Part I

Chapter 1: Introduction

Forms of Closure

Eternalism and Presentism

Time and Alienation

Time and Interpretation

Time and Trauma

Literature and, Alas, Death

The Future Past

Chapter 2: Belatedness

Belatedness and Trauma

Nachtraglichtiech

Reading and Rereading

Deconstructing Causality

Making Memories

Chapter 3: The Arrow of Time

Time and Meaning

Meaning and Entropy

Time and Retrospection

Time and Fragmentation

Chapter 4: The Rage for Order

The Poet as Maker

Heterocosm

Aboutness and Afterwardness

Chapter 5: Clearing Places

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Endings and Still Life

Endings and the Imitation of Life

Chapter 6: Forms of Teleology

Endings and Being

Teleology

A Sense of Closure

Chapter 7: Getting Closure

Getting Closure

Getting Closure in the Digital Age

Tense, Aspect, and Fragmentation

Part II

Chapter 8: Forms of Apocalypse

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Part I

Chapter 1

Introduction

Forms of Closure

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In Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut’s antiheroic

protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, is a traumatized survivor of the

firebombing of Dresden. The story follows his “pilgrimage”

backwards and forwards in time to confront his most horrific

memory: emerging from the shelter of an underground meat

locker to bear witness to the devastation. At the same time

his story is about the impossibility to confront the event

too overwhelming to experience when it occurred. In the

years following Dresden Billy becomes a very successful

ophthalmologist and a seemingly normal man. The war does not

impact him much, at least from the perspective of what we

imagine a normal life looks like. We know, however, his

normalcy is a façade foisted over the numbness of shock

that, ironically, makes him fit in perfectly with 1950s and

60s contemporary middle class American culture. His complete

lack of personality allows him to blend right in.

Billy’s posttraumatic symptoms only begin after

surviving an airplane crash two decades after Dresden. We

will return later to the double-time structure of trauma:

Billy manifests the symptoms of the trauma of Dresden only

after he survives a second life-threatening event. What I

want to reflect on first is how his traumatic breakdown

results in his belief that aliens from Tralfamadore have

abducted him. These aliens, who live in a sort-of

Einsteinean four-dimensional world, teach him how to “come

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unstuck in time,” unveiling to Billy the mysteries of the

universe.

The Tralfamdorians can look at all the different

moments just the way we can look at a stretch of

the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see

how permanent call the moments are, and they can

look at any moment that interests them. It is just

an illusion we have here on earth that one moment

follows another like the beads on a string, and

that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

His lunatic vision that he evangelizes to the world

imagines life encompassing all of time, past, present, and

future, as one simultaneous moment frozen in amber. Unstuck

in time, Billy can visit any moment in the frozen network of

causality in his life. He even claims to have experienced

his own death. It is merely one of any number of events in

the series of events in his life that he randomly visits.

The novel does not end with his death, but with a memory

that he claims makes him happy, which is, ironically,

driving through the devastation of Dresden in 1945. It does

not turn out that it was, in fact, a particularly happy

memory: the horses pulling the carriage he rides in undergo

horrendous torture galloping on mutilated hooves. This

drastically calls into question his Tralfamadorian

philosophy that one should only focus on the good moments in

life. Whereas Billy seems consoled by his newly adopted

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philosophy to the point of quiescence, everyone else

believes, rightfully, that he has lost his mind.

The novel closes when the framed narrator, who appears

to be Vonnegut himself, returns to comment on the current

events of life coinciding with the time he composes the

novel in 1968: the Viet Nam War and the assassinations of

Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. The first and last

chapter bookends the novel with memoir. At the end, the

novel’s past and the author’s life converge on the present,

the typical temporal crisis that occurs when a memoirist

reaches the present time of his or her writing. How do you

end the narration of a life that continues into an unknown

future? Vonnegut ends the novel like many novelists and

memoirists, by reflecting on the nature of history itself.

Although Billy Pilgrim’s narration ends in an

irresolute position (un)stuck between the future and the

past—between Dresden and his own death—the novel achieves

what we call closure because the narrator returns to provide a

reflective epilogue. It functions like intrusive third-

person narrative, a technique by which the novelist enters

into the narrative to provide commentary, which Vonnegut

does at random moments throughout the novel. We might say

that Vonnegut’s clarity in the last chapter encloses Billy

Pilgrim’s lunacy. Despite the postmodern playfulness with

time, the ending of the novel is fairly traditional. Many

nineteenth-century novels end with an epilogue in which the

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author pulls back from the narrative with an omniscient

perspective to scan over the novel as a whole.

Slaughterhouse Five, however, leaves a lot of questions

unresolved. Unlike traditional nineteenth-century realism,

Vonnegut confronts the horrors of the mid-twentieth century

with ambiguous open-endedness. The novel does not exhibit as

much authorial control as the epilogue-like final chapter

suggests. The different narrative voices imply a disparity

between moral visions. Does the framed narrator, a character

named Kurt Vonnegut, who introduces the novel and ends it,

share Billy Pilgrim’s moral vision of an eternal and frozen

universe bereft of freewill? Does the actual author, Kurt

Vonnegut, who is the novel’s authority, share the moral vision

of either the narrator or Billy?

Closure is constituted by complex perspective and

action configured in a sequence that we call plot. We call a

conflict between explicit and implied voices, ironic distance.

The ironic distance between the voices creates closure

whereas the ending brings narration to a final point beyond

which linguistic marks disappear into the blankness on the

last page.

Tralfamadorian cosmology, however, argues that there is

no such thing as an ending. Irresolution is more true to our

experience than literal finality, since in life there is

always more to come. Vonnegut emphasizes irresolution and

absurdity by ending with silly birdsong as we enter into the

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white space after the final words of the novel, “poo-tee-

weet?” with questions that remain open to interpretation

that can only result in a return to the text, whether that

means drawing from our memory of the novel or going back

into the text itself. In other words, the novel might end,

but we don’t.

Like a Tralfamadorian universe, we can go back into

various moments of a novel. Interpretation of the end is,

unlike its linguistic termination, not irreversible. The

ending that does not end Slaughterhouse Five, and a closure that

the enunciating narrator, who returns to wrap up the novel,

that remains irresolute enacts the temporal experience of

trauma. Life moves on, plodding forward in the arrow of

time, which Vonnegut makes clear when he offers a sort of

recap of current news in the final chapter. But 1945 and all

of the moments before and after also have their own way of

moving on, the return of the repressed, so to speak, that

interrupts the possibility of getting closure.

Eternalism and Presentism

Physicists call the Tralfamadorian perspective of time

a “block universe.” Huw Price describes the block universe

as “a view from nowhen,” a perspective of the universe

separate from a particular moment in time to constitute a

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single picture. On a literary level, then, Billy Pilgrim’s

vision of the universe is not lunatic. A novel is a complete

and fixed temporal world, a “block.” Linguistically frozen—

the book you read is not going to change suddenly mid-

reading—it is a pretty rigidly determined form (which will

raise interesting questions later about the extent to which

a literary work has consciousness and, therefore, freewill).

But it is impossible to see a story or a poem freed from

“when,” or from what we know in writing as tense.

The perspective of time freed from “when,” or “tense,”

is known as eternalism. It is the opposite of our conscious

experience of time in which only the present moment is real,

or presentism. Whereas presentism imagines time as “beads on a

string” in which “one moment follows another,” eternalism

argues that the sequence of beads on a string is an

illusion.

We are all presentists. We reconstruct the past and the

future here in the present from the information and

experience available to us from one moment to another.

