Confessions of a Doctoral Dissertation Defense:
On Re-Temporalizing the Self: Ontological Fictions of Spacetime.[1]
[N.B.: Revised version of the original doctoral defense presentation
proffered on the 16th of May, 1996 at SUNY-SB.]
Foreword
As I sit here preparing to talk about my
dissertation, I am reminded of its origins. And, I am also reminded that I am
supposed to talk about what lead me to this project, and, hopefully, where it
will take me, other than the award of this degree and, someday, of a job.
The origins of this dissertation stretch as far back
as my childhood, when I used to lay awake in those wonderful Caribbean nights
of my “innocence”, and look at the warm darkness that surrounded me wondering
what made darkness so dark, and why I could see it. I would lie in bed and feel
time moving; I would hear it in the rhythmic cacophony of the coquíes and the soft swaying of the palm
trees against the metronomic tick-tocking of the clock. And, I could smell it
in the fragrance of the garden that was carried lovingly on the shifting winds
of the warm night. For me, time was contained in the movement of a passing car
as its headlights shone upon the walls of my bedroom, growing in brightness and
size as it shifted on the wall, changing with the passage of each moment my
perception of the space in which I was, until reaching its climax, to,
eventually, fall back into darkness.
Like a (cinematic) text, time and space were
contained in that one place, in that one moment, framed by the experience of my
room, and my consciousness. And I wondered if it was the same in other houses,
other streets, other times ... until it came to me to ask, “How is it in other
minds?” After all, “Do other people perceive time and space as I do?” “Or is it
different?” These simple questions defined who and what I was.
As I grew older, though not necessarily wiser, and
joined society's well-formed body of consensual malcontents, I noticed that
these questions were never answered to my satisfaction. No religion, no
science, no dogma, has ever illuminated the brightest of dark corners of my
room. Even today, as I sit here pretending to have resolved this question of
time and space, I question these institutional premises upon which we define
our every experience, and wonder how it is that we take all of this for
granted, especially when we, as humans, define who or what we think we are. It
is these questions, or, rather, the precious act of questioning inherent to a
child which leads me to today's performance.
I now realize how similar my journey has been to
that of the protagonists in the novels under discussion. So, as I sit here and
ready myself to partake of the communion with others, I must take a deep breath
and realize that what I've tried to salvage may be less tenable than I hoped.
In my long years of study, and the many more to
come, I have tried to understand what defines humans, socially, culturally, and
institutionally: and have come to the conclusion that our need to control time
and space determines our very being. But time and space are also taken for
granted. There must be a space for time and a time for space and what happens
happens within this relation. Like this defense, in this locale, and at this
moment, being is prescribed by its limiters, them being time and space. These
limiting factors are equally present in texts, not merely as tools for the
writer nor as mediums for the reader, but as enactors of the texts own being.
My dissertation explores the practice of literary hermeneutics
in an attempt to establish a critical methodology based not merely on
linguistic spatio-temporal turns, but, rather, on physical and philosophical
notions of time and space. Through a reading of Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics
(1965), Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles (1958), Clarice Lispector's The
Passion According to G.H. (1968), and Alan Moore's “The Reversible Man”
(1983), I dwell on the basic human need to answer the ontological questions
that define humanity's quest for meaningful self-identity. This is achieved by describing how these
texts adopt a broad sense of space and time based on its socially constitutive
function, thereby releasing space and time from their strict religious and
scientific character. I propose that each work in question embodies one of
three major forms of temporal consciousness: the transcendental, the
historical, or the narrativistic. Such
an apprehension of spatial temporality will eventually lead to a better
understanding of the problems that critics and theorists face when confronted
with the crumbling borders between literary genres, and, ultimately, when
trying to understand the hermeneutical and temporal relationships established
between ontological narratives and the self-constituted reader.
The
Problem of Time and Space
From the time of the Ancients, an
understanding of the concepts of space and time has been crucial in answering
questions pertaining the self. Both Parmenides, as well as Heraclitus, viewed
being through problems of sequence, continuity and flow of time (chromos). Human
interaction with space and time came to be understood as a river that flows in
one's backyard —also referred to by some as the arrow of time (thus Time’s
Arrow). The physical qualities of time and place were eventually distinguished
from a special sense of appropriate or just time, and, I may add, space (kairós).
With Plato and Aristotle the quest
is divided, being becoming a “spiritual” quest while spacetime a purely
physical one. For the following centuries spacetime would become physical
categories apart from man —absolute space and time—, or, eventually, they would
be considered artificial experiential contraptions created by man. As such,
Aristotle's determination of time as a series of "now-moments" would
condemn the West to see time as nothing more than a physical quantifiable
concept. Newton, Descartes, and the British empiricists would relate to space
and time as things of lesser human endeavor, except as referential to the
organizational power of human being.
