Everybody was obsessed with the philosophy of time for much of the 20th Century.
Proust always denied that
Bergson had any influence on is work, but many of the writers at the beginning of the 20th Century, had very similar preoccupations with the subject of time.
Bergson went out of fashion in the 1920s, and sometimes I have had reason to wish that Joyce had too.
When you live in a maelstrom of Hiberno-English, reading Joyce can seem a bit like over-egging the pudding.
One friend told me that his mother talked like Molly Bloom's soliloquy (no punctuation, not the subject matter) to which
I replied
"All the more reason not to write it down".
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12 comments:
It's funny, because we are just at the part of Finnegans Wake where time and space are a big factor and Wyndham Lewis denouncing the Modernists en masse, and I have to confess I don't really get the whole problem about time really.
I can sympathize with your situation, Maria, but as a Californian, I'm hardly in the same boat.
The
Philosophy of Time has certainly caused a lot of headaches.
I certainly hope you enjoy Finnegan's Wake, and if you need any links to cultural details, please let me know.
For instance, Adam and Eves at the beginning refers to a church on the quays in Dublin city centre.
Thanks for that book rec. We do have a ton of reference materials which my friends are good enough to lug around as to what Joyce might possibly be talking about, but these questions and anxieties about time seem like they might require a bit more than a footnote to understand.
The question of time is embedded in narrative itself and if you take a look at Kant it might help to see what the ground of battle actually is.
Modernism, with the breakdown of recognizable form in all the arts, is very worthwhile and while I much prefer reading Proust, Joyce is a very lucid guide to the problems facing the writer of his time.
"Time after time" is a reference to the Epiphany that Joyce discusses in "The Portrait..." and it is almost staring the reader in the face that the object Stephen chooses for his discussion is a street clock.
I spent much of my graduate years having Joyce read at me by fellow students who seemed to love the sound of their own voices and who would engage one on the question of Vico and history for hours.
That is how I account for the fact I became a gardener, not an academic.
Yeah, I can't imagine hanging around the grad students while they dissected Joyce. It was bad enough with Yeats, and actually I just stopped.
I don't know--Kant may be a bridge too far. We'll see. I'm thinking of wangling one of those 'very short introduction' books that Oxford likes to put out.
Gardening sounds like a very sane alternative.
If you can manage "Finnegans Wake" Kant should seem like child's play.
A search for "Kant linear time modernism" leads to some good links.
What happened when reading Yeats?
He also can be heavy going.
He was also caught up in mythic time and worked Eastern philosophies of recurring incarnations in history into his work.
Well, you're right about that--one good thing about attempting the Wake is that anything else looks at least possible.
It wasn't actually a problem with Yeats, it was a problem with our arrogant grad student TA. When he supported a yet more arrogant undergrad against another student who had an alternate point of view, I bailed on the whole class, and really on lit classes in general. There was more lit in my life, but not in the lit major, a fact which I have never regretted.
It's worth keeping in mind that the tactics you describe are how power-crazed academics manage to clear students out of the group and have less work for themselves in the long run.
I could write a treatise on the hilarious posturing that used go on... and many of the students I knew were theologians,one of the most argumentative bunch of bowsies to ever wear shoe leather.
(Much more of this and I'll have a compulsion to parody Joyce.)
I hardly think Joyce would mind.
Yeah, I think I was the only one he drove out though. I believe everyone else thought he was kind of a rock star.
I haven to say that none of the other TAs I had were like this, and one of them, one of the best, actually ended up by being a theologian.
Doubtless...
There's no beating the power of
prayer.
I first encountered Bergson in the mid-70s. Creative Evolution was the first I read. Not sure how I discovered him - perhaps a reference in Delueze? Foucault? Barthes? (Boy, I really read a lot of French writers back then, though Proust did not happen until the mid-80s and I have yet to read the final volume working, as I do, under the superstition that it must wait until I am on my deathbed.) As for Joyce, well, I do wish he'd put his hand down and let someone else in the class have a chance.
Thank you so much for taking time to comment here, John.
I have only just seen it.
Proust goes round in circles so there is no problem in taking him up at different points and just enjoying his intelligence.
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