Augustine is the most famous presentist. In Confessions he argues

against an ancient Greek tradition of physics that

understands time in terms of physical change. Refuting

Aristotle’s claim that time is the result of the physical

movement of bodies, Augustine argues that time is movement

that we create in our minds. For Augustine, then, we exist

in a vanishing present. The moment we apprehend any given “now”

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constantly recedes into the past, a realm that becomes both

fixed and, for Augustine, non-existent. Our only temporal

reality is the brief “now” when our minds work hard to

reconcile memory (the past) and anticipation (the future).

The presentist view reveals a temporal experience of life that

is mentally frenetic and temporally unstable, but it

perpetuates existence forward linearly nonetheless.

Augustine’s argument remains remarkably resilient.

Countless books on time by philosophers, literary critics,

and even physicists begin with Augustine’s famous musings

about the difficulty of thinking about time in Book 11 of

Confessions. “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know. If

I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not.” We

cannot get out from under Augustine. This is because

Augustine asserts a truth we have not been able to refute:

our experience of time is relegated to perception.

Even Einstein (whose Theory of Relativity does not mean

all temporal experience is subjective, by the way), has to

account for the obfuscating function of the human perception

of time. Further, you exist in time, which is the crux of

Martin Heidegger’s difficult philosophical tome, Being and

Time. You cannot step outside of time to inspect it because

you cannot step outside of yourself (and vice versa). Even

Stephen Hawking cannot step outside of Stephen Hawking to

see time unmediated by perception. As much as a physicist

may want to speak of an objective entity called “time,” it

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will always be, like any phenomenon, observed from a

particular place and viewpoint. In short, all understanding of

time is restricted to our ability to verbalize its

experience, to give it grammatical shape. Philosophers, such

as Paul Ricoeur (whose incredible three-volume Time and

Narrative is a must-read for anyone interested in the issue of

the relationship between literature and time), argue that

narrative is a model of time. As we will see, however, there

are far too many ways in which the temporality of life and

of fiction conflict, making this a questionable thesis. I

believe that narrative is, in many respects, a grammar of

time. Further, there are many places in which life and

fiction are permeable while there are just as powerful ways

in which literature is divorced from the actual world. The

relationship between fiction and life is a conflicted debate

that has prevailed for centuries, so it is unlikely that we

will resolve the issue here!

The Tralfamadorians see time as one big book in which

everything has occurred, is occurring, and will occur as one

complete and frozen universe. Like Billy Pilgrim who has

“come unstuck in time,” you can enter and exit the book at

any place, but the content of the book always remains the

same. There is nothing that will change the events on page

1,012 or page 3 just because you move between them. The plot

is fixed. Therefore, there is no free will in an eternalist

universe just as the Tralfamadorians claim that earthlings

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are the only creatures in the universe who believe that they

have the ability to make their own destiny. The past,

present, and future in an eternalist-Tralfamadorian

cosmology are not divided by tense, which conflicts with the

human experience of time. It is no surprise that Billy

identifies with determined and inhuman time since he has

become, as Vonnegut says, “a lifeless plaything of history.”

Billy’s experience has convinced him that neither he nor

anyone else can exercise any free will to change a world

that can produce something as horrific as Dresden.

For obvious reasons, an eternalist or Tralfamadorian

experience of literature is not possible. An author or poet

must temporally configure a work by using tense and aspect,

and a reader must read through time. But I will suggest,

eternalism is essential to literary interpretation

nonetheless. This is a difficult but central paradox for

literature and the biggest reason why literature is very

distinct from life.

The analogy of eternalism to a book conflicts with

experience. We can only understand a book because we read it.

We don’t just exist in it. It has been the dream of many

students to learn by osmosis, but books are entities that

require one to engage in its temporal movement from a

beginning to an end. In fact, nothing in the world, even

inert matter, exists as a single moment of perception. Just

as we cannot experience an object, like a tree, as the pure

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phenomenon of tree-ness—we are always reading a tree,

bringing language in between what we see—we cannot exist in

a book’s book-ness as something available in a single moment.

Reading a book is a process that occurs through time. Words

follow one another in a forward movement to form sentences.

And sentences follow one another in a pattern that makes

sense. We make sense of what we read because one thing

follows another in a sequence.

The forward movement by which words make sense in a

sequence is inextricably bound to the “arrow of time.” The

ability to make sense out of text, to form meaning, requires

movement that is integrally part of time’s irreversible

movement forward. Time also moves in sequence. The unique

configurations of objects in space in any nanosecond never

occur simultaneously. One moment cannot occur simultaneously

with the next. Two seconds in the sequence of time never

overlap. The world makes sense because time does not allow

for simultaneity. As John Archibald Wheeler says, “Time is

nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once.”

Even if you speed-read, the words and sentences of a book

remain sequential. Words might blur by faster and faster

like a film reel in fast-forward, but you are still reading

in a sequential linguistic order. Even if you skip around in

a book, or read sentences in reverse, the reading process

remains relegated to the forward motion of time’s arrow.

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Reading out of order merely rearranges the text from the

background of its linear progression. Nothing has changed.

Temporal Alienation

For Billy Pilgrim, eternalism serves as a comforting

escape from the brute fact of time’s arrow. If everything

occurs in a simultaneous past, present, and future, free will

does not exist. There is no need to worry about the moral

effects of human action. As Billy says ***The block-universe

of eternalism is far more determined than anything John Calvin

could have ever imagined! Causality forms one giant

simultaneous design.

For most physicists, eternalism is the actual design of

the universe. The past, present, and future are all equal.

In other words, physics does not assign any special value to

tense. Literature, however, assigns time asymmetrical value

by dividing its passage into tenses. This creates the

biggest distinction between the physical and the literary

models of life. The fact that we divide time into tense,

such as was, is, will be, means that we bestow value on time, a

viewpoint, or aspect. By bestowing value that gives words a

shape, we create temporality, the organization of time into a

plot. Plot moves because tense forms out of cause and

effect. Causality matters and makes sense because actions

and consequences are shaped by a viewpoint. The world in

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narrative, in other words, takes on moral form. Time in of

itself has no value; temporality forms from a viewpoint that

allows us to imagine a purpose to life by providing time’s

physical inertia with meaning.

The laws of nature in the physical universe are not

accountable to moral codes of ethics. There is nothing, in

fact, about the operations of the physical world that

necessitates moral meaning. There is nothing moral about

gravity. Hurricane Katrina did not happen because of moral

causality (despite the fact that certain fundamentalist

ministers argue that it was God’s wrath over homosexuality).

The operations of the physical world will continue on in its

forward movement in spite of any moral law we project on it.

In fact, the universe is a pretty impersonal place. Space

occupies a vast emptiness that terrified Pascal and

continues on whether we exist or not.

Since the beginning of written history the human is

compelled to make nature conform to human concerns despite

the fact that nature functions in spite of our presence. The

alienation of the human from nature is the most powerful

factor that motivates us to make fictions. As we will see,

fiction grows more difficult and self-conscious as

technology increasingly divides our experience of time from

the natural world. The more that we own time, the more

complex and indeterminate temporality in fiction becomes. We

have been bending time to our will through fiction since the

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dawn of storytelling. For instance, poets and authors

anthropocentrically reconcile the disturbing

disinterestedness of the natural world with human concerns

by reversing cause and effect when they depict nature responding

to our feelings. We are not sad because it is raining; it is

raining because we are sad. The terrible storm does not

coincide with King Lear’s descent into madness; the storm

breaks out because of King Lear’s descent into madness.

Hurricane Katrina does not form because of a confluence of

atmospheric pressure systems and moisture that foment in the

middle of the Atlantic; the hurricane destroys New Orleans

(for lunatic fundamentalists) because God is angry over

homosexuals.

This reversal of cause and effect in literature in

which nature sympathizes with our feelings is known as

pathetic fallacy. You can find examples of pathetic fallacy in

most stories, poems, and even more commonly in movies.