By the late modern period,
Nietzsche, worried with the advent of the Industrial Age, would forewarn of the
error in misconceiving time as nothing more than a tool for man. “The intent
[of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same], Nietzsche stipulates, is for the
present never to be depreciated as a mere means to the future: each moment is
to be self-fulfilling” (Thiele 222).[2]
In the twentieth century, history
had joined science in determining time and space as quantifiable elements of
nature. Faced with the need to understand the realities of the world that
surrounds us in a quantifiable manner, man would come to define the world through
established and accountable scientific, or, rather, technological certainties. Consider
the necessity in the twentieth century for a position like that of the
Directorate of Time, which takes care of the world's number one clock at the
United States Naval Observatory. As a major part of the world's effort in the
ordering of time, especially since it makes up for 40% of worldwide official
time, the Directorate depends on 54 cesium atomic and hydrogen maser clocks by
which, through consultation with its international counterparts, the
Directorate tracks the exactitude of the passing of time. But, as time passed,
even these technological certainties have deteriorated into mere speculations
upon the relation between differing theoretical suppositions. With this
breakdown of the cognitive system, the certainties that defined the self also
suffered, leaving humanity to attempt to recapture its supremacy over the world
through new ventures in space and time, especially through the act of
narrative.
Postmodern and deconstructive
agendas would undermine the authority of history and science by denying them as
the transcendental mediums in which perspective is possible (Ermarth 58).[3]
Postmodern fiction would emphasize not the time that ordinarily surrounds us (chronological
time) nor the locale which we inhabit (geographical space). Rather, postmodern
and deconstructive modes of reading would emphasize the time circumscribed by
the reading act itself (experiential time) and on the place of the reading
itself, that is the text (topographical space), as expressed in language and
consciousness itself.
But the solutions proposed by
postmodern and deconstructive modes fall short of their enterprise. Postmodernism
and deconstruction attempt to lay the methodology for a linguistic treatment of
being free on centric discourse. But, in reality, this treatment of the text,
and of the self, maintains the same bipolar structure between a center and its
margins of modernism. This oppositional relation only establishes new authorities
by the transvaluation of discerning centers. In such an act, both postmodern
and deconstructive moves turn out to be no more than a new subjective and
biased treatment of the self. And, in such an act, the quest for a supposed
true ontically pure being is lost in the comfort of a cognitively acquired
self.
Is a true pure ontic self possible? Quantum
theory revives an idea as old as Anaxagoras and Heraclitus, or as old as the
concept of Ying-Yang, that is, that life is an endless relationship between
“bodies” at the most primary sense. In Mindwalk (Bernt Capra, 1990) the
poet Thomas Harriman, played by John Heard, quotes Pablo Neruda as he questions
what it is we search for when we throw out our nets at night. Harriman states
that we cast nets and search for the answers of the universe. But, when we wake
up naked in the middle of the night, all we find is a fish trapped in midair. “Don't
you find that what you catch is your own self again? Like that fish trapped
inside the wind?” Furthermore, “Life feels itself, and the search for life is
an internal one.” And in the few words of Pablo Neruda, and of himself,
Harriman questions the insistence of the politicians (represented by Sam
Waterston) and the scientists (represented by Liv Ullman), as of every other
human in the world, in searching for perfection outside of the self.
Postmodernism and deconstruction has
remembered that no one entity is in itself pure and separate from all others. Arthur
Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, among others,
remembered the relationship between the existent and the nothing. As Shiva
dances, the Hindu myth tells, the world dances in its existence. And in this
dance, the search for knowledge reigns. In such a quest, the Ur-text is
envisioned and an Ur-self imagined. And, in the end, the search ends in ogling
the packaging, while one wishfully, yet fearfully, shakes the interior to find
out, without looking, what is inside. It is this avoidance of the package's
interior which I believe has fueled the ever so constant re-determination of
the self in the past century. And, it is this re-determination of the self
which I look at in relation to space-time. For in the end, Shiva's dance takes
place and implies duration. It is this place and duration, understood as the
constitutive moment and locale of being, which eventually must be questioned by
all.
The
texts
Each text selected for my dissertation embodies a
different treatment of space-time and the self, especially in their different
textual structures. For example, Italo Calvino's Le cosmicomiche (Cosmicomics)
and Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles are examples of the human need
to compile stories gathered around a temporal narrativistic framework: the
diary.
The structure of Calvino's narrative in Cosmicomics
resembles more a scientific journal than a tale. It reproduces the transcendent
accident of being as expressed by Heraclitus' river and Newton's physics. From
the beginning, the protagonist of Cosmicomics, Qfwfq, is thrown into the
river of space and time, left to defend itself against the tides and wills of
his surroundings. As a result, being is inevitably powerless of determining its
own course.
