The Varieties of Temporal Experience

Travels in Philosophical, Historical, and Ethnographic Time

Michael D. Jackson

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780231546447
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Anthropologie

What does it mean to live in time, between the unforeseeable and the irreversible? In The Varieties of Temporal Experience, Michael Jackson demonstrates the significance of a phenomenology of time for ethnography, philosophy, and history through a multifaceted consideration of the gap between our cultural representations of temporality and the bewildering multiplicity of our experience of being-in-time.

Jackson explores temporality in a subjective mode as a form of literary anthropology. The first part of the book tells the story of John Joseph Pawelka, whose 1910 escape from prison and subsequent disappearance became one of New Zealand's great unsolved mysteries, discussing what it reveals about the interplay of popular stories, hidden histories, and media narratives in constructing allegories of national and moral identity. In the second, Jackson reflects on journeys up and down the islands of New Zealand, touching on the ways that personal stories are interwoven with social and historical events. Throughout this groundbreaking book, Jackson juxtaposes philosophy, history, and ethnography in an attempt to do justice to the extraordinary variety of temporal experience, at the same time exploring the ethical and existential quandaries that arise from the complexity of lived time.

The Blind Impress

And once you have walked the length of your mind, what

You command is clear as a lading-list.

Anything else must not, for you, be thought

To exist.

And what’s the profit? Only that, in time,

We half-identify the blind impress

All our behavings bear, may trace it home.

But to confess,

On that green evening when our death begins,

Just what it was, is hardly satisfying,

Since it applied only to one man once,

And that one dying.

—Philip Larkin, from “Continuing to Live”

Part One

Prologue

One sometimes happens on a scholarly essay that transcends the discursive conventions of the academy and leaves one stunned and moved. Such was the impact on me of reading Thomas Schwarz Wentzer’s “I Have Seen Königsberg Burning,” in which the author describes events that occurred before he was born as if he had experienced and suffered them at first hand. How is it, Wentzer asks, that someone else’s story becomes in effect one’s own? And to whom can we assign the authorship of such a story when it appears to possess an independent life, inherited and reinterpreted within a family generation after generation?

As the Red Army advances across East Prussia in December 1944, a German mother and her youngest children flee their farm near the Memel River, hoping to reach a Baltic port and possible evacuation to Scandinavia. The second youngest of these children, born in 1938, will outlive the war, marry, and become the father of Thomas Schwarz Wentzer. But in the unbearably cold winter of 1944–1945, living on soup made of potato peelings and passing the cairns of children who have died on the road, the family is unsure whether it will survive hunger, frostbite from temperatures that fall to minus 25 degrees Celsius, and the strafing attacks on their refugee column. Not long after crossing the frozen Vistula Lagoon, the front line cuts off their escape route and the family has to retreat.

Thirty kilometers to the north lay Königsberg, the historic capital of East Prussia. Four months ago the city was reduced to burning rubble by phosphorus bombs dropped from Allied bombers. Firestorms raged for three days, leaving 200,000 of the city’s 320,00 inhabitants homeless. When the Red Army occupied Königsberg in April 1945, the 100,000 Germans who had not already fled were systematically expelled, and to this day the descendants of these refugees return to their ancestral city as tourists, nostalgic for a world that ended before many of them were even born.

Similarly indelible traces of a former life seem to have haunted Thomas’s father, who often told his son that he had seen Königsberg burning. As a child, Thomas took this declaration on trust, trying to imagine the city as it once was. As a student of philosophy, he associated Königsberg with Kant and began to see the fire-bombed city as a symbol of the collapse of European Enlightenment, the annihilation of the dignity of man, the destruction of the Good and of the moral integrity of everything connected to German culture.

Ironically, Thomas’s father never actually saw Königsberg burning. He probably appropriated his older sister’s traumatic memories from the time she worked as a nurse in the city. Having escaped the one-thousand-degree firestorms that blew through the streets at over one hundred miles an hour—melting glass, boiling asphalt, and incinerating hundreds of thousands of human beings—Liesbeth fled east in the hope of being reunited with her family. Just as her direct experience of Königsberg in flames would be absorbed by her younger brother, his false memories were in turn taken up by his son. Finally, the same historical event was subject to so many biographical reworkings that no one could claim to know the truth of the event or to be the author of the story it occasioned. Each person made the event his or her own. Yet even when Thomas comes to doubt the veracity of his father’s claim to have seen Königsberg burning, he does not doubt this reiterated phrase held such a profound meaning for his father that he has a filial obligation to ponder the meaning, however unfathomable it may be. Though not at liberty to discount his father’s claim; he must respond to it, just as he feels obliged to respond to the horrific history of his homeland. Thomas quotes Walter Benjamin to convey this thought. “The past carries a secret index with it, by which it is referred to its redemption. Are we not touched by the same breath of air that was among those who came before us? Is there not an echo of those who have been silenced in the voices to which we lend our ears today? Have not the women, who we court, sisters who they do not recognize anymore? If so, then there is a secret appointment between the generations of the past and that of our own. For we have been expected upon this earth. For it has been given us to know, just like every generation before us, a weak messianic power, on which the past has a claim.”

Thomas wrote his remarkable essay in response to a past that, in the form of his father’s compelling testimony, made a claim on the son, and it is possible that the son was brought into the world in order for this claim to be redeemed.