Weather is one of the most conventional ways in which to

establish mood in a film. It is always dark and stormy

because the characters are in conflict. It is always sunny

and spring-like because the characters are happy or have

resolved conflict. Nature, in other words, empathizes with

humans. In reality, nature could give a shit about us.

We treat time in the same dynamic as pathetic fallacy

by imposing on its passage our own concerns and values that

it does not inherently possess.

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The act of reading is one of the most powerful ways in

which we resist the brute impersonality of the universe. The

sequential nature of language in which one word follows

another to create cause and effect makes morality possible

for us by temporalizing events despite the fact that there

is nothing inherently moral or conscientious about time.

Therefore, the fact that text makes sense because it mimics

the forward and sequential movement of time has great ethical

implications concerning our being in time. Whereas time is

terribly impersonal, temporality is ethical. It is

impossible, I argue, to examine the relationship between

time and plot in literature without recognizing the ethical

implications of reading. The value that we give to the

essentially inhuman nature of time is a consummately ethical

concern. Reading and our responses to what we read have

consequences.

The relationship between time and narrative or lyric,

however, must also take into account certain laws of physics

that do not conform to our understanding of literature. Time

is never going to speed up because we are having fun or slow

down because we are miserable; and we are never going to

become “unstuck in time” because we are traumatized. But

science does not account for the powerful nuances of the

imagination. Literature allows us to identify with lived

experience in which we perceive time slowing down or speeding

up or coming unstuck. It is the metaphors we live by to

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describe time as “running out,” or “time is money” (the

examples can go on for pages, as George Lackoff shows) that

literature address and which shape the ways we experience

and act in the world.

Whereas time is not inherently moral and physics can

easily ignore time-consciousness, the moral shape we provide

action and events is integral for literary interpretation.

The examination of time as a model for scientific theory

unfettered by the wily musings of consciousness contrasts

the more literary perception of time as a model of human

consciousness in all of its slippery, egocentric

perspectives experienced in a perpetually vanishing present.

Consequently, neither a purely scientific nor a purely

literary understanding of time is satisfactory. Time remains

as hard to grab hold of as it was nearly two thousand years

ago when Augustine struggled to provide its mysteries with

theology. Physics has not gotten to the bottom of things,

despite Einstein’s indelible theories. No matter how much

science can anatomize time, there is always something that

remains mysterious about the human experience of it that can

only be addressed by the imagination.

Even to form a coherent theory of time, science

requires language, and language is temporally embedded. In

order write about time one will remain constrained by the

convention of using tenses to coordinate temporal place and

aspect to shape viewpoint within text itself. Unless we

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evolve into beings that can communicate with some kind of

immediacy that does not require language to mediate between

perception and reference, language will always intervene in

its meaning-making function relegated to a forward moving,

sequential linguistic order shaped by temporal structure. We

cannot experience and express the instantaneous phenomenon

of things, which means that delay, a gap that measures out

thought and action, or perception and articulation, is

encoded in the fabric of existence. We will be examining

this in depth in terms of belatedness.

The Tralfamadorian vision of the universe as one

simultaneous moment that abolishes was, is, and will be, might

be a physical model of the universe in which past, present,

and future have equal value, but such symmetry is alienating

from human experience. Our subjective experience of time as

temporal beings is asymmetrical, divided up into units of

unequal value. It is impossible to create texts that define a

world without using the sequence of words organized by tense

and shaped by a perception of that world. Science can

systemize theories concerning time, but literature revels in

its irreducible mystery.

Despite the temporality of literature, there is a great

deal of credibility to the Tralfamadorian notion of temporal

determination. The most unique aspect of literature that

will be essential to understanding closure and endings is

how any work embodies a past-future tense in the temporal

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paradox that makes literary experience possible in its

relationship to time. Narrative or lyric makes sense because it

constitutes a complete and unique temporal whole that cannot be replicated in

life but which depends upon life’s forward motion nonetheless. The

interpretation of texts entails an oscillation between

enternalist and presentist views of time that conflict and even

contradict each other. They are two irreconcilable modes of

understanding a text that form provisional and intuitive

resolutions to the temporal paradox of the past-future tense

involved in reading.

The backward and forward movement in time in

Slaughterhouse Five reflects Billy Pilgrim’s traumatized mind.

He copes with the return of the repressed by framing

memories in terms of time travel. The novel charts a

shattered self’s attempt to master a trauma that cannot be

articulated. Vonnegut blends his voice with the narrator,

who introduces and closes the novel, and Billy’s story as it

is narrated through a particular narrative voice. He also

interweaves a complicated movement of time, providing a

viewpoint to the narrative that unifies it into a whole. The

novel might present a fragmented, disjointed, temporally

distorted narrative, “schizophrenic,” as the subtitle

characterizes it, but the framed narrator and the evident

hand of authorial control crafting the juxtaposition and

movement of scenes creates a powerful sense of closure. The

novel does not feel irresolute. It projects completion.

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And yet there is an equally powerful sense that

narrative cannot provide the trauma of Dresden, the horror

of atrocity Billy and Vonnegut witness, with any kind of

closure at all. Billy approaches the atrocity gingerly,

painfully, indirectly. Each time jump juxtaposes scenes of

Billy’s experience in the war that move linearly to the

climax in Dresden. (Notice that, early on in the novel in

Chapter 2, Vonnegut does offer a very linear plot summary

for Billy’s story, which illustrates the famous distinction

Vladimir Propp made between story and narration that will be

important later in this book.) The traumatic experience

cannot be known in its happening; delay widens as a result

of trauma, and Billy must wind through time toward it. The

trauma, therefore, threatens to disrupt the novel’s

unification. The work as a whole not only leaves us

questioning the morally weighted viewpoint of Billy and

Vonnegut, but also forces us to negotiate complex narrative

deferrals that Vonnegut turns into the trope of time travel.

Slaughterhouse Five is a novel that makes the relationship

between trauma and time evident. I will be arguing that all

literature responds to trauma of sorts. Trauma or conflict

outrages principles and virtues that we live by. But if what

we value were not conflicted, there would be little content

for a work. Trauma is akin to conflict. Both disrupt how we

come to understand the very principles and virtues we live

by.

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There is, then, a tense relationship between conflict

and structure. We must examine the structure of time in

literature that creates wholes out of conflict and

unspeakable horrors of life that always remain fragmented.

Conversely, we must also examine the conflict in life that

informs structures of time in literature.

Time and Interpretation

The analysis of time in literature is usually

approached in terms of poetics, which means interpreting how a

text means, as opposed to hermeneutics, which entails what a

text means. Although the applications of these terms can be

slippery, hermeneutics is concerned with forming methods of

interpretation to use in the analysis of text while poetics

assumes that a text appears to mean something and examines

the devices, conventions, and structures authors use to

create the appearance of literary coherence. Since

temporality is the structure we impose on the experience of

time, its analysis is usually confined to poetics.

The Russian Formalist critic, Roman Jakobson, calls

the process by which authors make writing appear meaningful,

literariness. The term seems useful enough to me. We recognize a

work as fiction because an author uses devices that

distinguish a work from non-fiction. Literariness and appearance

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are ineluctably bound: an author or poet bestows language

with the appearance of literariness through tropes.

Closure and endings are tropes. They are devices or

conventions integral to a work’s appearance. The devices

authors use to play with time, which Gerard Genette calls

anachrony, are also tropes that impose a structure over time.

Flashback, foreshadowing, parallel time, in medias res, etc.,

create the unique appearance of a slice of time as moments

selected from an infinite array to compose a fictional

universe.

