acquaintance and knowing about could mean possessing substantial information. But there doesn’t have to be much of a difference, and we do use the phrases as near-synonyms . But it’s Barthes’s next move that really shifts the ground . ‘En savoir long’ is certainly different from ‘en savoir’, and it is shrewd of Richard Howard (the translator) to drop the emphasis on quantity, since in English ‘knowing about’ can easily include the notion of knowing a great deal about . Literature knows a lot; it knows too much. It knows more than it wants to know, perhaps; and almost certainly more than we want it to know. This is a long way from the apparent disavowal from which the proposition started, and some considerable distance from simple knowledge by acquaintance. (2005: 39).
At first the idea of knowing something seems grander than knowing about something. This is apparent if we alter de Bolla’s question ‘What does this painting know?’ to ‘What does this painting know of?’,
which seems to suggest its shallowness, or ‘What does this painting know about?’, which seems to require a specific field of knowledge.But, according to Wood, these lesser forms of knowledge turn out to count for a great deal, so that if Barthes appeared to be describing the modesty of literature, he is in fact making quite a large claim for its epistemological function.
For Wood, the displacement of ‘to know of’ with ‘to know about’ is a reinscription which elaborates on the idea of knowledge, and ‘fills it with hints of unspoken knowledge’ (2005: 38). In other words, the impression that knowledge about something is trivial in comparison to knowing something is mistaken, and the reinscription of the idiom restores to the idea of knowledge all of the haunting force of the unspoken which gives de Bolla’s question its power. The emphasis on the unspoken is important here because it characterises a non-philosophical mode of knowledge, in which claims are implicit. But it is worth noting that the difference between the ‘of’ and the ‘about’ in this scheme cannot be aligned with Ricoeur’s distinction between tales of time and tales about time, in which the force of ‘of’ seems to reside exactly in the implicitness of time in the tale and the force of ‘about’ seems to rely on some level of overt thematisation (1985: 101).
Barthes’s discussion of literature and knowledge is also of interest to Wood’s discussion and of use to mine for its account of the relationship between knowledge, literature and life: his claim that ‘Organized or systematic knowledge is crude, life is subtle, and it is for the correction of this disparity that literature matters to us’ (2005: 40). This is a statement that brings us to the second question from which westarted,
the question of the value of literature to a philosophical understanding of time.
If we understand philosophy to be one such crude knowledge, incapable in its crude, organised ways, of understanding the subtlety of life, we find ourselves acknowledging the superiority of literature over philosophy as a form of knowledge of the world.
But there is a paradox here insofar as this formula simultaneously asserts and denies the value of literature to philosophy: if literature lies in the middle between the crudity of philosophy and the subtlety of life it will be, on one hand, a more subtle form of knowledge of life than can be achieved in systematic thought and on the other, a relatively crude copy of the subtlety of life. Literature may provide, for example, a case study in internal time-consciousness, but philosophy would be better to deal directly with life itself, where the full subtlety of internal time-consciousness can be encountered undistorted by the demands of verbal representation. The value of literature to philosophy depends upon whether we view literature as the subject or the object of knowledge, that is, as a form of knowledge of life, or as an object which knowledge might try to understand ordescribe,
the knower or the known. Let us suppose for a moment that the novel is superior to philosophy when it comes to knowledge of internal time-consciousness, that it can capture something which escapes systematic knowledge, or that it takes up where philosophy leaves off. The disparity between the knowing subject (the novel) and the object known (interiority) is not so great, according to Barthes’s view, as that between philosophy and the mind. How then are we to know what it is that the novel knows about internal time-consciousness? In order to draw the novel’s knowledge of life into the light, or to return to Wood’s metaphor, in order to give voice to the unspoken knowledge that the novel possesses about time, we require a discourse about literature, ora knowledge
of literature.
Whether we call this knowledge philosophy, criticism or theory, the gap between this organised and systematic knowledge and the subtlety of life is encountered again in the gap between systematic knowledge and literature. Presumably, however, the gap is less wide, so that knowledge of literature will take us some way towards knowledge of life. And this, for Barthes, is why literature matters to us: it is a stepping stone by way of which philosophy can reach out towards a comprehension of life’s subtleties.
Though it may be music to the ears of creative writing students everywhere, this model of the relationship between philosophical knowledge of time and fictional knowledge of time is problematic in many ways, many of which are concerned with the ambiguities of the concept of knowledge itself, and the difficulties of viewing representation as a form of knowledge. Nor is the tension between philosophical and fictional knowledge of time in any way new, dominating as it has the critical and philosophical engagement with Proust and the analysis of Mrs Dalloway.
I would like to address these old questions to more recent novels, to Ali Smith’s The Accidental and Ian McEwan’s Saturday, which serve as interesting examples in which the problems of knowledge, fictional knowledge of internal time-consciousness, and critical knowledge of this fictional knowledge, interact with each other.
Accidental Knowledge
What then does Ali Smith’s The Accidental know about time? In many ways this is a more focused question than ‘Is this a novel about time?’,
and
one which avoids the absurdities of Ricoeur’s discussion as he tries to weigh various topics against each other in his critical quest for what is principally at issue. It may be that some of the metaphysical baggage which comes with the idea of knowledge is unwanted or unnecessary, but this is also the question’s strength, in that it deals head on with the question of what the novel knows about life, and how this relates to the knowledge of life that can be claimed in philosophy. In the first place, The Accidental has a certain amount of explicit thematisation, and even discussion of time, which takes place in the mind of Astrid, a twelve-year-old girl who is on holiday with her family in Norfolk. The novel’s focalisation rotates around the four members of the family, so that the inner lives of Astrid’s brother Magnus, her father Michael and her mother Eve are available to us in turn. When we first meet Astrid, she is contemplating beginnings:
Because why do people always say the day starts now? Really it starts in the middle of the night at a fraction of a second past midnight. But it’s not supposed to have begun until the dawn, really the dark is still last night and it isn’t morning till the light, though actually it is morning as soon as it was a fraction of a second past twelve i.e. that experiment where you divide something down and down like the distance between the ground and a ball that’s been bounced on it so that it can be proved, Magnus says, that the ball never actually touches the ground. Which is junk because of course it touches the ground otherwise how would it bounce, it wouldn’t have anything to bounce off, but it can actually be proved by science that it doesn’t. (2005: 7)
Astrid might well have been reading Book XI of Augustine’s Confessions and the contemplation of daybreak which was discussed in Chapter 4 of this book, and on which Augustine bases his whole problem of the vanishing present. But Astrid’s interest in dawn is more complex and more cluttered than Augustine’s, since it is not only a question about the divisibility of a moment which is at stake, but also a tension between the moment of dawn and the moment officially known as the start of morning by clock time. Astrid’s mind jumps to the problem of the divisibility of the present for good reason, since it affects both these conceptions of morning, and so to the idea that the systematic knowledge of science will be of no assistance in this, since it will only prove to her something that she knows is not true. If Astrid has already gone some way beyond Augustine in her contemplation of daybreak, the effect is about to be compounded, because Astrid lives in the age of the digital video camera, and she is taping dawns:
She now has nine dawns one after the other on the mini dv tape in her Sony digital. Thursday 10 July 2003, Friday 11 July 2003, Saturday 12, Sunday 13, Monday 14, Tuesday 15, Wednesday 16, Thursday 17 and today Friday 18.
