Time is a universal condition. It applies to all, and though we continue to make blazing progress in the fields of medicine and technology, we have not overcome time. In Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Gracehoper asks, at the end of one particular fable, ‘But, Holy Saltmartin, why can’t you beat time?’ (Joyce, 1939). Time remains a puzzle to be solved – or perhaps a limitation to be overcome – and though this may appear the concern of the scientists, it seems we often look to literature to help us overpower time. J. Miller claims that ‘It’s about time. All literature is about time.’ (Miller, 2003) and we can ask what literature would look like if it didn’t map relationships through time; aren’t all stories about change? Doesn’t all narrative concern a move from position x to y, from one state of affairs to another? Or, perhaps the change in narrative is not in a character’s circumstances but in their disposition, an arc of some kind in their mental states. Either way, literature is inseparably, critically concerned with time.
So time is essential to literature. But reading and writing allow us to experiment with time in ways much deeper than simply chronicling a change from x to y. The central claim of this essay will be that reading and writing literature allows us to interact with time in ways which are inaccessible in our daily lives. In attempting to demonstrate this, the essay will look at two ways that writing literature allows us to experience and experiment with time; claiming that writing literature allows us to stop and record time, immortalising certain conventions and societal customs, as well as offering the author a way to escape time in some way. Furthermore, the essay will consider how, by offering the reader a chance to control time in a way usually impossible in their daily life, reading literature affords us the same experimental ability. This essay will primarily examine time in Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, occasionally supplemented with evidence drawn from Italo Calvino’s work Invisible Cities. Through these two works, we will understand just how it is that writing and reading – two activities enabled by time – are able to help us conquer it.
The first way that writing literature allows us to experiment with time is in how it stops and records time. The writing of literature, because it takes place in time, a certain temporal context through which the author is living, cannot help but immortalise certain societal conventions and norms, which appear anachronistic when read by a modern-day audience. Far from being a limitation, this imbues the author with a profound ability: to stop time. We can view The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie through this lens: written in 1961 but set in 1930s Edinburgh, the novel records Miss Brodie’s peculiar ties to Scottish Enlightenment thinking, immortalising a philosophical worldview which would perhaps have been held by a wide array of women at the time of Spark’s writing (or indeed, in 1930s Scotland). Sandy describes the ‘legions of her kind during the nineteen-thirties… who crowded their war-bereaved spinsterhood with voyages of discovery into new ideas… in art or social welfare’ (Spark, 1961: 33). The particular ‘new ideas’ of the Scottish Enlightenment which Miss Brodie might have taken on board can be found in Hume, who himself questions the narrative structure of our lives. Hume talks of the mind as a kind of theatre, imagining that all we see are varying perceptions which ‘pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations’ (Hume, 1978: 252). Hume remains sceptical about the existence of any underlying self – an ‘I’ to which this narrative progression is happening, when all the evidence we have points only to a succession of phenomena, and not a continuing mental substance.
In having Miss Brodie supposedly enamoured with Scottish Enlightenment thinking, championing this ruthless empiricism and focus on the observable, Spark stops time for a moment, recording the influence, and impact, of Hume’s thought on the philosophical state of 1930s Edinburgh. Hume’s influence has been immortalised; time perverted to allow for his ideas, originating from the 18th century, to be shown to hold importance in the 20th. However, beyond just recording and promoting the philosophy of Hume, perhaps Spark aims to immortalise another societal convention, one related more closely to the American 1960s from which she is writing; second-wave feminism. The American feminist writer Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963, ‘help[ing to] ignite the second feminist wave’ (Alexander, 2020). The second feminist wave aimed to ensure that women’s social and political voice was heard, and encouraged women to fight gender oppression, which Friedan called ‘the problem that has no name’ (Friedan, 1963).
Miss Brodie can also be seen to reflect the pursuit of equality between the sexes found in Friedan; we learn that ‘those of Miss Brodie’s kind were great talkers and feminists and, like most feminists, talked to men as man-to-man’. (Spark, 1961: 34). Is Spark not once again pausing time, recording a particular social phenomenon – namely the rise of second-wave feminism, and an increased championing of female autonomy and voice – and immortalising it in the canon of literature?