But the emphasis on poetics also creates a conflict for

interpretation. Time is clearly wrapped up in our

perception, which means that temporality in literature

engages some kind of conflict or disruption in the linear

experience of time. The plot of a narrative, for instance,

requires conflict or disruption in order to move from a

beginning to an end. There is no such thing as a copasetic

story. How and when a storyteller begins a story are in of

themselves disruptive acts, bound up in the ways in which he

makes choices that will shape its temporal appearance.

To interpret the ways in which time is the central

phenomenon by which we read and understand literature means

that we are always seeing structure as the result of meaning.

In other words, time is not inert in literature but

represented by a viewpoint that bestows it with theme (a

word I do not particularly like, but it will have to do for

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now). Therefore, any poetics of time will always require a

hermeneutics of its representation. What a text means is

wrapped up with how a text means, and vice versa.

But a third form of interpretation, extrinsic criticism,

has become much more popular in the past few decades.

Extrinsic criticism focuses on extra-literary issues, such as

politics, history, culture, modes of production, and myriad

concerns that surround a text. These approaches are less

concerned with examining a text as a formal whole, an

aesthetic object isolated from the world and available for

disinterested inspection (although this does not mean that

political or cultural critics exclude such formal and

aesthetic concerns from their work). In fact, extrinsic

criticism is more apt to see a text not as an autonomous

whole, but as embedded in a network or intertexuality of other

works. The word text, of course, comes from textiles, which means

weaving.

Extrinsic criticism is a reaction against the formal

hermeneutics and poetics that dominated literary studies

well into the 1980s and emphasized “close reading.” In the

far more political period of the 1960s and 70s that enters

academia, particularly the growing multicultural

demographics of a university, scholars and students begin to

believe that it is irresponsible, untenable (and, dare I

say, unethical) to treat a work of literature as though it

stands above or outside of the concerns of the culture in

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which it was produced, including the politics involved in

syllabus development for a classroom. Extrinsic criticism

accounts for a great deal of the so-called culture wars of

the 1990s that produces numerous headlines and paranoia

concerning the death of Shakespeare and the birth of

cultural studies and whatnot.

Extrinsic forms of criticism remain strong today

because globalization has forced English to address post-

colonial and non-canonical texts while examining

multicultural experience that formal studies, such as close

reading, often elide. An important question in this book

concerning time and trauma will be, why, despite the

exponentially increasing interest in the sociopolitical

consequences of literature, ethics and morality remain

almost taboo subjects. Ethical issues are so clearly bound

to the political ramifications of literature, and yet ethics

somehow carries the same stink in literary studies as

structuralism. (In part I think the distrust of ethics has

to do with its misleading association to moral criticism.)

Our current time-consciousness, particularly as it

develops into a traumatic and post-apocalyptic era,

constitutes extrinsic concerns in this book. Even though I

will be more concerned with how literature is temporally

structured by post-apocalyptic and post-traumatic concerns,

the formal conventions of a text are ultimately effected, if

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not created, by the extrinsic, cultural consciousness of its

historical situation.

The structuralist movement, which examines the deep

codes and conventions that structure all of language and

literature, is too totalizing for the more nuanced

interpretation of text today. But structuralism has also

been too devalued. I have expressed my discomfort with the

word theme, which is the rough equivalent of the

structuralist emphasis on myth or archetype. There are

conventions of seeing and understanding the world that

repeat and displace throughout literary history. For

instance, a vast amount of fiction and poetry (despite

Darwin) repeats in various forms the myth of a singular

catastrophe, a tragic fall, that divorces human from God,

human from nature, human from self. One can detect shadows

of Adam and Eve, the serpent, the forbidden fruit, and the

fall in myriad literature up until today. Always beware of

the mysterious stranger who enters into a seemingly stable

world depicted in the beginning of a story, I frequently

tell my students. Or watch for the archetypal imagery in any

story that involves a character willing to transgress an

established code of some sort in order to attain what he

desires.

The emphasis on theme in high school and foundational

college education in literature results from its inherent

universality. We can all identify with any of the themes of

27

literature because they resonate with human concerns that

have been and continue to be fairly immutable. Themes are

aspects of the world that, through a sort of general

consensus, a culture considers to be, in a phrase of Paul

Tillich’s, ultimate concerns. There is, in the end, a limited

battery of universal themes: the search for self-knowledge,

the corruption of power, the deceptiveness of appearance,

etcetera. It is one of the resilient aspects of literature:

the fundamental concerns of humanity remain fairly stable.

One can find the same “themes” in ancient literature as one

can find in the contemporary novel. It is unlikely, for

instance, that our culture is going to value man’s

inhumanity to man in the near future, or believe that

glorifying war is a good thing, or that the course of true

love always runs smooth, or that certain conflicts have

clear moral implications. Such resilience, as we will see

later in the book, accounts for the fact that, although 9/11

is supposedly the event that changed everything, the

structures fictions use to respond to it remain fairly

traditional. The terrorist attacks did not create new

literary forms.

The reason I cringe at the word theme is that it is too

easy for a student to choose one and prove in an essay the

ways that the text conforms to it. Most of the themes of

literature are already so established that they are

automatically assumed and expected when we read a work. The

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more labor of interpretation entails interpreting how an

author conflicts theme, the much more variable aspect of

literature (although the how of a text is also remarkably

resilient throughout history). By examining the ways in

which an author structures a work—the unique ways in which

an author’s vision incorporates the conventions and devices

of literary appearance—the reader might discover that a work

more than often challenges comfortable assumptions of a

theme. A forgotten area of literary studies is the reader’s

expectations.

I want to take the issue of theme and the how of theme

a step further. It is more interesting, I believe, to

examine conflict itself as structuring events that create

the sense of theme much in the same way that the poet’s use

of figurative language creates the sense of literariness.

It is impossible to ignore the lineament of closure and

endings in a work and the conventions that create an organic

sense of temporality to negotiate conflict and trauma. The

structure of any narrative, for instance, with a beginning,

middle, and end is totalizing no matter how experimental or

irresolute an author makes a work, particularly in its

function to bring unification and coherence to the

haphazardness of writing in its representation of the deep

antinomies of life. In fact, as I will argue, there is

nothing more fictional and artificial than an ending and the

29

closure that it gives to a literary work, and this poses

problems for interpretation.

Time and Trauma

It is a commonly held notion that the growth of trauma

theory in the early 1990s was an attempt to provide ethics

to structuralism and deconstruction in the development of

Holocaust Studies at Yale. Close readings tend to diminish

actual human concerns in the world that a poem or story

expresses. At the same time, trauma theory incorporates

formal and structural interpretation that the sociopolitical

and ethical implications of trauma challenge. The study of

trauma in literature brings the formal study of literature

together with the sociopolitical examination of text quite

nicely.

((In this book, however, I want to avoid a potentially

serious problem with current trauma theory: the tendency to

use traumatic experience as the theme of literature, a

method that is fairly uninformative and that often precludes

meaningful discussion. Instead, I want to assume that most

literature deals to some extent with trauma since a work

requires conflict.

Since trauma is experience that is too overwhelming to

comprehend when it occurs, the symptoms of trauma result

from the delayed response to the original event. Trauma can

30

only be understood in light of this temporal delay, which,

as I will continue to argue, is inherent in the structure of

all literature. The general argument of trauma theory,

therefore, is that trauma can only articulate an account, a

history, of the traumatic event in a literary language, but

that account will never adequately capture the trauma

itself.

In the seminal book, Unclaimed Experience, Cathy Caruth,

arguably the founder of trauma theory, emphasizes the

structure of belatedness in trauma’s representation.

“Traumatic events,” she says, “are not assimilated or

experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly” (4).