But it is hard to know what moment exactly dawn is. All there is when you look at it on the camera screen is the view of outside getting more visible. So does it mean that the beginning is something to do with being able to see? That the day begins as soon as you wake up and open your eyes? So when Magnus finally wakes up in the afternoon and they can hear him moving about in the room that’s his in this dump of a substandard house, does that mean that the day is still beginning? Is the beginning different for everyone? Or do beginnings just keep stretching on forwards and forwards all day? Or maybe it is back and back they stretch. Because every time you open your eyes there was a time before that when you closed them then a different time before that when you opened them, all the way back, through all the sleeping and the waking and the ordinary things like blinking, to the first time you ever open your eyes, which is probably round about the moment you are born. (2005: 8)
Astrid’s question here about the connection between beginnings and vision, and her subsequent thoughts about when Magnus’s day begins, and the beginnings which occur every time she blinks, establish a dichotomy between the personal vision of the eye and the apparently collective vision of the camera which runs through the novel as a whole. It is part ofa dialectic
between private subjectivity and the shared history of cinema, and more generally between subjective and objective time.
The question also contains a clear echo of Augustine’s efforts to hold the vision of daybreak before the mind’s eye, for the purposes of foretelling the future from the present:
Suppose that I am watching the break of day. I predict that the sun is about to rise. What I see is present but what I foretell is future. I do not mean that the sun is future, for it already exists, but that its rise is future, because it has not yet happened. But I could not foretell the sunrise unless I had a picture of it in my mind, just as I have at this moment while I am speaking about it. Yet the dawn, which I see in the sky, is not the sunrise, which is future. The future, then, is not yet; it is not at all, it cannot possibly be seen. But it can be foretold from things which are present, because they exist now and can therefore be seen. (Augustine 1967: 268)
For Astrid, there is the moment of daybreak and then there is the moment of watching the recording of daybreak, and whereas in the former, sunrise is in the future, and so has not happened yet, in the latter, the future has already happened, and can be quickly accessed. The camera is deeply bound up with anticipations of the future, and particularly with the anticipation of retrospect, for Astrid. She films things imagining or hoping that her recordings will become significant archive in the future, that the police will come looking for her because ‘someone in authority will remember and say oh that twelve-year-old girl was there with a camera, maybe she recorded something really what is the word crucial to our investigations’ (2005: 10) or that her most mundane actions will become cultural history:
There are two ways to watch what you are filming: 1. on the little screen and 2.through
the viewer. Real filmmakers always use the viewer though it is harder to see with it. She puts her eye to the viewer and records her hand making the latch go up then down. In a hundred years’ time these latches may not exist any more and this film will be proof that they did and will act as evidence for people who need to know in the future how latches like this one worked. (2005: 15)
The implication here is that the camera is her future, in the sense that she will be a real filmmaker, but also that her personal actions will be valuable archive, that the things of the present have a built-in obsolescence, and so are already the objects of historical curiosity. The camera is not only the focus of Astrid’s Augustinian puzzles about time, but the technological version of the traditional diary and all of its most traditional functions in the emergence and development of self-consciousness. It is a diary with a firm emphasis on the future, which provides Astrid with the most complex ways of envisaging retrospect as well as the most straightforward ways of measuring time: ‘By the end of their time here she will have sixty-one beginnings, depending on if they go home on the Friday, the Saturday or the Sunday.Sixty-one minus nine, i.e. still at least fifty two more to go’ (2005: 13).
There are two kinds of time-consciousness at work in Astrid’s character, one of which is an explicit interest in time and beginnings as manifested in her opening discussions of time, and the other of which occurs at a less conscious level and which demonstrates the importance of time to her thought in more implicit and less philosophical ways. Her interest in digital video archiving spans both modes of time-consciousness in the sense that it is the object and means of her reflection, as well as a pervasive influence on her awareness of the world in general. She is, for example, highly aware of CCTV, and of its relation to time, its ironies and its inherent power relations, to the point where she films the CCTV cameras which are filming her in Norwich station, and is asked to stop on the grounds that she is recording the details of the security system. She is preoccupied with the time recorded by CCTV cameras in which nothing happens, and this leads her into a contemplation of time without happenings. Having counted out a minute on her watch in which ‘not a single thing happens’, Astrid comes to consider the events of this apparently empty minute:
It is actually not true that not a single thing happened in that minute she counted out just now. There were the birds and things like insects flying.
Crows or something probably cawed in the heat above her. They are doing it now. There is the tall white plant over behind the wall, cow something it is called. In sixty seconds it probably moved a bit in the air and it must even have grown but in a way that can’t be seen by the human eye. (2005: 127)
In her discussion of beginnings, in her obsession with CCTV, in her preoccupation with digital video, and here above, as she contemplates the things which escape the notice of the human eye, Astrid’s time-consciousness is highly visual in its nature, and her mind style is one which consciously reflects upon and unconsciously enacts this relation between time and vision. This extends to her interest in colour, which again becomes entangled in her consciousness of time:
Astrid had never really noticed how green things are before. Even the stone is green. The door of the locked church door is brown-green, hasa sheen
of green on it from it just being there in the weather etc. It is a really bright colour. If she had her camera she would have just filmed the colour for a whole minute and then later she would be able to see what it really looks like, that colour. (2005, 127)
The conscious time-consciousness involved here is in a running theme about the measurement of time, and the importance of a single minute, while the less conscious time-consciousness is the temporal structure which is at work in her relation with her camera, whereby the reality of something before the eye can only be encountered in retrospect as its recording. The first kind of time-consciousness is most obviously manifested in Astrid’s constant calculations and measurement, for example, in her interest in people’s ages, and her habit of translating these ages into proportions of old and new based on the length of time each person has lived in the new century in relation to the old. The second kind of time-consciousness is derived in a more obvious way fromher own
age and her position in history at that age, and represents something distinctly modern about the portrait. At both levels, the accumulated effect of the association between time and vision is an account of her timeconsciousness which goes far beyond the mere relation of what Astrid thinks about time in her more philosophical moments. Her thoughts about time are embedded in her general mind style, in the language that she overuses, in the repetition of her ideas, and in a set of modern conditions in which time is encountered. ‘5.16am on the substandard clock radio’ (10) :
a phrase as simple as this plays its part in the knowledge that the novel builds up of Astrid’s experience of time, containing as it does a marker of her mind style in the word ‘substandard’, which she applies to everything, her preoccupation with daybreak, and even the set of conditions for the technological measurement and recording of time in relation to which this clock radio is judged. The substandard clock radio is Mrs Dalloway’s Big Ben, interrupting the flow of Astrid’s subjectivity to remind us of the world which is collective and shared.
If we go back to the beginning, or to Astrid’s contemplation of beginnings, it is clear that a straightforward comparison between Astrid and Augustine will miss the point when it comes to the question of philosophical and fictional knowledge. I have already argued this point the other way around, by claiming that the full interest of Augustine’s discussion of time is only realised by the reader who does not, as most philosophers have done, isolate the discussion of time from the narrative as a whole. Even if Astrid gives Augustine a run for his money in the discussion of dawn, this is not the way that fictional and philosophical knowledge can be compared. The most important aspect of Astrid’s discussion of beginnings is one that we have not discussed yet, namely the fact that it is itself a beginning. This is not to say that openings which know that they are openings are in any way of value in themselves, or to be admired on account of their self-consciousness. The novel in the act of self-contemplation, contemplating the idea of beginnings at the beginning and of endings at the end, is rivalled only by the self-conscious poststructuralist preface at the outset of a work of literary theory for the status of the contemporary world’s worst cliché. But this is not what we have in Astrid’s concernwith beginnings, nor
with the novel’s interest in its own structural principles and stages more generally. The Accidental is a novel which begins five times, and then has five middles, which are followed by five endings. In each case, four of the five sections are accounted for by the four main characters, Astrid, Magnus, Eve and Michael, while the fifth is the voice of Alhambra, or Amber, named after the cinema in which she was conceived. The connection between Alhambra and Amber should not be oversimplified, and is explored below in more detail, but the starting point here is that Amber ‘is’ Alhambra, the narrator of these peripheral sections of the novel. Amber’s narratives differ from those of the Smart family: whereas Astrid, Magnus, Eve and Michael arefocalised
in a number of ways by a third person narrator, Amber’s discourses are in the first person. As well as being considerably shorter than the other sections, these discourses, largely because of the absence of the third-person voice, adopt a different attitude to fictional time, one which is external to the narrated events of the novel, and which rushes through time in truncated autobiographical sweeps. That Amber is in some way external to time is something that the novel continually suggests. She wears a watch which is stopped at 7 o’clock, so that when time is passing for Magnus, it is static for Amber (144). Her name, in the playfully associative mind of Michael’s sonnet sequence, is ‘an exotic fixative. Amber preserved things that weren’t meant to last.Amber gave dead things a chance to live forever’ (163).
