Dramatizing Time in Twentieth-Century Fiction

William Vesterman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317743651
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

How have twentieth-century writers used techniques in fiction to communicate the human experience of time? Dramatizing Time in Twentieth-Century Fiction explores this question by analyzing major narratives of the last century that demonstrate how time becomes variously manifested to reflect and illuminate its operation in our lives.

Offering close readings of both modernist and non-modernist writers such as Wodehouse, Stein, Lewis, Joyce, Hemingway, Faulkner, Borges, and Nabokov, the author shares and unifies the belief, as set forth by the distinguished philosopher Paul Ricoeur, that narratives rather than philosophy best help us understand time. They create and communicate its meanings through dramatizations in language and the reconfiguration of temporal experience. This book explores the various responses of artistic imaginations to the mysteries of time and the needs of temporal organization in modern fiction. It is therefore an important reference for anyone with an interest in twentieth-century literature and the philosophy of time.

1 Plum Time in Everland

The Divine Comedy of P. G. Wodehouse

“It reminded me of one of those lines in the poem—‘See how the little how-does-it-go-tum tumty tiddly push.’ Perhaps you remember the passage?”

“‘Alas, regardless of their fate, the little victims play,’ sir.”

“Quite. Sad, Jeeves.”

“Yes, sir.”¹

Viewed as an ultimately uneducable man,² Bertie Wooster undermines the biographical foundations of the novel as a literary form. In any given “installment of the Bertram Wooster story,”³ he will always be seen to forget as a character the same lovely taglines of literature that as a narrator he remembers so well to have forgotten. Of course Jeeves never forgets anything and can always supply any demand for the proper lines or their proper authors. And at first each of his lessons seems taken to heart, because in Bertie’s narratives both the initial ignorance and the supplied knowledge have been clearly remembered down to the last nonsense syllable. But as soon as Bertie stops writing and enters his world again, oblivion resumes its sway, as he himself might put it. Old favorites fade over and over. In volume after volume, for example, Jeeves has to remind him what the troops of Midian are said to do in Hymns Ancient and Modern (they “prowl and prowl around”).⁴ And although Bertie has been through Eton and Oxford he never can get straight Jeeves’s rem acu tetigisti (“you have touched the matter with a needle,” i.e., “exactly so”).⁵ Yet every time Bertie comes to narrate his latest aphasias, he is once more blessed with total recall.

Literary lapses are fully consistent with larger problems of learning. Bertie can no more help getting engaged to the same women over and over again—although previous narratives clearly prove he should know he shouldn’t—than he can help enacting the eternal return to Totleigh Towers or Steeple Bumpleigh—although previous reincarnations as a narrator prove he knows he will get in the soup promptly on arrival. In spite of his helplessness and infinite regression, however, Bertie’s autobiography is far from being Kafkaesque. The world he lives in is not hellish, but (as Evelyn Waugh says) “paradisial.”⁶

Although amnesia and passivity seem to rule his life, all his verbal fumbling and personal diffidence are redeemed as soon as Bertie begins to write. In a strikingly original style with shining new similes leaping out of a tumbling torrent of slangy cliché, biblical reference, and literary allusion, his spirited narration proceeds as if he were blessed by Divine Inspiration like some Mayfair Caedmon.⁷ At least, without an equally radical explanation, his literary state of grace as a narrator seems incomprehensible. How—under centuries-old novelistic conventions of temporal verisimilitude—could he ever otherwise be understood to have written the books in which he appears? It is as if Leopold Bloom were to wake up on June 17, 1904, and sit down to write Ulysses.

This serial literary apotheosis in a serial novel makes part of the comic art of P. G. Wodehouse, and the comedy would not be nearly so amusing without its play on novelistic conventions. This point becomes very clear in any comparison of the Wooster narratives with their transmogrifications into plays. Absent the dynamics of interaction between Bertie as narrator and Bertie as character, everything tends to fall flat. Trapped without its temporal perspective in the block universe of a mere living present, the transcribed dialogue dies, Bertie seems only inept, and Jeeves himself only stuffy or arch and self-regarding, not respectful, all-knowing, and all-forgiving. It is therefore not just in their more intricate plotting that the novels belie Wodehouse’s own typically modest characterization of them—“musical comedies without music.”⁸

One fundamental convention of narration in the first person assumes that the narrator has learned something about his or her earlier life, if only what parts of the plenum of experience may be justifiably left out of its verbal record. Naturally, a narrator’s ambition is to achieve some greater composition—to understand and express the life left in. And if life exists in time, the language of narrative in expressing some meaning for a life also expresses a sense of time. Paul Ricoeur says that through “emplotment” the art of narration creates knowledge of time by creating a world of events in which “‘one because of that’ prevails over ‘one after that.’”⁹ By making a meaningful temporal order of occurrences, narrative redeems events from mere sequence. Ricoeur claims that by achieving a verbally expressed composition out of the welter of occurrences in history (or out of the welter of imaginary occurrences possible to fiction), the art of narration “figures and reconfigures” the mystery of time, humanizing it for our understanding. By means of these figurative powers narrative allows time to become comprehensible. But if time implies change, and Bertie’s autobiography ultimately expresses an absence of change, how can we understand his life or his time or the narrative art of P. G. Wodehouse?