Therefore, most trauma theory recognizes the double time

structure of trauma. A secondary event instigates the

symptoms of trauma as an event that could not be experienced

or articulated at the time of its happening. Billy Pilgrim

can only experience the trauma of Dresden by circuitously

revisiting the war and his life afterwards. His pilgrimage

culminates in his twentieth wedding anniversary when the

contorted expressions of the barbershop quartet remind him

of the horrified expressions of the German guards seeing the

destruction for the first time. As most clever readers point

out, it is the one memory, and the climax of the novel, that

Billy does not time travel to but results from an actual

flashback.

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Delay is encoded in traumatic or overwhelming events in

literature in the form of fragmentation, temporal distortion

(the literary notion of “flashback” takes on new contexts in

an age of PTSD), and epistemological indeterminacy. The

prevalent sense of belatedness confounds the most common

forms of narrative, the God’s-eye-view or the linear

narrative in which the relationship between word and world

is stable and transparent, and the author asserts a knowing

authority over his or her material. It is no surprise that a

growing self-consciousness of neurosis leading up to and

following World War I (eventually becoming systematized as

post traumatic stress syndrome) coincides with the radical

literary departures from traditional representation in the

early twentieth century.

Consequently, the concerns of trauma theory widen from

individual and isolated experience to encompass history

itself. As an interpretative structure placed over the

sequence and passage of events, history has a tendency to

elide the true contingency and incomprehensibility of the

past. (Caruth) Paradoxes abound. For trauma theory, history

is that which cannot be represented. The past cannot be

articulated. What is important, therefore, is to examine

what history fails to signify, what coherence and closure

obfuscates, and how the creation of the appearance of meaning

and literariness distorts traumatic experience (which is

32

already a distorted experience). It is, undoubtedly, thorny

terrain.

I do not disagree with this deconstruction of meaning

in verbal representation concerning trauma (although I have

many disagreements with deconstruction). Where I have

problems, however, is in the assumptions of literary

closure. As I will continually emphasize, closure does not mean

bringing conflict to a close. Trauma theory has a tendency to cast

experience into an orphaned state, raising trauma to the

paradigm of errant and indeterminate meaning. In short, it

is too easy to fall back on the incomprehensibility of trauma itself

as a theme. It is a sort of interpretive cheat, or shortcut,

I believe, to argue that a work explores how experience is

too overwhelming to put into words. The unspeakable and

unknowable status of trauma is known as the traumatic sublime.

Such an approach is not unlike the clichés, “it is too sad

for words,” or “words fail to describe the beauty of (fill

in the blank).” Hence, the unsayable and the unknowable

becomes in of itself, theme, which, paradoxically, is a form

of closure that closes interpretation. (There is a whole realm

of inquiry that is fascinating known as the apophatic, which

essentially means knowing what things are by knowing what

things are not.)

The result of the traumatic sublime is that trauma becomes

elevated to a nearly supernatural category of experience. I

have no plans to diminish the sublime nature of literature,

33

by the way. And certainly I do not plan to diminish a

relationship between literature and the sacred, the central

subject of Part II. (There is a salient relationship between

traumatic experience and the sublime that turns experience

into something hallowed.) I want to avoid, however, the

tendency of the sublime to turn a literary work and the

trauma it addresses into something cut off from

interpretation and sequestered into a space akin to the

sacred in its root definition, set apart. Such setting-apart

has very crucial consequences not just on how we interpret

text, but also on how we see and act in the world.

The genocide in Europe from the late 1930s to 1945, for

instance, has been elevated to the term Holocaust, which

makes it, as many scholars point out, sort of inaccessibly

sacred, something that cannot or should not be discussed.

The Holocaust becomes taboo. This is the reason why many

prefer the term, Shoah. The same phenomenon occurs with 9/11.

Very quickly the site of the terrorist attacks became sacred

or hallowed ground while our acts of memorializing the event

elevates and sets it apart. There is every reason for 9/11

to become the traumatic sublime; but there are also reasons

to be critically wary of turning 9/11 into a space that

should not be transgressed with thought and language.

Caruth’s theory poses a dilemma: traumatic experience

defies representation, so attempts to articulate it results

in an affront to understanding that threatens to close off

34

the possibility of meaning. Dominick LaCapra argues, “Caruth

. . . seems dangerously close to conflating absence (of

absolute foundation and total meaning or knowledge) with

loss and even sacralizing or making sublime, the compulsive

acting-out of a traumatic past” (History 121). Susana Onega

and Jean-Michael Guteau describe the sublime of trauma as

the “failure of faculties” concerning traumatic experience,

claiming, “trauma would, thus, be compatible with a

conjectural mode that would throw us subjects, in our

capacity as readers and critics, into a complex ethical

state of a disquieted ‘negative capability’” (19). I am

actually comfortable with Keats’ notion of “negative

capability” in the context of trauma, as I will make clearer

later in the book. However, it does seem to me a dead end

for trauma theory if it succumbs to the same emphasis on

absolute categories of the ineffable as theology.

A way in which to avoid the traumatic sublime while

preserving the poetic sublimity of a work, nonetheless, is

to examine the effects of providing conflict with closure.

There is a link between the stories we tell and our ethical

sense that trauma complicates. When we tell stories, we are

driven to make them unified and to give its content a theme

or a message. Despite the cliché, there is a moral to every

story, even on the simple level of a tasteless joke, because

there is a reason why they are articulated. Storytellers and

poets have a message, a purpose, a vision, having to do with

35

what it means to be human. Themes, the moral to the story,

are ultimately ethical at the same time as they are acts

that provide conflict with closure, which is the biggest

reason why scholarship tends to treat ethics like something

venomous. Such closure that provides literature with a

purpose or theme often elides actual human suffering. As we

will see, the tropes of closure falsify experience.

(Fiction, for all intents and purpose, is forgery.)

Closure is the tradeoff of literature. The unification

of a story or poem, which I have been calling forms of closure,

is necessary aesthetically (stories need to be articulate

and interesting) and ethically (stories have a point, a

purpose, even if the point is pointlessness itself). But

unification is something externally imposed on material that

does not have inherent coherence. One could call this the

principle of conservation in fiction. Every attempt at symmetry

between fiction and actuality corresponds to a conserved

quantity of conflict. In other words, there will always be

an asymmetrical relationship between narrative or lyric

coherence and actual human conflict.

As part of this principle of conservation, an author

must contend with the fact that trauma, the conflict from

which a message is demanded, is almost impossible to

address. The unification a text forms is a necessary

artifice. It is a convention or an appearance that creates a

work’s sense of meaning and literariness. Closure, therefore, is a

36

trope. The difficulty a critic must confront is the disparity

between the actuality of trauma or conflict and the

aesthetic completeness of a literary work. What, for

instance, might the necessity of an ending, the choices

entailed in order to shape the unruly material into a story,

elide concerning the actual antinomies of human experience?

The structure of traumatic experience is inherent in

the structure of literature since both are bound to the

temporal paradox of past future tense. But trauma is also

something that has real implications on lived experience. So

a great deal of this book will examine the intrinsic

concerns of text: how the temporal structures of text reveal

traumatic belatedness (how literature constructs these

structures) and the sense of meaning we can draw from

analyzing these structures. But these intrinsic concerns

will also bear on what it means to be human in the early

21st century. These concerns have consequences.

Trauma theory is not a new paradigm for literary

criticism. It is a new arrangement of ideas that offers

different ways of paying attention to the forms of text.

This gets forgotten in the fervor of its critical movement

over the past two decades. The complexities of belatedness

are very close to us and are part of our daily experience,

and can be incorporated into the wider humanities. More

importantly, the same temporal structure of trauma inhabits

a whole range of non-traumatic discourses that share similar

37

characteristics to those studied in trauma theory. There are

many experiences that cannot be registered in their moment,

causing a delay that yields fragmentation, juxtaposition,

superimposition, and temporal anachronies in their

representation. For instance, the experience of joy or a

spiritual awakening shares in the similar delayed response

to overwhelming experience. In fact, with the emphasis on

conflict in narrative or the critical status of language in

poetry, the structure of trauma exists in all of literature.