This externality to time is literalised by the externality of her short first-person narratives to the three sections of the novel, which are named, in the same spirit of literality as ‘The Beginning’, ‘The Middle and ‘The End’. As we have already seen, ‘The Beginning’ is more than just a literal self-designation - it is a topic which lies at the heart of Astrid’s interest in time - and nor is it a single point of origin, as Astrid’s dawns and her blinkings of the eye make clear. The multiplicity of beginnings is inherent in the narrative’s structure, which begins again with each character’s focalisation, and begins again not only at the beginning, but also at the middle and at the end. The ability of the beginning to operate in this way as structural self-designation, as a structural feature, as a thematic concern, and as a preoccupation of characters is itself literalised in a kind of graphic joke, in which the three titles simultaneously name their sections of the novel and become the first words of the focalised discourse of each character, so stepping across the ontological boundary between real and fictional time. This is a literalisation of a relationship between the outside and the inside of fiction, and I use the word literal here in its literal sense, to mean that it pertains to letters on a page.
Amber’s externality to time, like the word ‘beginning’, has a graphic dimension. It is Amber’s words which begin the book, and they come before the beginning, and before the words ‘The Beginning’. She begins, in the first section with the words ‘My mother began me . .’ and in the other sections with ‘I was born . .’, ‘I am born . .’ and ‘I was born’.
She is a framing device for the novel as a whole and for each of its sections as well as being dramatised within each section, and as such she is, in Derrida’s words, ‘invagination’, or ‘an internal pocket which is larger than the whole’ (1992a: 228). It would be more accurate, then, to say that Amber is outside and within time, and her autobiographical descriptions seem to confirm this. She may have a mother and a father, but her parentage oscillates ambiguously between real people and characters in films which played in the Alhambra cinema where, one infers with some difficulty, her real father worked as the manager. Cinema begat her: ‘My father was Terence and my mother was Julie.(Stamp.
Christie) I was born and bred in the hills (alive) and the animals (talked to)’ (105).
This sense of cinema as parentage is established by a set of references to films, featuring Terence Stamp and Julie Christie, which were part of the actual environment of the Alhambra cinema, as well as a more metaphorical and symbolic environment which begat Amber.
The more associative references which evoke Dr Doolittle and the Von Trapp family, as a shared history, and the blurring of real and symbolic conditions, of characters and actors, are neither accidental nor trivial.
They are part of the general soup of historical and cinematic influences which Amber, or Alhambra, who is both an exotic fixative and a cinema, invokes:
I was formed and made in the Saigon days, the Rhodesian days,the
days of the rivers of blood. DISEMBOWEL ENOCH POWELL. Apollo 7 splash-downed. Tunbridge Wells was flooded. A crowd flowed over LondonBridge,
and thirty-six Americans made bids to buy it. They shot the king in Memphis, which delayed the Academy Awards telecast for two whole days.
He had a dream, he held these truths to be self-evident, that all men were created equal and would one day sit down together at the table of brotherhood. They shot the other brother at the Ambassador Hotel. RIGHTEOUS BROS it said in lights above the hotel car park. Meanwhile my father was a watchmaker and my mother could fly using only an umbrella. When I was a child I ran the Grand National on my horse. They didn’t know I was a girl until I fainted and they unbuttoned my jockey shirt. But anything was possible. We had a flying floating car. We stopped the rail disaster by waving our petticoats at the train; my father was innocent in prison, my mother made ends meet. I sold flowers in Covent Garden. A posh geezer taught me how to speak proper and took me to the races, designed by Cecil Beaton, though they dubbed my voice in the end because the singing wasn’t good enough. (2005: 104).
The first-person pronoun is under some stress here as it strains to encompass cinematic history (actors) and cinematic narratives (characters) withinthe I
of self-narration. But the disdain for that ontological boundary is subsumed in the more general relationship between cinematic and socio-political history. These are Amber’s multiplicitous beginnings, and they assign to her the narrative function of representing a collective history of representations, which encompass the private reflections of the novel’s other characters as history encompasses the individual. Like Rushdie’s Saleem Sinai, she is the personification of a babble of represented voices against which the personal lives of Astrid, Magnus, Eve and Michael are particular and parochial. The connection with Rushdie here is worth contemplating, partly for the dialogue it creates with another novel preoccupied with beginnings, both of a fictional and of a socio-political nature. Both The Accidental and Midnight’s Children borrow their joke about beginnings from Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, in which the conditions of Tristram’s conception, and therefore the narration of those conditions, play a prominent part. The conception and birth of Tristram Shandy and Saleem Sinai provide a backdrop in clock time, or in historical time, against which the digressions of narrative time take place, but in the case of The Accidental and Midnight’s Children, the personification of history in Amber and Saleem ensures that, in the opposition between the individual and history, or the personal and the collective, the subset contains the universal set, or the part contains the whole. The idea of a person as a part of a social or historical totality is the basis of time structure in many novels, whether it is through the interaction of the individual with history in the historical novel, or the tension between the temporality of the inner life and the measurement of clock time in the outside world. By putting historical time inside the individual, these novels disturb the ordinary conception of time that we find, for example, in Mrs Dalloway, or in Ulysses, in which the order of the outside and the chaos of interiority happily co-exist, or in which the individual exists within history. We find here something of the logic of Hegel’s ‘concrete universal’, or the paradox of the immanent or embodied universal according to which a particularity can represent a totality, or a part can stand for the whole. This may be more obviously a conscious game in Midnight’s Children, with its many literalisations of ideas of fragmentation and unity. The perforated sheet, for example, through which Adam Aziz becomes acquainted with his future wife, assembling a picture of her as a totality bit by bit, is itself a parody of the efforts of Adela Quested in Forster’s A Passage to India to find in any tiny detail an emblem of Indian-ness in general. The idea of embodiedtotality,
or of the relationship between the particular person and their representative function is similarly literalised in the relationship between Amber and Alhambra, where the former is within time and the latter outside of time. This reading of Amber, as the personification of cinema and of history on the outside, and her interactions with Astrid in all of her particularity, is corroborated by the extract from John Berger which begins the novel, before the beginning: ‘Between the experience of living a normal life at this moment on the planet and the public narratives being offered to give a sense to that life, the empty space, the gap, is enormous’.
Just as the word ‘beginning’ traverses from one order of reality to another, so too does Amber cross the boundary from the outside of fictional time to the inside, carrying all of her overtly symbolic functions with her into the realm of the particular. For all that Alhambra represents about time, as Amber, she is capable of interaction with Astrid in the mundane realm of particularity that is the Smarts’ family holiday in Norfolk. The intervention narrated by The Accidental is partly this metaleptic intervention of the symbolic into the particular, and this is the source of Amber’s atmosphere of other-worldliness, of significance, and of power. The embodied interaction which takes place as a result of this intervention, such as the interaction between Amber and Astrid, is characterised by an oscillation between particular and universal significance, and at times has the character of a post-symbolic commentary on the relationship between the symbolic and the particular itself.