Calvino achieves a similar effect, although with a rather different focus, in Invisible Cities. The structure of the text is a series of imaginary conversations between two historical figures, Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, about a selection of conceptual cities from which Marco Polo is returning. Following Polo’s description of Trading Cities 1, Calvino writes of a moment of misunderstanding between Khan and Polo, noting that ‘the objects [which were all that Polo had to convey what he had learned from his travels to Khan] could have various meanings… an hourglass could mean time passing, or time past, or sand, or a place where hourglasses are made’ (Calvino, 1972: 45). Calvino is recording here the polyvalence of the human experience: that our observation of the material is structured by our memories, our desires, and our dispositions. In fact, the very structure of the book – a circulation between cities of ‘desire’, ‘memories’ and ‘signs’ – speaks to the interchangeability of humanity. Yet Calvino, as Spark does, stops and records time, taking these exchanges between Polo and Khan –real figures, both active in the 13th century – as demonstrative of our timeless desire to build and experience, of our endless pursuit of legacy. Calvino takes a series of conversations which could easily be temporally located, and uses them to turn our eyes inward, and have us examine the traits in ourselves which accord with Polo’s desire to explore, and Khan’s desire to be remembered. By immortalising certain conventions, and indeed conversations, which would have taken place in the 1200s, Calvino enables us to better understand our present moment.
This unique ability of authorship is part of the way in which writing literature allows us to experiment with time, profoundly changing our experience of temporality.
The second way in which writing literature allows us to experience and experiment with time is in the ability it affords the author: namely, the ability to position oneself outside of time, by lording over narrative progression and cause-event relationships. Spark continually commandeers time to portray cause and effect in different ways, perhaps most evident in the temporally-confusing epithets given after some of the Brodie set’s names. Spark tells us that ‘Rose Stanley was not yet famous for sex’ (Spark, 1961: 17). And later again describes ‘Monica Douglas, later famous for being able to do real mathematics in her head.’(Spark, 1961: 22). That Rose was as yet not famous for sex, and Monica not yet renowned for her abilities in arithmetic, but that they inevitably, unavoidably would be, is a confusing position in time to take up and demonstrates the power Spark, as author, has over time; a divine ability to be certain over events which have not yet occurred, to guarantee what should still be the conditional, and to deliver on those guarantees. This is a relationship to time which goes beyond our daily experience of time, a lordship over cause and effect which we are, in every moment of our lives, unwillingly subject to. What Spark achieves by this is what Barbara Linn Probst denotes as the separation of ‘narrative time’ and ‘reader time’. Probst notes that, ‘Flashback, memory, and backstory interrupt linear time’ (Probst, 2021) corresponding to our understanding of how the unique kind of guaranteed prolepsis that Spark employs in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie drives a division further between those two conceptualisations of time: narrative time, the time in which the events of the story take place, and reader time, the linear progression through the narrative by the reader. MacIntyre, in the fifteenth chapter of After Virtue, argues that ‘the unity of a human life is the unity of a narrative quest’ (MacIntyre, 1981), and by interrupting the reader’s linear progression through time in their consumption of the narrative, the author once again cements their role as outside of time, in control in some way of temporal cause-effect sequences, achieving a relationship to time which, for the reader, remains inaccessible.
Calvino plays with the linearity of time in a similar way, achieving a mastery over time comparable to Spark. In Fedora (Cities and Desires 4), the narrator tells us that ‘In every age someone, looking at Fedora as it was, imagined a way of making it the ideal city’. (Calvino, 1972: 39). Just as Spark does, Calvino steps outside of time; how else might a narrator feasibly be an authoritative voice on what happens ‘in every age’? To assume epistemic lordship over what should be unknowable, just as Spark does with the epithets of the Brodie set, Calvino must briefly ignore the linearity of time, gaining a control over time generally inaccessible in our daily lives.
Writing literature is a generative process which can only be facilitated by moving through time, by relentlessly experiencing. Through our experiences, we might draw together a narrative which reflects some of the most formative and foundational events of our own life. And so all of writing is concerned with time, not just in that events must move through time to be understood, but in the sense that writing is a process, cathartic in some way, which reflects our own, deeply personal experiences of time. And yet, it is only through writing, an exercise which forces us to pay homage to time, that we might wrangle it, control time, and utilise it for our own aesthetic and narrative choices. This is the exclusive ability of the author, who in their writing manages to step outside of time briefly, and contort the typical linear progression to their liking. Writing literature allows us the chance to conquer time.