Therefore, my book looks not simply at trauma, but at the

structure of experience in which trauma is made manifest.

Literature and, Alas, Death

Providing a coherent link between past and the present

with plot in order to “get closure” confronts an even larger

issue than mastering immediate experience. Plotting prepares

for the ultimate close, death, which is the fate of life

that bears down so exigently on ancient and renaissance

tragedy, and that continues into the novel. All quests for

self-knowledge ultimately resolve in death. The truth frees

at the same time as it kills. Ahab’s quest for the White

Whale is a quest for the truth, which ultimately becomes the

quest for death. The literary term plot is, ironically, the

same noun to denote the portion of ground where we bury the

dead. The homonym reveals a truth. All plots are end-

38

directed, designed to draw the reader to a portion of the

end. T.S. Eliot claims that all poems are epitaphs. The plot

of life inexorably reaches the same end.

It is often the agony of tragedy, as in King Lear, that

when the depths of self-knowledge are reached, as in the

recognition scene at the climax of the play, death is right

around the corner: death is the price of freedom. It

produces the feeling of tragic futility, of waste, or what

we will see as the ineluctable nature of time, entropy. We

reach astounding truths and confront the necessities of life

only for those necessities to kill us!

Catharsis is partly accountable for our relief that we

still have a chance. Unlike Richard III, we have a horse.

But it is also wrapped up in the vision of life in the full.

Since we have no way in which to experience our own death,

tragedy allows us to cope with it by projecting a meaningful

sense of life’s beginning and end from the middle. Despite

the tragic waste of self-knowledge that arrives too late, we

are allowed to exit the play, to come out of it after the

end. We are, in other words, survivors.

There is a powerful relationship between trauma and

tragedy, particularly in a Christian context of narratives

of salvation and redemption that become secularized in the

psychoanalytic process of working-through trauma in order to

“get closure.” Serial catastrophe that reaches a crescendo

in 9/11 intensifies our interest in trauma theory.

39

Ultimately, our preoccupation with trauma becomes endemic in

our deepening sense of belatedness, or what I will refer to as

afterwardness, a powerful feeling akin to a contemporary post-

apocalyptic imagination. Visions of life and what remains

after the end have become dominant in both literature and

visual media.

A literary tradition that begins with an apocalyptic

imagination has, to a certain extent, come full circle to a

predominant concern with the literal, actual end. But

instead of being a religious concern, the post-apocalyptic

has become post-traumatic. To risk sounding like a myth

critic, which I am not, I argue that literature in the West

begins in trauma and displaces trauma throughout time in

many different forms from apocalypse, to tragedy (and

comedy), to post-apocalypse.

This traumatic and post-apocalyptic mindset, which is

really one and the same, has complex effects in literature

and the ways we interpret text. All interpretation is bound

to the formal temporal structure of the past future tense of

fiction and lyric. The crisis of ending that fiction or

poetry addresses, and the intensifying difficulty of

literary endings in general that reaches a peak with the

modern and postmodern novel, becomes ultimately an ethical

concern in contemporary literature that literary criticism

can address much more richly and humanly than science or

40

religion (if only literary studies were not so sacred off by

ethics).

We are more exigently aware of living in a time

characterized by afterwardness than any other era, but we are

losing a sense of what it is we come after. In a time when

everything seems to be at or after an end, we need urgently

to ask what we should value. What remains? What do we have

time for? These questions become increasingly difficult when

the vanishing present that is our consciousness of time

makes the tradition or the whole of our experience vanish

too.

The Future Past

All readers experience the suspense involved in the

forward movement of a plot, the anticipation of a journey

toward the end that will provide surprise and satisfaction.

“Don’t tell me the end!” is one of the most common

exclamations when someone embarks on reading a book for the

first time. It reflects the implicit knowledge we all share

that a book has an unchangeable and unique future that

depends upon the reader’s own actualization of the

experience. This might be the most personal aspect of

reading. Despite a community reading the same book, each

person wants to experience the future it offers on his or

her own terms. It is not just the novel’s ending, but my

41

ending that I do not want you to ruin. As the community of

reading grows more hyperlinked through the Internet, the new

warning has arisen: the “Spoiler Alert.”

Kierkegaard famously claimed that life must be

understood backwards but lived forwards. His insight

suggests the complex relationship between the past and the

future in life and fiction. The crucial difference between

life and fiction is that a work must be understood from a

retrospective stance gained from within its forward

movement. You cannot step outside of life. One can stand

outside and after a work in order to understand it as a

whole. We always have to look to the past in order to move

forward in life, but we cannot dwell after its end. A text,

however, can be examined from beyond the end. We can stand

outside of a narrative’s temporality in ways that we cannot

stand outside of the temporal experience of life.

Fiction might flaunt this freedom with time, but its

freedom is also restrained by convention, particularly the

temporal structure that necessitates an ending. In a paradox

made explicit by the balance between order and contingency

in a literary work that an ending must negotiate, the

temporal freedom of fiction depends upon the limitations of

closure.

An ending provides a work of literature with its unique

retrospection: a work possesses a fully formed future. Whereas in

life the future is unknown, something for which we await in

42

every moment, in the world of fiction, the future has already taken

place. In life we cannot inhabit the future and turn it into a

memory, whereas in fiction we can dwell after the work’s

future and experience it retrospectively.

There is evidently a tradeoff of temporal freedom

between life and fiction, which I called a work’s principle of

conservation. In life the future is malleable (at least, in

our perception of it, the future is open), but we do not

have the freedom to skip ahead to the future, so to speak,

in order to evaluate the present. We are stuck with

reconciling the present with the past and with an envisaged

future. However, to the extent that fiction realizes a future—

the ending of a novel is fixed and unique to that novel—the

future in fiction is not open, even though we have the

freedom to know that future in order to evaluate the content

of a work as a whole. The text really is a determined little

universe. Fiction is both free to invent a fully realized

future and restrained by its structure’s totalizing effects.

A narrative or a lyric is a fully formed future that

waits for the reader and that he or she draws into and

actualizes in the present. Temporally actualizing

experience, or making experience or memories present to

oneself, is a process in phenomenology called presentification.

We make the past or the future of a literary work (the

beginning, middle, and end) present to ourselves in our act

of reading and interpreting. In any act of reading or

43

interpreting a text, we are energetically making its

material present to us in the moment. A completely formed

future that lies in wait and that the reader presentifies is

completely unique to literature and impossible to replicate

in the actual world. In life we can anticipate and project

our desires into the future, but all of our acts of

presentification are relegated to the ways in which we reconcile

the present and the past.

When you open a book and begin to read, you hold a

complete and realized future in your hands. Even the first

word of a novel establishes a future that has already been

configured by the author in the past. The first word summons

the end since, in temporal terms, a word in a sentence is

bound to the sentence as a whole. The reading process delays

the complete experience of a sentence as each sentence moves

toward the delayed end of the narrative. There is a constant

oscillation between incompletion- completion, fragment-

whole, while reading that is temporally bound. The mind must

negotiate a remarkable amount of memory and anticipation

while reading: each word drifts into the past as the mind

must expect and comprehend the next word.

Reading always happens, therefore, in the past future

tense. A simple example is a sentence like, “I knew you would

come to the party.” EXPLAIN GRAMMAR MORE

A slightly different way of understanding the realized

future of a narrative is the rhetorical term prolepsis:

44

stating something about the future in the present as if it

has already happened. It is a statement that affirms or

projects a future event already occurring.