The interaction between Amber and Astrid is, among many other things, an encounter between two very different relations to time, and one facet of this difference is the relationship between cinema and digital video. Though Amber has no real connection with cinema within the Norfolk narrative, in her relation to her metaleptic other she is the embodiment of cinema, its offspring, and its history. How then are we to read the key event in this relationship, when Amber drops Astrid’s video camera from the pedestrian bridge and they watch it smash into fragmentsbelow:
Halfway across the pedestrian bridge, above the roaring traffic, Amber stops.
They lean over and look at the view and the countryside again. It is beautiful.
It is really English and quintessential. They watch the cars beneath them going in and coming out, moving like a two-way river. The sunlight off the windscreens and the paint of the cars is flashy in Astrid’s eyes. It is easier to look at the further-away cars fading into a see-through wall of more shimmering heat. Their colours melt through it as if cars aren’t made of anything solid.
It is a beautiful summer afternoon, like the perpetual summers used to be in the old days, before Astrid was born.
Then Amber drops the camera over the side of the bridge.
Astrid watches as it falls through the air. She hears her own voice remote and faraway,then
she hears the plastic-sounding noise of her camera as it hits the tarmac. It sounds so small. She sees the truck wheel hit it and send it spinning under the wheels of the car behind it on the inside lane, breaking it into small pieces which scatter it all over the road. Other cars come behind and carry on hitting the pieces, running them over, bouncing them across the road surface. (2005: 118)
If Amber is a symbolic mother to Astrid, this episode is where the symbolic mother displaces the real mother. The camera, as a birthday present from her mother, is an emblem of her beginnings, as well as being the archiving machine on which Astrid has recorded all her subsequent beginnings, that is until Amber arrived, when she stopped recording dawns. The displacement of the real by the symbolic mother is strengthened by the echo of Eve’s own language in Astrid’s perception of the scene which precedes the smashing of the camera. The countryside is ‘English and quintessential’, an idiom that we know belongs to Eve from the novel’s start.
The beauty of the afternoon evokes in Astrid’s mind the perpetual summers of the old days, before Astrid was born, and again we hear the echo of her mother’s nostalgia for the days before Astrid was begun.
Eve, as her name suggests, has a fundamentally Adamic view of time (Astrid’s biological father is called Adam) as a fall from Eden, and she is imaged as mother nature at the same time as she is established as Astrid’s natural mother: she is her literal and her symbolic beginnings, the mother of Astrid and the mother of all women. Both Eve and Amber then have symbolic maternal relations to Astrid, and both entail the positioning of the mother before the beginning of Astrid, literally, symbolically, and in Amber’s case in terms of the novel itself, which she begins before Astrid. If we think about this in relation to Amber’s own peculiar account of her parentage, of her parents as actors and actresses, as films, as cinema workers, and as cinema itself, we are drawn to a reading of this scene which places Eve’s Adamic myth, of nostalgia for the perpetual summers of old, in competition with Amber’s, which views (quite literally) the digital video camera as a fall (also literally) from the Golden Age of cinema. By smashing the camera, the symbolic mother displaces the mother, and the Adamic myth of a lost Eden is transformed intoa nostalgia
for the camera’s own cinematic parentage.
In a novel called The Accidental, we might not expect everything to be intended, but there is a strong feeling in this scene, and in the novel as a whole, that the novel knows what it knows about time. It is no accident that the road in this scene is a ‘two-way river’ above which Amber and Astrid are poised. If time is a river, this looks like a multiply suggestive symbol: it is the violation of the pastoral scene, but it is also a kind of encoding of time, perhaps two different attitudes to time, or more plausibly still, an encoding of middleness. The second section of the novel, ‘The Middle’, has begun a few pages before this scene, and begun with the same traversal of the boundary between the form and content of the novel: ‘The Middle . of the dual carriage way…’ (108-9).In
the first crossing of the road, which was not by the bridge, but involved stopping the cars, the symbolism is explicit:
It is insane. It is really dangerous. It is a bit like the story from the bible when the seaparts in two, except it is
traffic. It is like Amber is blessed with a magnetic forcefield from outer space or another galaxy. (109)
In both of these crossings, Amber’s superheroic power and her otherworldliness are entwined with her metaleptic crossings between the middle as a structural principle for the novel, and the middle as a literal position within the frame of the fiction. The interpretation of this scene as a symbolic encounter between digital video and cinema depends on the metaleptic travel involved in Amber’s duality as an internal dramatisation in the story and as an external frame narrator, since it invokes symbolic associations established outside of the spatiotemporal frame represented by the holiday in Norfolk. But the middleness of Amber and Astrid here is part of the way that the novel gives the impression of knowing itself, of knowing what it knows about time, since it reinforces the co-presence of fictional and textual time. It is no accident that Astrid and Amber are in the middle of the bridge here, and that the road is a perpendicular axis on which they are in the middle. In the middle of their crossing, they are at the centre of a cross. To borrow a bad joke from Barbara Johnson, they are a kind of cruci-fiction, a crossing point between the book itself and its fictional frame (Johnson 1980). One of these axes signifies their position in the middle of the book, with fictional time still to come and fictional time under the bridge. The present itself is difficult to grasp. It is easier for Astrid to look at the further away cars, as they fade into a see-through wall of shimmering heat, than to look at the cars beneath. In the intensity of the moment, Astrid hears her own voice, remote and far away, as if the moment is structured as self-distance, or as if her own experience of this central moment parallels that of the novel, as it tells its story and at the same time knows itself from a distance.
The accidental and the intentional intersect here in a complex way with the question of fictional knowledge. Let me return to Michael Wood’s discussion for some accidental help on the question of knowledge:
It is no accident that - this is the phrase writers always use when they are about to do something slippery with their argument. Let me start again. It is not, I hope, merely a piece of free association on my part that brings together Barthes’s idea that literature makes knowledge into a holiday and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s image for the occasions when philosophical problems arise: when language goes on holiday. (2005: 42)
It is an accident that Wood should make this observation about the argumentative idiom ‘it is no accident’ in the context of a discussion of knowledge as a holiday, and that I should be writing about knowledge in relation to a novel about a holiday. It is an accident that Barthes’s notion that literature makes knowledge a holiday, and Wittgenstein’s remark that philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday seem to relate so well to The Accidental. But it is no accident that I have been using the idiom heavily over the previous paragraphs, because the question of knowledge, of what this novel knows about time, is necessarily connected to the question ofwho
it is that is doing the knowing. As Wood’s warning at the outset of the chapter makes clear, one of the possible objections to de Bolla’s question about what a painting knows is that it personifies the painting, though one could counter-object that it is only when knowledge is thought of as the exclusive activity of a conscious mind that this can be seen as personification at all. Whereas in the first section of ‘The beginning’ knowledge about time can be attributed to Astrid herself, the interaction of Astrid and Amber, and so of their ideas about time, attributes knowledge to another level of discourse: not to the mind of a fictional character but to the mind which orchestrates their interaction. In the camera-smashing scene, knowledge of time is produced partly by this interaction, and partly by the organisation of a symbolic system, in which a complex set of ideas about time can be said to be encoded. This is a novel, I have claimed, which knows what it knows about time, in the sense that it seems to contain a substantial and complex body of ideas which pertain to time as a topic and at the same time recognise the metaleptic parallel entailed in the relation between the topic of time and the temporal logic of narrative. It is not only in the interaction of Amber and Astrid, then, that knowledge of time is produced, but in the interaction between the topic of time and the temporal logic of narrative fiction, where these two interactions are unified by the duality of Amber’s ontological frame. Can we then speak of the novel’s knowledge of time without assigning this knowledge to the author, or claiming the intentional nature of its knowledge as a kind of conscious encoding in fictional form? Is this knowledge of time meant, and if not, does it qualify as knowledge? ‘Believe me. Everything is meant’ Alhambra declares after the announcement of her own name at the start of the novel. This guarantee of intention serves as a commentary on the novel’s symbolism in general and seems to assign an authorial intention to Alhambra herself, though she is not an author. An atmosphere of authorial surrogacy surrounds Alhambra and Amber throughout the narrative, not only in her power, in the idea of her symbolic motherhood of Astrid, in her position as the narrative frame and her un-timeliness, but in a kind of knowingness. Here again the mirroring of Amber and Eve is apparent, since Eve is also an author, married to an academic reader, and destined at the end of the novel to become Amber, or to step into her role as the stranger who intervenes in the life of a family. If we are to understand Amber as a surrogate author, her metaleptic correspondences do not stop at the boundary between Alhambra’s symbolic function and the inner fictional frame: they extend outwards to the amber cover (the original hardback cover), to the author, and the novel’s title. And this will suffice, at least, as a way of understanding, with the help of the novel’s implicit self-commentary, the mode of knowledge that we might expect from a novel about time: that it might fall somewhere between the intentional conduct of an enquiry and the generation of accidental insights.