The experience of reading literature also allows us to experiment with time. When we read that ‘Mary, who later, in that hotel fire, ran hither and thither till she died’ (Spark, 1961: 22) and we realise we are being told of events that have happened in ‘reality’ but are yet to happen in time, what does this do to our experience of temporality? How must we expand our understanding of time to accommodate this apparent divide between the events and the time they have to happen in? However we are to accomplish this, we must begin by acknowledging that this formulation of time goes beyond our quotidian experience. The ‘kind’ of time being played with here transcends our regular understanding, and simply by being witnesses can we as readers begin to control time in ways previously unachievable. To read events which occur out of linear time and order them into a cohesive narrative is to commandeer time; this is what we do as readers.
Reading is re-organising that which needs to be re-organised, taking the events presented as they come and formatting them into a series resembling our real-world experience. ‘Narrative activity, in history and in fiction, provides a privileged access to the way we articulate our experience of time’ (Ricoeur, 1979: 17). This articulation of our experience of time is what we gain by reading, relating our own experiences to the characters’ progression through a narrative arc of some kind. This is easily done when we read narratives that follow linear time; we are able to map ourselves and our experiences on to the steady development of the characters, relating throughout their own arcs and falls to the peaks and troughs of our own lives. However, when we read literature, such as The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie or Invisible Cities, which subverts linear time in some way, we have to do much more work as readers to delineate the similarities between the characters and ourselves. Finding these links is one of the readers’ principal aims; Catherine Gallagher notes that ‘Characters’ peculiar affective force… is generated by the mutual implication of their unreal knowability and their apparent depth’ (Gallagher, 2007: 357). We find characters in literature to be impossibly familiar, and this is why we attempt to relate ourselves in some way to the characters we read.
So, when we read of Mary later dying in a house fire, knowing that it hasn’t happened yet but is certainly, unequivocally going to happen, we have to do real work with time and narrative in order to digest the character. Not in an effort to ‘relate’ to Mary, but to understand, to buy Mary as a real figure, ‘impossibly familiar’ as good characters are. To do this, we gift ourselves a leniency with time which is not normally allowed; we rearrange the cause-event relationships, and their positions in time, in order to create what resembles a linear narrative. But what we have produced is a fiction, born of our own self-certified mastery of time and its events; a fabrication by which we allow ourselves to feel confident in our understanding of the happenings of Mary’s life.
To feel satisfied enough in our conversion of these non-linear events to allow ourselves to feel how we typically do for real human interactions – the shame, guilt, awe, pity, elation and melancholy we feel for others – for the characters of literature is the key task of the reader, and this may only be achieved by assuming a proficient control of time.
We have not and will not conquer time in our own lives. We remain trapped in a linear progression of cause and effect, marching inevitably from one moment to the next. Nevertheless, in writing and reading literature we make a small act of defiance against time, manipulating time in ways that we can’t in our daily lives. Writing and reading literature allows us to experience and experiment with time in a multitude of ways; it allows us to stop time, immortalising certain moments. It allows us to position ourselves outside of time, and give ourselves a dictatorship over time which we cannot possibly experience in real life. Only through reading and writing literature can we hope to conquer time.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alexander, Kerri Lee (2020) ‘Feminism: The Second Wave’ National Women’s History Museum [online] Available from: https://www.womenshistory.org/exhibits/feminism-second-wave (accessed: 15/12/24)
Calvino, Italo (1972) Invisible Cities, London: Secker and Warburg.
Friedan, Betty (1963) The Feminine Mystique, New York: W.W. Norton.
Gallagher, Catherine (2007) ‘The Rise of Fictionality’ The Novel: History, Geography, Culture, 1: 357.
Hume, David (1978 [1739]) A Treatise on Human Nature: Second Edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Joyce, James (2012 [1939]) Finnegans Wake, London: Wordsworth Editions.
MacIntyre, Alasdair (1981) After Virtue, Indiana: Notre Dame Press
Miller, J.Hillis (2003) ‘Time in Literature’ Daedalus 132 (2): 86–97.
Probst, Barbara Linn (2021) ‘Character Time and Reader Time’ Writer Unboxed [online] Available from: https://writerunboxed.com/2021/01/25/character-time-and-reader-time/ (accessed: 15/12/24)
Ricoeur, Paul (1979) ‘The Human Experience of Time and Narrative.’ Research in Phenomenology 9 17 – 34.
Spark, Muriel (1961) The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, London: Macmillan.