Calvino's Cosmicomics represents the ever
present, the Aristotelian “now-moments”, as Qfwfq is moved, pushed and flung
out into existence, without ever being capable of influencing the choices that
appear in his journey through time and space. Time is referential movement
outside of experience. The Past and the Future are just referential points in an
ever present journey of evolutionary progress—Time’s Arrow. Qfwfq's being is
one determined by the “now”, not by a before nor by an after. It is only the
present moment which is pertinent to Qfwfq's consciousness, a testament to
non-referential mental processes in the arbitrary causal vastness of nature and
the universe.
Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles is a
more humanistic treatment of the experience of spacetime, as embodied in the
history of a people and a place, in the guise of a chronicle/diary of the
explorer’s ([hu]man/martian/kind’s) struggles on a “New World” (Mars). This is
done by primarily focusing on the question of “Martianness.” What does it mean
to be Martian? A treatise on the power and evils of colonialism, The Martian
Chronicles traces the colonizing process by which an identity is created.[4]
This colonizing process can be defined as the active conscious act of
perceiving the being as described by Edmund Husserl's concept of
time-consciousness. This problem is further emphasized by the intrusion of
Earth —the past— on Mars —the future—. Eventually, to be a Martian is to
problematize what such an identity entails in time and space. Mars becomes the
space by which the identity is questioned. The open future offered at the end
of the chronicle becomes the time towards which an identity is formed. To bring
“Earth” to Mars is to force one identity upon another. The question of identity
(Now) in modernity, then, is a question of an effacing supremacy (Future,
especially in the scientific-technological promise of the space program)
brought upon being by the colonizing obliteration of its being (Past).
Even so, for the Late-Modern, the question of
identity is itself more of a psychological programme than a physical one. For
in the Late-Modern identity is a mental construct of those experienced spaces
and those experienced times brought into review post-experientially by the
mind. And, in such a review of experienced moments, there is an expected end,
an identity brought to fulfillment, not by nature, as in Cosmicomics,
but by choice. Still, the programme is written, and the conscious individual
follows course until finally reaching the telos of his self.
Clarice Lispector's A paixão segundo G.H. (The
Passion According to G.H.) is the transition between the certainties of the
modern, whether physical or psychological, and the pretenses of the
post-modern. It is a self-reflective post/modern novel, yet it is also the
protagonist's personal diary as she confides her psychological fears and human disillusions
to an unidentified listener. The Passion According to G.H. plays with
the deepest sense of being, that is, with non-being. Contrary to Calvino's
transcendent “now” and Bradbury's conscious being, Lispector presents the
hidden question of the unknown rejected by the Modern and the Late-Modern. Not
only are all definitions of being put to question, but also the essence of the
quest for an identity. It is this quest which troubles the protagonist of The
Passion According to G.H. As such, time and space become useless as G.H.
fights with her self.
Finally, Alan Moore's comic strip, “The Reversible
Man,” brings to light the graphic quality of today's non-canonical act of
storytelling by treating a serious theme in what is considered by most canons as
a genre of adolescent frivolity. But, it also brings to light the
glyph-likeness of the postmodern and deconstructive world, as it brings into
the canonic form of the epic a marginal quality, similar to the cinematic form
of modern epic storytelling.
Alan Moore's cartoon “The Reversible Man” focuses on
the attempts of the post-modern to understand unconventional time and space. The
act of time in reverse questions the authoritative flow of time and the
sequence of space. But more than just a reverse in time and spatial habitation,
the story leads to questions on the spatial construction of the self,
especially because of its graphic nature. For, in the unbecoming of the protagonist,
both physically as well as mentally, the presuppositions of constitutive identity
are shaken up, especially when one considers that deconstructive modes are
still structural forms of constructing a self-identity, even though they reject
the premise of an absolute and centering station in being.
Final
Words
A
complete life may be one ending in so full identification with the non-self
that there is
no self to die. — Bernard
Berenson
Though there may be as many interpretations of
Spacetime as instances in a moment, one has to limit his views to a sample of
those available in a vast ocean of possibilities. With many theories and many
more examples to quash them, one tries to have a grasp on a corner of the
amorpheous beast before him: a theoretical security blanket of sorts, upon
which one ponces in hopes of spiriting away the existential creatures that lurk
in the liminality of being. It is with this in mind that I resolved on choosing
the texts I did and the treatments I choose to impose on them.
With Calvino's Cosmicomics and Bradbury's The
Martian Chronicles I described the eternalizing self in spacetime as
expressed by the epistemic tendencies of the Early- and the Late-Modern
periods, our cult to Time’s Arrow (a problem already brought to light by Zeno’s
paradox in the 5th century BCE). With Lispector's The Passion
According to G.H. I dwell on the experiential dissonance resulting from the
confrontation of the self with itself through the early postmodern nothing, as
present. And with Moore's “The Reversible Man.” I looked at how the self, in a
post(post)modern, or deconstructive, mode of spacetime faces death, or, rather,
the negation of death, ratified by Heidegger's binary absolute-nothing and Jacques
Derrida's deferred marginal.