If Astrid represents a combination of conscious and unconscious forms of time-consciousness, so too, it might be said, does the novel as a whole, and what The Accidental knows about time has to be understood as the sum of the two. This is the only way that de Bolla’s attribution of knowledge to the painting rather than the painter can be observed in relation to the novel. Just as Umberto Eco attributes the idea of intention to the literary work, rather than the literary artist, in the notion of Intentio Operis,
so too can the attribution of knowledge in a novel free itself from the limits of authorial consciousness. Fictional knowledge in this light becomes a combination of blindness and insight, in de Man’s terminology, so that sometimes what a novel knows might be inherent in what it doesn’t know, or generated in the interaction between its conscious projects and its accidental effects. Nor will a novel’s efforts to know what it knows, or to be in possession of its own blind spots, alter this model of knowledge in any fundamental way, since its efforts will only ever specify the distance between its self-knowledge and the knowledge of a given reader. When the model of cognition is one in which the work of art contains ‘hints of unspoken knowledge’, knowledge will necessarily lie beyond reach, and so remain inaccessible to the reader. In this respect the de Bolla-Wood question seems to lag behind a considerable quantity of theory in deconstruction and psychoanalysis which takes the inaccessibility of fictional knowledge as a starting point, and yet which seems to express itself in very similar terms to de Bolla’s original question. In Derrida’s Given Time, for example, the notion of the true secret, or the secret which cannot be revealed, is central to an understanding of the operations of fiction. There is, as Hillis Miller puts it, an ‘essential relation between literature and the secret’:
Literature keeps its secret. A work of literature is all on the surface, all there in the words on the page, imprinted on a surface that cannot be gone behind.
This means that there are certain secrets or enigmas in a work of literature that cannot by any means be penetrated, though answers to the questions they pose may be essential to a reading of the work. (2001: 152)
This notion, that a work of literature is all on the surface, is a useful link between the domain of art and that of fiction, reminding us that the insistent murmur of great art, the untouchable and unknowable secret that a work keeps to itself, is at work in verbal as well as visual art, however cluttered the notion of words may be with imputations of deeper consciousness. But it is also an indication that the problem of fictional knowledge is at a rather busy intersection of contemporary thinking: it is Derrida’s call of the Other, Badiou’s unnameable, de Man’s blindness, Lyotard’s inexpressible, Beckett’s ineffable, Freud’s uncanny, Lacan’s real, Conrad’s secret and, for Wittgenstein, what lies beyond the limits of language. Must we then settle for the paradox from which we began, of unknowable knowledge, or that fiction might know, perhaps better than philosophy does, that time is unknowably complex? The remainder of this chapter is concerned to show that the way out of this paradox, or the way into another one, is through a refurbishment of the model of knowledge on which it rests.
Fictions of Today Wood describes
his project in Literature and the Taste of Knowledge as an attempt to describe ‘what particular forms of knowledge in literature may look like, or taste like’ (2005: 11). It is, he claims, only going to be a taste. The main course lies elsewhere. If as Barthes claims organised knowledge is crude and life is subtle with literature in between, our options look unpromising. Life itself surely cannot be the main course.
To claim that life knows about life is like claiming that space knows about astronomy: it removes the foundational relation of knowledge between the knower and the known. The other direction isn’t much more promising, since it offers only a crude reduction of the thing to be known, even if it preserves the analytical distance, the doubleness of the relation between the knower and the known, which the self-knowing universe lacks. Barthes’s claim is of course an unsupportable slander upon the value of organised knowledge, and if philosophy is to be counted as a form of organised knowledge, a slander upon the value of philosophy.
Of course, life can be crude and philosophy subtle; life can be full of knowledge and philosophy can be disorganised; and philosophy is a part of life as much as life is a part of philosophy. Nevertheless, the sense of a gap between knowledge and life is at the heart of Wood’s enquiry:
‘between
what can be said and what can’t; of what takes the place of thinking when we encounter or engineer the unthinkable’ (11).
This gap between knowledge and life, and the place of literature in this gap, is also at the heart of Ian McEwan’s Saturday, insofar as its protagonist, Henry Perowne, whose inner life the novel explores, is a man of science. He is a neurosurgeon with an uneasy attitude to literature, who cannot quite accept the importance of fiction as a form of knowledge. He wants the world to be explained, not reinvented, and has no wish to be a ‘spectator of other lives, of imaginary lives’ (2005: 66). The first effect of this is irony, since Perowne’s world is a reinvented one, and his life is imaginary. The novel therefore stages a contest between scientific and literary knowledge but one which is circumscribed by the difference between what he knows and what we know, namely that he is fictional.
But where a metafictional novel would incorporate this knowledge into the novel itself, so claiming it as its own, as self-knowledge, Saturday is vigilant in the preservation of its realistic frame. This realism, and its rigorous referential illusion, is a doubling of the irony, because it is part of the discussion about literature which is dramatised in Perowne’s relationship with his daughter Daisy. Though he distrusts literature generally, his fictional preferences are for the realism of Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary:
They had the virtue at least of representing a recognisable physical reality, which could not be said for the so-called magical realists she opted to study in her final year. What were these authors of reputation doing - grown men and women of the twentieth century - granting supernatural powers to their characters? He never made it all the way through a single one of those irksome confections.And written for adults, not children.
In more than one, heroes or heroines were born with or sprouted wings, a symbol, in Daisy’s terms, of their liminality; naturally, learning to fly became a metaphor for bold aspiration. Others were granted a magical sense of smell, or tumbled unharmed out of high-flying aircraft. One visionary saw through a pub window his parents as they had been some weeks after his conception, discussing the possibility of aborting him. (2005: 67)
The distaste for the supernatural is part of Perowne’s scientific mindset, and extends to a suspicion towards symbolism as well as an outright rejection of experiments with time.‘You ninny.