This experience of the future in the present has not

been examined enough on a phenomenological level, even

though it is part of the ubiquitous excitement everyone

shares about reading a book. A book already has a fully

realized future waiting for us. This experience of reading

in the forward movement of suspense is possible because we

know that the narrative is going to move somewhere, and if

we stick with it, we will reach its end. We know that the

novel has a future waiting for us to reveal its secrets. The

novel’s future in of itself is not going to change as a

result of reading it. The act of reading does not change the

words that wait for us sentence to sentence. Therefore, we

experience a strange temporal distortion that is only

possible in fiction. In the activity of reading, we move toward a future

that has already happened. Not only that, we move toward a future

that is made possible by a writer who creates it before we

read. A book is a future prepared for us in the past. No

matter how the author plays with chronology—beginning at the

end, beginning in media res, jumping around in time—the work’s

future remains realized. The process of reading, which is an

activity that not only takes time but also takes place in

time, actualizes the future and transforms it into our

present experience of reading, or presentification, making

45

something from the past or the future present for our

inspection.

Reading and Rereading

Rereading a work is not a simple repetition. Although

one reads the exact same text, any reader experiences how

the work seems very different when you read it a second

time. The words are exactly the same as you left them, but

your perception of them have changed as a result of the

retrospection rereading affords. The experience of rereading

allows you to examine aspects of the content that had been

occluded by anticipation and suspense.

The first time you read a novel your mind is expending

a lot of energy digesting plot, the consecution of events.

You won’t have a firm grasp of the novel’s vision until you

reach the end. A work is always a thriller the first time

you read it: everything about a first reading is involved in

the anticipation of an unknown but fully formed future lying

in wait (unless, of course, you skip ahead and read the

ending first). But memory is an impediment. You have to

reconcile a beginning and middle, which you may have read

hours or days ago, with the ending. The past of your reading

has receded, making the present of the ending you have

reached dominate over the rest of the novel.

RE-READING as REVISIONARY

46

The process of reading, therefore, resembles the

double-time structure of trauma. The suspense of reading a

text for the first time suspends the cognitive ability to

know it. You cannot really understand a text until you get

through reading it. A first reading resembles how shock

challenges sequential causality that the movement of plot

creates. (Many stories play up the element of shock, placing

a totally unexpected event somewhere in the plot that drops

one into a state of unknowingness. The shocking beginning is

an evidently great way to hook a reader at the same time as

it is disorienting. Detective fiction usually begins with

the murder.) We are always in the middle of things when we

read for the first time.

A rereading, however, resembles abreaction. You can

return to the text to re-experience it in order to attempt

to master it with a distanced knowingness. When you read a

book a second time, you are, in a sense, reading about the

book, knowing it as a whole entity that can now be entered

from the outside. In fact, when you reread a book you

revisit the initial experience of reading toward the future

as an event that we could not, at the time of reading, fully

know, but that is now part of the past. A rereading,

therefore, is more retrospective than an initial reading

while it is also revisionary. It triggers, to a certain

extent, the initial experience with a text that could not be

grasped the first time around.

47

HOW MOST PEOPLE DON”T REREAD – HOW IT SHOULD BE

REQUIRED

((There are apparent theistic aspects to reading and

rereading. I will examine a more religious analogy to

reading in Part II. For now, in terms of time and futurity,

there is an element to the first reading of a book that

resembles finitude while rereading is more akin to the

eternal. The novel we reread is more fully present than the

fragmentary experience of reading in fits and starts the

first time.))

Although a fully formed future in fiction reflects the

inventive freedom of the mind, presentification poses problems

for interpretation. If narrative is, as philosophers claim,

a model of time, it certainly conflicts with lived

experience. In life the future is not already there, waiting

to reveal itself to us. The future is not like the pages of

a book or the frames of a film, fully formed into a

configuration of things already established and calibrated

in time. Only by our own efforts and as the result of events

that are beyond our control does the future take shape.

There is no readymade future. The future in life as opposed

to fiction is not a prefabrication that reading or

interpretation discloses. Tragedy is so powerful in ancient

Greece because their emphasis on fate makes the predestined

nature of narrative endemic to the representation of

48

determinism. Oedipus the King will always end the way that

Sophocles wrote it. MORE ON DETERMINISM

The future in the past tense is, perhaps, the most

powerful way in which fiction conflicts with life and poses

serious problems to the notion that narrative provides a

model of time. The form of the future that fiction provides,

in fact, might make literature ultimately divorced from

life. It is the single most powerful way in which to argue

that a poem or a novel is, indeed, a heterocosm, a completely

separate and alternate world, an alter mundus.

* * *

This book will move through a series of interpretations

and meditations on the nature of closure and endings in

literature, each chapter building toward a more dense

analysis of apocalypse.

Chapters 2 and 3 will focus on the formal literary

conventions of closure and endings. Put simply, closure is the

ways in which a literary work achieves a sense of

completeness that allows us to think of and examine a text

as a whole. I have loosely called the text as a complete

whole an eternalist view of a work. Closure is what Aristotle

means when he famously states that all works require a

49

satisfactory (and satisfying) beginning, middle, and end,

and how this structure forms a work’s entelechy. Closure is

also, of course, the result of working-through trauma as a

way to move-beyond its stultifying effects.

Endings, on the other hand, are the ways in which an

author or poet out of sheer necessity brings narration or

lyric to the point at which signification stops. The ending

is the actual point in time when no more linguistic marks

follow. It is the event when sequential order ceases.

Endings are the way in which an author or poet finishes the

sequence she began in order to create closure. An ending is

also the way an author or poet “interrupts” narrative or

lyric to give the end of sequence the appearance of

completion.

Finally, an ending is something we automatically

associate with death, the final point, the terminating

event. Our anatomy of ending as a trope, however, will provide

other ways of understanding its meaning as something that is

not a terminal event, but a continual mode of becoming in the

context of telos, or the purposive ends of things. The telos of

things in life expands into eschatology, the belief that life

begins anew after the end, which is ultimately bound to

apocalypse, the disclosure of truth that coincides with or

results from catastrophe.

But literary endings also draw from the inherent nature

of closure and endings in our own experience with time.

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Another often seemingly irreconcilable contradiction is the

relationship between literature and life: the imaginative,

hypothetical construction of fiction compared to actual

lived experience. It is a prevalent argument that fiction

offers a model for life, a notion that life often vexes.

Chapter 4 will focus on the ways in which media and

digitization refigure our self-consciousness of time,

particularly in its compression and the deepening of the

present.

After examining the experience of 9/11, I will explore

the development of time- consciousness in the nineteenth and

twentieth-century in Chapter 5 and the apocalyptic mindset

it leads to in Chapter 6. My main argument is that our

contemporary perception of time that has evolved since the

renaissance and that shapes our fictions is structured by,

and has the inherent temporal structure of, trauma: we live

always with a perpetual sense of coming-after, or what Freud

calls belatedness. The entrenched sense of belatedness

characterizes the very real feeling that the contemporary

world is post-apocalyptic.

Chapters 7 and 8 will examine how endings and closure

evolve since the renaissance when Shakespeare turns

apocalypse into tragedy, and then how tragedy transforms

into (and often becomes one and the same with) trauma, only

to return to an emphasis upon literal apocalypse in

contemporary literature. Chapter 9 will explore the

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eschatological orientation of particular novels in the

twentieth century that grapple with issues of faith and

belief. The relationship between eschatology and narrative

endings, too, transforms into an apocalyptic and post-

apocalyptic mindset for religious writers. Finally, Chapter

9 will *****

Chapter 2: Belatedness

Belatedness and Trauma

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The first poem of Anthony Hecht’s Pulitzer Prize

winning collection The Hard Hours (1967) is the remarkable and

strange, “A Hill,” about a terrifying vision that, ten years

later in the poet’s life, triggers a vague childhood memory.