All of these texts basically express the existence,
implicitly or explicitly, of an all-encompassing locale for the contents of
being, be it in the form of absolute physical spacetime; be it in the form of
subjective experiential consciousness; or be it in the form of a graphically
reified text. It is not, then, about content, but about defining the “chalice”
which holds the content of being in place. As I have shown in my analysis of
Calvino's Cosmicomics, this locale and moment is the scientific myth of
t0,
that is, of the legendary origin of the universe. T0,
ideologically known of as the origin of time, is also the locale that contains
all contents, both primary, as well as marginal. Through the centuries many
have queried the primacy of this locale over the known world, and over the
self. But even postmodern and deconstructive attempts at disavowing the
Absolute have become no more than affirmations of spacetime's locale as the
reigning locale of the Absolute.
In
“Back to the Future,” Mark C. Taylor claims
that
to understand the difference that marks the margin between modernism and postmodernism, it is necessary to refigure
space by imagining time without presence. Time that lacks the present implies a
space that is never present (though it is not simply absent). The space of
postmodernism is “the becoming-time of space and the becoming-space of time. (13)[5]
It is true that there is a need to refigure space
and time, or, rather, our experience of space and time. But to make “presence”
and “present” equals is pushing the envelope of credibility too far. Clearly
Taylor is basing his claim on Derrida, and on the fact that Derrida is using
Heisenberg's Principle of Uncertainty to pair space and time against each other
as distinct and separate vectors of experience. But, as I demonstrate through
my reading of Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, in reality both Taylor
and Derrida are going back to Husserl's perceptive act of time-consciousness as
they express the existence of pasts and futures that are not readily
distinguishable in the fleeting moment of perception.
Strangely enough, the postmodern is about the end. But
it is not about the end of the modern, as it is commonly purported. Rather, as
I show in my analysis of Lispector's The Passion According to G.H., the
postmodern is an attempt to embrace the ends of the world in hopes that it will
not come to fruition. Emphasizing the graphic nature of modern life, the
postmodern desensitizes humanity to the perils of their modern egos. “Death is
the absolute future in which the absolute past approaches, but only approaches,
for death is never present” (Taylor 18). In a weird reclaiming of Epicurus, the
postmodern becomes a comic strip of death, of hatred, of deformity, and of the
end of civilization. As such the value of being is diminished as the value of
spacetime diminishes, and as the need to find oneself is banalized in its mere
existence in the postmodern.
Finally, through my analysis of Moore's “The
Reversible Man” I propose that self-identity also suffers as the postmodern
takes away the precious uniqueness of past events and their relation to the composition
of our being. As Nancy M. Farris states, “The mystery of transubstantiation
lies precisely in its recreation of a unique act, which occurred only once and
in historical time” (573).[6]
It is this non repetitive quality of time that makes identity so distinct in
the self. The self becomes as time travels “forward” presenting it with new
experiences with which to constitute being. And yet the postmodern spends its
time rewriting the past to its excesses. Like a spoiled child who is
unsatisfied with the beginnings it was dealt, the postmodern searches the deck
of space and time for a better hand to play. But Søren Kierkegaard, as well as
Nietzsche and Heidegger, knew that for being to be free it must embrace its
death with open arms.
In a way, to search for one's death is to search for
one's beginning. It is to embrace the unknown, for that is what spatio-temporal
experiences give hints about: that is, that to enact the true nature of being
is to realize the fleeting nature of being, and that despair comes as a result
of man's futile act of trying to maintain it in stasis. Being is only possible
by embracing the child inside us: that “Yeah-saying” being which grasps its
world, not as a burden, but as a chance to enact its being.
Walter Mucher
May 16th, 1996/July 4th, 2007
Notes
[1] PhD Dissertation in Comparative Literature, SUNY at Stony Brook, N.Y.
August 1996. Available through UMI Dissertation Services: Ann Arbor, Michigan.
UMI Number: 9713861.
[2] Thiele, Leslie Paul. Timely Meditations: Martin Heidegger and Postmodern Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1995.
[3]
Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992.
[4] For a treatment on The
Martian Chronicles as a treatise on the colonization of America see Gary K.
Wolfe's “The Frontier Myth in Ray Bradbury”, in Ray Bradbury, Martin
Harry Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander, editors. Edinburgh: Paul Harris
Publishing, 1980.
[5] Postmodernism: Philosophy and
the Arts. Continental Philosophy, 3. Edited by Hugh J. Silverman. New York:
Routledge, 1990. 13-32.
[6] “Remembering the Future,
Anticipating the Past: History, Time, and Cosmology among the Maya of Yucatan.”
Comparative Study of Society and History. 29 (1987): 566-593.
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