You Gradgrind’, Daisy reproves him. ‘It’s
literature, not physics!’ (68). It could be said then that Perowne would approve of the kind of novel he is in, with its strict observation of the linearity of time and its recognisable physical reality, except that he fails to see the point of those either:
What did he grasp after all? That adultery is understandable but wrong, that nineteenth-century women had a hard time of it, that Moscow and the Russian countryside and provincial France were once just so. If, as Daisy said, the genius was in the detail, then he was unmoved. The details were apt and convincing enough, but surely not so very difficult to marshal if you were halfway observant and had the patience to write them all down. (67)
In answer to the question of what novels know, Perowne would say ‘nothing’, since they are divided between childish make-believe, pointless reinvention, inane moral teachings and workmanlike drudgery. The knowledge of the neurosurgeon is, by contrast, a thing of beauty:
To go right in through the face, remove the tumour through the nose, to deliver the patient back into her life, without pain or infection, with her vision restored was a miracle of human ingenuity. Almost a century of failure and partial success lay behind this one procedure, of other routes tried and rejected, and decades of fresh invention to make it possible, including the microscope and the fibre optic lighting. The procedure was humane and daring - the spirit of benelovence enlivened by the boldness of a high-wire circus act. (44-5)
This instrumental rationale for the value of scientific knowledge underlies much of Perowne’s thinking, which celebrates the contemporary world for its ‘wondrous machines’, and views the city itself as a ‘brilliant success, a biological masterpiece’ of technological achievement. The opposition of literature and scientific knowledge is therefore partly acted out in the relationship between Perowne and the literary members of his family, in the figures of Daisy and his father-in-law Grammaticus, who are poets. But there is a less obvious way in which this opposition is developed, which lies, once again, in the relationship between the apparent reality of Perowne as the protagonist of a realistic novel and his fictionality. Saturday pitches a neurosurgeon’s notion of interiority against the novelist’s, and this contest is conducted not only between the different notions of knowledge held by its characters, but in the relationship between the central character and the novel itself. Hence, on one hand, there is a notion of the mind as pure matter:
A man who attempts to ease the miseries of failing minds by repairing brains is bound to respect the material world, its limits, and what it can sustain -
consciousness
, no less . he knows it for a quotidian fact, the mind is what the brain, mere matter, performs. (67)
On the other hand the mind which thinks this, and everything else that it thinks on a single day, Saturday, 15 February 2003, is the subject of McEwan’s novel, so that the conception of the mind as matter is also the matter of the novel’s exploration of interiority. Perowne is both a subject and an object of knowledge, but of course he doesn’t know it. He is the object of knowledge because an omniscient narrator is allowing us access to his head, and this access therefore provides an ironic contrast with the kind of access to heads which is the stuff of neurosurgery.
The idea of omniscience is interesting, for obvious reasons, for a consideration of knowledge. Perowne, thought of as a person, may have views about literature, and about its inferiority to science, but his own knowledge is deficient to the extent that the real debate between scientific and fictional knowledge is being conducted at a level to which he has no access. He is watched or known from above, as it were, and this omniscient knowledge of him is by far the most important thing that he doesn’t know. His own condition as a fictional narrative is unknowable to him, and it could be argued unknowable to the omniscient narrative voice itself, which is concerned with knowing him, but not with its own relation to that knowledge. The omniscient narration may then know everything about Perowne, but like Perowne, there are some important things that it doesn’t seem to know about itself, such as the fact that it is engaged in a polemic between literature and science. And what kind of omniscience is it, we might ask, that doesn’t know everything about itself? Nicholas Royle has raised similar questions in relation to the idea of omniscience in The Uncanny. ‘Omniscience’, he argues, is simply the wrong word for this basic predicament in fictional narrative, not only because it carries within it a specifically Christian ambience in which Christian subjects are the objects of knowledge to an all-knowing god, but also because it is simply misleading. If omniscience is normally thought of as ‘access to consciousness’ it is, Royle argues, also access to unconsciousness, or to what a character does not think and know.
Omniscience, Royle argues, ‘became a widespread literary critical term just as psychoanalysis was establishing the structural and conditioning impossibility of complete knowledge of one’s own thoughts and feelings, let alone complete knowledge of anyone else’s’ (2003: 261):
reliance on the term ‘omniscience’ thus acts as a means by which criticism can avoid the obligation to reflect more rigorously on what psychoanalysis might have to say about unconscious knowledge and desire, or, conversely, what literary fiction may have to say about psychoanalysis. (260-1)
Certainly the idea of access to Perowne’s interiority only seems to raise questions about what he does not know, and indeed seems to locate the novel’s knowledge in a kind of structural tension between the knower and the known. Like Miller, Royle resorts to Derrida’s notion of the secret as literature’s essential characteristic, as a means of approaching the structural and conditioning impossibility of complete self-knowledge which is at work in this relation between a character and the so-called omniscience of the narration in which that character is represented - the ‘telepathic bonds and connections at the most decisive and elementary structural level, between narrator and character’ (268). Royle is speaking of Mrs Dalloway here, of its thematic and structural concerns with telepathy, and of his own very understandable preference for a notion of narrative telepathy over the ‘religious, panoptical delusion of omniscience’ (261). It is partly the very idea of a narrator or a character as a person that is at issue here, and so the possibility of any inference of secret and undisclosed knowledge that might lie behind the words as they present themselves in a novel. In the absence of a mind, it seems pointless to speculate about what a novel might know at some level behind the surface of fictional character, and yet at the same time, there seems to bea knowledge
of sorts, a secret, which is the property of neither character nor narrator.
If one account of this secret knowledge is what Perowne doesn’t know, either about his own fictionality, the presence of a narrator, and the polemic function that this condition fulfils in the debate on knowledge, there are also other factors to be added to the list, and which might, in a different way be thought of as the secret of literature. Royle’s use of Mrs Dalloway to analyse the elementary structural relation between character and narrator identifies one common feature between Saturday and Mrs Dalloway, but to the knowing, the two novels are more profoundly linked than that. Like Mrs Dalloway, Saturday is set on a single say in London, and involves a symbolic journey across town, and from this point of view, McEwan’s novel can also be linked to Joyce’s Ulysses, and its account of a single day in Dublin. There is a certain thematic baggage that comes with this relation, and with the interest in the single day as a principle of unity, or as a significant unit of time. Ulysses, for example, is concerned with the circularity of the day, with the fact that it starts where it finishes, and therefore that it reproduces the circular structure of the ‘homecoming’ which it parallels in Homer’s Odyssey. With this parallel also comes an ironic contrast between the temporal limits of the single day, and the epic sweep of the journey of Telemachus and Odysseus, as well as a set of themes of reconciliation between father and son, high and low culture, and between literary and non-literary sensibilities. Both Mrs Dalloway and Ulysses are concerned at a thematic and technical level with the opposition between internal and external time, and with the enormous quantity of mind activity that fills the smallest units of time. These issues are at work in Saturday in a number of ways, in the circularity of its structure, its homecoming themes, its opposition of literature and science, the reconciliation of Perowne with his daughter, and its interest in the encounter of the high-bourgeois world of Perowne with the ordinary criminal culture represented by Baxter. There is in this sense a considerable quantity of significance which is not known either to its main character or to its narrator, and like the structural relation between narratoror
character, locates knowledge at a level not represented by any fictional mind or within the scope of omniscience. One important dimension of this knowledge is what the novel knows about time, about the treatment of time in its precursor novels, and about the contemporary conditions in which this tension between subjective and objective time is lived. In his analysis of Mrs Dalloway Ricoeur argues that, despite the constant striking of Big Ben throughout the novel, the notion of clock time is inadequate to describe the complex apparatus of public history, collective experience and authority that constitutes the backdrop against which the private thoughts and actions of characters are staged. Borrowing from Nietzsche’s phrase ‘monumental history’
Ricoeur refers to this apparatus as ‘monumental time’ and describes the special power of novels to know the relation of personal to monumental time in this way:
We must not stop with a simplistic opposition between clock time and internal time, therefore, but must consider the variety of relations between the concrete temporal experience of various characters and monumental time. The variations on the theme of this relation lead fiction well beyond the abstract opposition we have just referred to and make of it, for the reader, a powerful means of detecting the infinitely varied way of combining the perspectives of time that speculation by itself fails to mediate. (1985: 108)
Here again we encounter the notion from which the discussion of fictional knowledge started, that a novel is capable of more than abstract speculation, and particularly with regard to this infinite variation of relations between the concrete temporal experiences of various characters and monumental time.