Besides trying to recall quotations, Bertie’s life consists largely of his getting “into the mulligatawny” and Jeeves’s getting him out. That’s what Jeeves seems placed on earth to do. What is more, Jeeves knows his place and never resents it. What do you think of that? Jeeves exists to serve not only Bertie—who he fully understands is “mentally negligible”¹⁰—but also any of Bertie’s odd friends and relations who might require his help—“They all come to you, don’t they, Jeeves, from the lowest to the highest?” Happily for them, Jeeves’s service is so effective that (for example) no need for money ever lasts for more than a few days. While some people like Bertie himself “have the stuff in heaping handfuls,” others temporarily experience a desperate need for “a bit of the ready” and rely on Jeeves’s schemes to redistribute the wealth, although the money of the young master is never required for the plan. And while all Jeeves’s plans are crowned with success (as Bertie might say), a new edition of Spinoza is about the most this gentleman’s personal gentleman ever gets from anyone for his pains. Jeeves is always pleased with his reward, however, fully satisfied to have been of service. What do you think of that?

In fact, not only are envy and ingratitude unknown, but Bertie lives forever in his mid-twenties in a world devoid of other common causes of human suffering. Violence, relations between the sexes, arson, blackmail, and drunkenness—to take only a few examples—are always just as harmless and amusing as money troubles. The weather is almost always perfect. Mumps (never accompanied by testicular complications) is the worst disease really encountered, hangovers the worst discomfort—“I felt like a sandbagged leper.”¹¹ You can kick a Boy Scout in the rump and the result is not permanent damage to nerve or bone, not a criminal charge or a civil lawsuit, but the gratitude of the boy’s father, which leads to the success of young lovers.

Granted, in the public sphere the plague of Communism sometimes infects people like G. D’Arcy (“Stilton”) Cheesewright, causing him to shun momentarily the eager support of a rich uncle and to believe he is joining the working-class struggle by becoming a rural constable.¹² People of the “rougher sort” sometimes throw eggs and old vegetables at political speakers.¹³ There is a protest march.¹⁴ But that’s about it on the left. It is also true that Fascism does appear in Wooster’s England through an organization formed by Bertie’s enemy Spode, later Lord Sidcup.¹⁵ Yet his Black Shorts do little more than chant “Heil, Spode!” while wearing rugby pants off the field of play. Like ghosts defined pragmatically by William James, they might as well not exist. As for Capitalism, everyone in his world (including Bertie) knows that he and most of the young and idle rich at the Drones Club are complete social parasites, but no one cares. No one cares! What do you think of that?

What everyone does care about is the fast-paced pursuit of still more happiness in unambiguous and fully satisfying forms. And thanks to the fish-fed brain beneath his size-nine hat, Jeeves has the power to supply every demand in Bertie’s world and to overcome every threat to its normal steady state of pure pleasure. But where does he get the heart to do so? How does “one after that” become “one because of that” for him? How are we to understand the motives of a superman in the selfless service of a booby?

It might be argued that the lack of an answer is precisely the basic joke of the series and a sacred mystery, like the never-revealed name of what the Newsomes manufacture in The Ambassadors or what Captain Vere says to Billy Budd behind the closed doors. But surely criticism should not give up without a fight. Jeeves always counts on the discovery of clear and distinct motives to form his plots, and why should we not try to take him on his own terms?

At this point, an unamused critic interested in social justice might say that the only relevant motives here are those of the genre, and “the clever slave” is a type going back at least to Roman comedy, one designed to affirm the justice of the established social order by dramatizing its putative universal acceptance. The fact is, however, that the social order dramatized by P. G. Wodehouse has never existed in England or anywhere else on this planet, according to observers as socially acute and as politically opposed as George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh. In England there are not and never were any noblemen like Lord Emsworth or Lord Ickenham (heading for the bath armed with his great sponge Joyeuse), no valets like Jeeves, and no clubs like the Drones with its bread throwing, its swimming bath (complete with a series of ropes and rings suspended overhead for drunken displays of prowess in full evening dress), and its borrowing and lending of fivers by old crumpets and old beans.¹⁶

But if it is not like the world of a real England, what is the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Thematicizing Time
• 1 Plum Time in Everland: The Divine Comedy of P. G. Wodehouse
• 2 Wyndham Lewis vs. Gertrude Stein: Classic Time vs. Romantic Time
• 3 Choral Narrative and the Web of Time in Ulysses: From Romanticism to Modernism
• 4 The Moment of Narrative Truth in The Sun Also Rises
• 5 Coming to Terms with Time in Faulkner
• 6 Particles and Waves in Borgesian Time
• 7 The Technique of Time in Lolita
• 8 A Pleromatic Reprise of the Book
• References
• Index