Thomas’s essay left such a profound impression on me that I felt that I now inherited it and had to find an adequate response to it. Something more was required of me than simply writing to the author and telling him how moved I had been by his essay. This more considered response involved a lot of thought, some of it disciplined, some idle. Initially, my mind went back to 1945, the year I began school in a small New Zealand town. At the very moment that Thomas’s grandmother Selma and her four children were trudging across the snowbound wastes of East Prussia with tens of thousands of other displaced persons, starving, chilled to the bone, stigmatized by their ethnicity, their belongings in mud-soiled bundles or shabby suitcases, I was blissfully ignorant of the war, though some of my earliest memories were of my two uncles returning home on leave, the texture of their serge uniforms merging with the smell of the laurel hedge near my grandparent’s front gate. Despite these gaps and contrasts, sixty years later one of Selma’s grandsons, now a teacher of philosophy in a Danish university, and I, an anthropologist and writer living in the United States, would become close friends. This was not, however, the story I came to tell. I needed to find another way of treating the entangled relationship of biography and history. Thomas speaks of this relationship as something “I cannot escape from, being the person that I am, born in the mid-sixties of the last century, a German of all nationalities, coincidentally having been educated as a philosopher, having to deal with the facticity of the contingent necessities of my peculiar situation that are both so unique and yet so common to people like me.”

Even if no chronicle of the past remains, and tyrants like Qin Shi Huang or Adolf Hitler burn the books that keep our memories of the past alive, the past persists, smoldering for years only to spontaneously combust one day in a moment of violence. Even if our unhealed scars are not mentioned and our history suppressed, the tradition of the dead generations continues to weigh like a nightmare on the minds of the living, affecting a parent’s mood or the inflection of a voice, explaining a minor mannerism, an addictive tendency, a fatal flaw. Does a story one day have to be told—to shed light on this insidious field of shadow, this haunted landscape, those lost Edens? And can this story redeem what has been done or lift the curse that has been transmitted in silence across the generations?

“The Blind Impress” was born of these questions, and invites reflection on the complicated ways that history impresses itself upon us so that our individual lives are grafts of the lives of others whose sacrifices place us in their debt, whose errors we are blamed for, whose wounds we bind up and try to heal, whose questions we attempt to answer, and whose deferred dreams we feel called upon to realize on their behalf.

That Green Evening

He is sitting outside his garden shed. A panama hat shades his face. Hoes and rakes are propped against the wall; seed potatoes are spread out on superphosphate sacks. He lights his pipe and tosses the match away.

I was three when my grandfather retired from the police. He began telling me stories before I even understood what stories were.

“My, the living” (Yorkshire accent, rueful shake of the head), “to look at him you wouldn’t think he could make anything but a nuisance of himself.”

He pauses. Holds his pipe away from his face. Wipes a film of spittle from his lips with the back of his hand. The cabbage patch is spattered with white butterflies.

“Aye, there was only one thing ’e could do, could that lad, and that was make a public nuisance of himself.”

My grandfather seems to brood for a moment on the failings and foibles of men, and I can smell blood and bone and hear the river stumbling through the bush.

In the years my grandfather is remembering, Saturday was latenight shopping. Farmers drove in from the boondock and stood along the footpath, backs to the street, smoking cigarettes and complaining about the falling price of wool. Wives went shopping. A lot of town boys resented the young farmers. Would get drunk and pick fights. One bloke in particular was an inveterate troublemaker. My grandfather was “forever being called out to deal with him.” But telling this story, my grandfather doesn’t mention the misdemeanor. It’s the young man’s pride that is at stake, not his guilt. When my grandfather arrests him outside the post office, he avoids taking him directly to the police station because this will mean going along the thronged main street. Instead, he takes an alleyway into a back street so the miscreant will not be seen and shamed.

In 1960, when my grandfather died, I went back to Inglewood for the funeral. After a Methodist service, the cortege set off for the cemetery. As our car turned behind the hearse toward the cemetery gates, I noticed a group of old men standing on the opposite side of the road, heads bowed, hats in their hands. One was the man whose public humiliation my grandfather had averted fifty years ago.

My uncles inherited my grandfather’s fob watch, watch chain, and police baton. My legacy has been my grandfather’s stories.

One story in particular he returned to time and time again. It was also a story about youth, and loss, and guilt and shame.

In 1910 a young man called Joe Pawelka was arrested in the Manawatu and remanded on charges of housebreaking, arson, and theft. His escape from police custody triggered the most intense manhunt in New Zealand since the military pursuit in the late 1860s of the Māori resistance leader Te Kooti. During the weeks that Pawelka was on the run, two men were shot dead, buildings were set on fire, shops and homes burgled, and panic engulfed a province. My grandfather was stationed in Levin at the time and was among police reinforcements brought to the Manawatu for the manhunt. Like many New Zealanders, he would remember “The Powelka Campaign” as the biggest news story of the year, with banner headlines fueling the general “hysteria” and “pandemonium.” “Mad Orgy of Manslaying,” Truth declared. “Wild Rumour and False Alarm.”

Recaptured and brought to trial, Joe Pawelka got twenty-one years’ hard labor for breaking and entering, theft, arson, and escape. Many people, including my grandfather, thought the sentence vengeful and unjust, and on the wintry August day in 1911 when Pawelka escaped from the Terrace Gaol in Wellington, never to be heard of again, my grandfather was happy to conclude that poetic justice had been done.

Stories have a habit of generating stories. They come to nest, one inside the other, like Chinese boxes, each a window onto another’s world. This is what happened to my grandfather’s story about Joe Pawelka.

In 1973, after several years abroad, I came back to New Zealand with my wife and daughter and went to live in the Manawatu. Some of the places where Joe Pawelka had lived, worked, and taken refuge became ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• The Blind Impress
• The Enigma of Anteriority
• Afterword
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index