Perowne’s variation on this theme begins, like Astrid’s, before dawn in the vision of what seems at first to be a meteor crossing the London sky, and which turns out to be a burning plane heading for Heathrow. Like Mrs Dalloway, this is a novel which shows a constant interest in the linearity of clock time, and through constant reference to clocks, the reader always knows the time to within a few minutes. The importance of this incident at the beginning of Perowne’s day is partly the role it performs in transforming clock time into monumental time, since it is through the rolling reports of TV news that this incident passes from the realm of a private occurrence into the public domain. The news is a kind of clock for Perowne, by which he measures his private experiences,
but it is also the unfolding story of the historical day, through which the contemporary historical context of the day, and most particularly the mass protest against the war in Iraq which took place on that day, find their way into the novel. Perowne’s chance vision of the burning plane, like his interaction with the anti-war demonstration as he attempts to go about his day in London, situates his individual life in relation to historical events in the traditional manner of the historical novel, but the relation between the rolling time of Perowne’s thought and the rolling events of TV and radio news constitutes the novel’s dynamic of temporal experience and monumental time. Like Astrid’s interest in digital video, one of the functions of this tension is the enactment of a distinctly modern relation between the present and its representation as retrospect, a relation which seems to define the reality of an event in terms of its representation:
It’s time for the news. Once again the radio pulses, the synthesised bleeps, the sleepless anchor and his dependable jaw. And there it is, made real at last, the plane askew on the runway, apparently intact, surrounded by firefighters still spraying foam, soldiers, police, flashing lights, and ambulances backed up and ready.Before the story, irrelevant praise for the rapid response of the emergency services.
Only then is it explained. (2005: 35)
The retrospect of news is a form of explanation of the kind that Perowne values over the reinventions of literature, a mastery which is lacking in the experiential present, and which bestows on the event the authority of the real. The relation here between Perowne’s subjectivity and monumental time is notably different from that of Clarissa Dalloway, partly as a result of the sense of corroboration between the public narratives of news and private experience. This sense of the gap between public and private, on which the interaction between Astrid and Amber is structured, extends more generally to Perowne’s relation to his historical moment, and to his position in the modern city, which is one of ‘aggressive celebration of the times’ (78). His historical self-consciousness is characterised chiefly as a feeling of comfort, in which his scientific turn of mind is at home in the age of wondrous machines:
Dense traffic is heading into the city for Saturday night pleasures just as the first wave of coaches is bringing the marchers out. During the long crawl towards the lights at Gypsy Corner, he lowers his window to taste the scene in full - the bovine patience of a jam, the abrasive tang of icy fumes, the thunderous idling machinery in six lanes east and west, the yellow street light bleaching colour from the bodywork, the jaunty thud of entertainment systems, the red tail lights stretching away ahead into the city, white headlights pouring out of it. He tries to see it, or feel it, in historical terms, this moment in the last decades of the petroleum age, when a nineteenth-century device is brought to final perfection in the early years of the twenty-first; when the unprecedented wealth of masses at serious play in the unforgiving modern city makes for a sight that no previous age can have imagined. Ordinary people!
Rivers of light.
He wants to make himself see it as Newton might, or his contemporaries, Boyle, Hooke, Wren, Willis - those clever men of the English Enlightenment who for a few years held in their minds nearly all the world’s science. Surely they would be awed. Mentally he shows it off to them: this is what we’ve done, this is commonplace in our time. (167-8)
In this passage the entire chain of association is visible between the technological conditions of the modern city and Perowne’s place in it, as he envisages a past of which he is the culmination, and a future in which the petroleum age is over, showing modernity off to the scientists of the past, or light to the Enlightenment. His position of mastery over the present, his spokesmanship for and inclusion in it, attest to a general commensurability between his inner life and the public world which is also reflected in his very attitude to time. He is committed to linearity, to the idea of progress, to clock time, and to the public narratives which are attached to clock time in the form of news. If Mrs Dalloway offers a variant of the relation of internal to monumental time in which the anachronicity of the former confronts the relentless forward motion of the latter, Saturday corroborates the scientific mind style with its monumental history. In this respect he contrasts with his mother, whose Alzheimer’s delivers everything into the present, and whose relation to time is less than rational:
‘I put sap in the clock’ she’s telling him ‘to make it moist’ (166). This association of temporal disorder with insanity is, for Perowne, part of a general structure of oppositions between insanity and sanity, which places the ‘bad dream’ of his mother’s illness with the dream-like qualities of the supernatural and the experiments with time that he abhors in the contemporary novel as the other to his own sanity:
Dreams don’t interest him; that this should be real is a richer possibility. And he’s entirely himself, he is certain of it, and he knows that sleep is behind him:
to
know the difference between it and waking, to know the boundaries, is the essence of sanity. (4)
As Perowne wakes up, like Gregor Samsa, into his nightmare the denunciation of dreams, like his denunciation of literature at the start of the novel, operates in conjunction with its own denial, as the structural dependence of his sanity upon what he does not know. As Perowne’s day is surrounded by night, so too is his waking sanity surrounded by the insanity of dreams, and the unknowable conditions in which his fictional life is embedded, and these conditions must include what he doesn’t know of his own intertextual relations to The Odyssey, Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway.
The Accidental and Saturday are both set in 2003 and published in 2005, they both seem to link a certain preoccupation of time with the spirit of the times, and they both deal with the intrusion into the life of a family of an outsider. But in one important respect I have argued that they are fundamentally different, since I claimed that The Accidental knows what it knows about time, and now I am claiming that Saturday knows what it knows only unconsciously, through a conjunction between what is known and what is unknown or unknowable. Because Saturday is vigilant in the preservation of its realistic frame, its self-knowledge is necessarily incomplete, since it cannot show even the most basic awareness of its own fictionality, and so of its own place in the debate between literature and science. Saturday differs from The Accidental in the sense that the former maintains an entirely implicit self-knowledge in its dramatisation of reflections upon literature, where the latter develops its self-knowledge in an explicit way, principally through its anti-realistic frame-breaking. Is it really possible to uphold this distinction, between implicit and explicit self-knowledge? On what grounds might one distinguish between conscious self-consciousness and unconscious self-consciousness, or between a novel that knows what it knows and one that doesn’t? It is quite clear that the question of knowledge and the appeal to consciousness, and by extension to unconsiousness, and by further extension to conscious and unconscious self-consciousness bring with them a theory of mind which would view fictional writing as externality to some inner depth, just as de Bolla’s Newman painting might be the external manifestation of knowledge which it refuses to yield, and so must remain secret knowledge. It is also clear that in retreat from a model of conscious knowledge which is too straightforward, both Miller and Royle have resorted to Derrida’s concept of the secret, and the essential relationship between literature and the secret. A close examination of the relations between surface and depth in this passage is required to see how it might differ from the first theory of mind. The passage in question is as follows:
Here we touch on the structure of a secret about which literary fiction tells us the essential, or which tells us, in return, the essential concerning the possibility of a literary fiction. If the secret remains undetectable, unbreakable, in this case, if we have no chance of ever knowing whether counterfeit money was actually given to the beggar, it is first of all because there is no sense in wondering what actually happened, what was the true intention of the narrator’s friend and the meaning hidden ‘behind’ his utterances. No more incidentally than behind the utterances of the narrator. As these fictional characters have no consistency, no depth beyond their literary phenomenon, the absolute inviolability of the secret they carrydepends
first of all on the essential superficiality of their phenomenality, on the too-obvious of that which they present to view. (Derrida 1992b: 153)
The secret being referred to here is a straightforward example. In Baudelaire’s tale ‘Counterfeit Money’, the narrator and his friend have given a beggar some money, but the narrator’s friend has given considerably more, an act of generosity which he justifies with the words ‘It was the counterfeit coin’. The secret that Derrida is discussing here is the answer to the question of whether the justification is true. In this eternal enigma, then, which refuses itself ‘to any promise of deciphering or hermeneutic’, Derrida finds an essential secret which fiction tells us about, and which in turn tells us about the essential nature of fiction. The second of these claims is presumably very modest: that in fiction, there are cases in which the truth of the situation can never be known, and because fiction is not real, because its characters have no depth beyond the words on the page, there is no possible investigation of the enigma.
This second claim remains open to the possibility that in life, the investigation of enigmas might offer more hope, of some discovery of the facts behind surfaces, and that real people have depth that fictional characters lack. The first claim, however, is considerably more significant in scope:
that this condition is in fact a general one, which fiction tells us about, explicitly that the essential superficiality of fictional characters and the absolute indecipherability of their enigmas might offer a model for all such enigmas outside of fiction, as well as the enigma of fiction itself.
Before we let this passage speak again, we can extend the significance of this secret from one which is internal in a particular fiction (what a character does or does not know) to the idea of fictional knowledge (what a novel does or does not know) and argue by extension that it is pointless to wonder what a novel actually knows, since a novel has no depth beyond its literary phenomenon. The next three sentences of this passage are as follows:
This inviolability depends on nothing other than the altogether bare device of being-two-to-speak [l’être-deux-à-parler] and it is the possibility of non-truth in which every possibility of truth is held or is made. It thus says the (non-)
truth
of literature, let us say the secret of literature: what literary fiction tells us about the secret, of the (non-) truth of the secret, but also a secret whose possibility assures the possibility of literature. Of the secret keptboth as thing or
as being, as thing thought, and as technique. (1992b: 153)
The ambiguity of whether we are talking about a secret which is internal to a particular literary text or which is an essential characteristic of literature, whether the secret belongs to literature or pertains to literature, is encapsulated here by Derrida’s double genitive: the secret of literature (his italics). In this case, the ambiguity is between a very ordinary point, that we cannot know truth in literature, and an excessively profound one, that the secret is the essential characteristic of literature. Each detail in theargument,
then resonates suggestively between the banal and the portentous. The ‘being-two-to-speak’ can be both the conversation in Baudelaire’s tale and the essential relation to the other which is the foundational possibility of language in general, while ‘the (non-) truth of literature’ can be both the internal feature of the counterfeit coin or the essential structural relation of literature to truth. It is the ambiguity of the secret conceived as the object of knowledge (the thing thought) and technique (the way in which it is thought). This constant slippage between the internal details of the literary work and the essential conditions of literature is what gives Derrida’s discussions of literary texts their essentially thematic atmosphere, giving the impression that theoretical issues are conducted at the level of thematic content in the text, and that their topics are allegories for their own techniques. It is also what allows the most grandiose claims about the nature of literature and language to take refuge in the alibi of their local and limited significance. The other significant problem with the argument of this passage is that it seems to want to preserve and abolish the model of surface and depth which underlies the idea of knowledge, or of the idea of language as pure externality. On one hand, there is a claim that, because we can never enquire behind the surfaces of fictional characters, the secret of literature, which literature tells us about, is that it is pointless to try. On the other hand, the absolute inviolability of the secret results from this superficiality. The first claim offers a model of pure surface, pure externality, beyond which it is pointless to enquire, but the persistence of the secret, the very existence of a secret depends on the notion that there is something to enquireinto,
or something which lies behind the surface. If we suppose that this is the situation that Derrida wishes to describe, one which both abolishes and preserves the model of surface and depth, the model of reading on offer would be one in which we make inferences about the inner lives of fictional characters based on the assumption of depth behind the phenomenal surface, and at the same time know that it is inviolable: we would enquire into a secret and know that there isn’t one. This is a perfectly reasonable situation, particularly since we might be bringing a theory of mind to the reading of a literary text which is not normally for use in relation to a fictional world, but one fashioned in the outside world, in which the inquiry into secrets, into depths behind surfaces, is not impeded by the essential superficiality of fictional characters. How then are we to understand the relation between surface and depth in fiction and the relation between surface and depth outside of fiction, or between an internal secret in a literary text and the light that this kind of internal secret might shed on secrets more generally? The answer to this lies in the word ‘possibility’. Again this is an argumentative manoeuvre that Derrida repeats throughout his writing, and which we have already encountered in the definition of the logic of supplementarity, as the possibility which produces that to which it is said to be added on. The relation between the secret in Baudelaire’s tale and a theory of mind that would apply outside of that tale is not one of simple generalisation. The claim is not that all language, like the sentence which may or may not lie about the counterfeit coin, is pure externality. It is that the possibility established in the fictional domain, the possibility of surface without depth, is a possibility that the other model, of surface as the externality of depth, cannot get away from: ‘the possibility of non-truth in which every possibility of truth is held or is made’.
If, when it comes to the internal consciousness of time, the novel picks up where the philosophy of time leaves off, it might best be thought of in these terms. We have explored several kinds of knowledge which the novel might have about time, but in each case it is knowledge which hides behind the surface of fiction, in the sense that it is not explicitly stated.
There is the open discussion of time engaged in by a character or narrator, the representation of inner time-consciousness, the symbolic episode as an inquiry into time, allusion and reference to other novels about time, the relationship between fictional time and narrative time, and the relationship between fictional time and the material textuality of the book.
The first of these, the open reflection on time engaged in by a narrator or character, is probably the only one that is in any way explicit, but it is also the most trivial and least novelistic. Of course, this explicit reflection might also entail discussion of the novel form itself, or of the nature of memory, recording and writing, but even so this would be the kind of knowledge that we might find in philosophy, narratology, criticism and theory, and tells us nothing of the kind of knowledge that the novel can develop after these discourses have left off. We only have to put explicit reflection on time into a relationship with the temporality of fiction, as The Accidental does, to produce a more complicated inquiry into time, one which is no longer on the surface of language but exists in a relationship or a tension between what a novel says and what it does. Fiction, in this sense, always has a secret about time, a knowledge which necessarily lies beneath the surface, and yet which also refuses the very idea of surface and depth which the notion of fictional knowledge offers. If a fictional character is essentially superficial, and any secret is therefore absolutely inviolable, so too must fictional knowledge of time be regarded as pure phenomenality, without depth beyond its literary phenomenon, and its secret knowledge about time as absolutely inviolable.
But the possibility of this surface without depth is not a reason to discard the notion of depth, or the model of knowledge altogether, since it is the possibility of the inviolable secret from which philosophy and narrative theory have to begin. The novel may take up where philosophy leaves off, but the possibility of doing so seems inaugural for the discourse it carries on from, like a future possibility which produces the moment to which it is said to be added on.
Notes
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Author: Mark Currie