The poem is a perfect example of belatedness at the center of

trauma, and is worth quoting in its entirety.

In Italy, where this sort of thing can occur,

I had a vision once – though you understand

It was nothing at all like Dante’s, or the visions

of saints,

And perhaps not a vision at all. I was with some

friends,

Picking my way through a warm sunlit piazza

In the early morning. A clear fretwork of shadows

From huge umbrellas littered the pavement and made

A sort of lucent shallows in which was moored

A small navy of cars. Books, coins, old maps,

Cheap landscapes and ugly religious prints

Were all on sale. The colors and noise

Like the flying hands were gestures of exultation,

So that even bargaining

Rose to the ear like voluble godliness.

And then, where it happened, the noises suddenly

stopped,

And it got darker; pushcarts and people dissolved

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And even the great Farnese Palace itself

Was gone, for all its marble; in its place

Was a hill, mole-colored and bare. It was very

cold,

Close to freezing, with a promise of snow.

The trees were like old ironwork gathered for

scrap

And the only sound for a while was the little

click

Of ice as it broke in the mud under my feet.

I saw a piece of ribbon snagged on a hedge,

But no other sign of life. And then I heard

What seemed the crack of a rifle. A hunter, I

guessed;

At least I was not alone. But just after that

Came the soft papery crash

Of a great branch somewhere unseen falling to

earth.

And that was all, except for the cold and silence

That promised to last forever, like the hill.

Then the prices came through, and fingers, and I

was restored

To the sunlight and my friends. But for more than

a week

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I was scared by the plain bitterness of what I had

seen.

All this happened about ten years ago,

And it hasn’t troubled me since, but at last

today,

I remembered that hill; it lies just to the left

Of the road north of Poughkeepsie; and as a boy

I stood before it for hours in wintertime.

Although the final lines announce a sort-of ah-ha

moment, which is usually a certain indication of closure,

the epiphany the poet experiences remains irresolute. The

hallucinatory flashback in a piazza in Italy and the memory

with which he connects the fugue to his childhood remains

dissociative throughout. The ending of the poem demands one

to reread the poem in order to organize its dense temporal

structure. Over the course of three time shifts in the poem

it is impossible to ascertain the poet’s source of trauma.

Instead, “A Hill” explores the dissociative temporal gap

between the present and trauma from a distant past.

The colloquial diction of the poem makes “A Hill”

deceptively simple. It is a very difficult poem. Hecht

conveys his “vision” in a matter-of-fact voice, as if we

have entered into the middle of a story the poet recounts.

Hecht’s observations meander—“where this sort of thing can

occur”—which makes the poem unfold shapelessly. The casual

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phrase “some friends,” combined with “Picking my way,”

indicates a nonchalant sense of place. The use of

prepositional phrases, like “fretwork of shadows” and “small

navy of carts,” struggle to form metaphors, but the casual

voice keeps them from forming any meaningful context. The

term, “sort of” echoes Hecht’s ambivalent attitude about the

vision toward which he draws us through a series of loose

associations.

Movement and noise in the piazza emphasize the silence

that will ensue once the “vision” occurs. The selling of

“ugly religious prints” imbues tourism with religiosity,

hands moving in transactions evoking “exultation” and

“godliness” in a simile that echoes “visions of saints.” But

his inability to comprehend “vision” makes the simile

between devotional activity and busy marketplace ambiguous.

The poet alerts us to the vision’s precipitous event by

using the phrase, “And then” to evoke narrative sequence.

And then, when it happened, the noises suddenly

stopped,

And it got darker . . .

Stilling the active marketplace, Hecht draws us to the

vision in terms such as “it happened” and “it got darker”

that refuse connection to a concrete event as

. . . pushcarts and people dissolved

And even the great Farnese Palace itself

Was gone, for all its marble; in its place

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Was a hill, mole colored and bare. It was very

cold,

Close to freezing, with the promise of snow.

A surreal temporal distortion occurs. The season clearly

changes from “warm sunlit piazza” to “close to freezing”

while, “the promise of snow,” is a casual statement that

suggests familiarity with the environment.

In the changed setting the poet juxtaposes the loose

metaphors established in the previous setting in the piazza:

umbrellas cast a “fretwork of shadows” in the piazza, the

trees are “like old ironwork.” Whereas the shadows of

umbrellas “littered the pavement,” the trees, too, convey

waste, “gathered for scrap.” The industrial connotations

discord with the bleak natural setting where, like in the

piazza, he is “picking my way” nimbly through the woodsy

terrain as the “little click / Of ice” “broke in the mud

under my feet.”

Repeating the term “And then” to denote narrative

sequence, the poet “heard/What seemed the crack of a rifle”

that climaxes his “vision” as the final lines of the stanza

suggest falling action.

But just after that

Came the soft and papery crash

Of a great branch somewhere unseen falling to

earth.

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Whereas the poet feels odd comfort at the sound of gunfire

in that “At least I was not alone,” the sound of something

falling “unseen” indicates that he is indeed “alone” in a

desolate way.

A short two-line stanza finally breaks the long and

meandering first stanza.

And that was all, except for the cold and silence

That promised to last forever, like the hill.

The poet teases us into a trick ending where instead of

drawing the poem to a close, the short stanza serves as a

transitional moment in the poem. The earlier “promise of

snow” repeats with the “cold and silence/That promised to

last forever.” The first “promise” indicates something

anticipatory and familiar whereas the second suggests an

encroaching existential mood that “grew darker.”

Like a dissolve in a film, the final stanza “restored”

the poet to his original setting “To the sunlight and my

friends.” The sound of the piazza “came through” followed by

the sight of “fingers” buying and selling in the marketplace:

the poet returns to reality like he is gradually awakening

from a dream.

Although the experience haunts him “for more than a

week” with “the plain bitterness of what I had seen,” he

seems to dispense with his attempts to bring meaning to the

vision since “All this happened about ten years ago.” A

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decade has passed when suddenly, “at last today,” something

startles him into a flurry of cognition.

I remembered that hill, it lies just to the left

Of the road north of Poughkeepsie; and as a boy

I stood before it for hours in wintertime.

We do not know what alerts the poet to his memory of the

hill. The biggest gap in the poem is the absent experience

that “at last today” leads him to connect the hill of

childhood to his “vision.” There is no dramatic irony here.

We assume that if he does not know, we do not know either.

The swift time shifts condense into confused memory.

Ten years after the poet undergoes a visionary fugue-state,

a sudden recollection “at last, today” allows him to connect

it to his childhood in Poughkeepsie. In a frenzy of

recognition the poet attempts to arrange a period of at

least thirty years at the center of which rests the vision

in Italy. The most important phrase, “but at last, today,”

suggests that the poet “today” has undergone a startling

moment of recognition that compels him to hurry the poem

together.

The diction of the poem resembles a person recounting a

story in a rush because the experience is immediate and

exciting, like events one might scribble into a journal or a

dream-book. Meaning remains wrapped up in associative

impressions. The force of sublimation becomes stronger than

the drive for cogent expression. Although “A Hill” does not

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labor to mean, but obliquely intimates a sense of meaning, the

temporal structure gives the poem a sense of closure

nonetheless because the poet has made a connection. The poem

describes an epiphany the poet experiences concerning the

nature of a flashback in which, years after the flashback,

he is able to recall traumatic childhood experience. The

poem recounts two unbidden experiences: the flashback and

the epiphany, the nature of which he leaves blank, ten years

later. This leaves three unsolvable mysteries at the heart

of the poem: What did the poet experience in Italy? What

happened in his childhood that makes the hill both haunting

and traumatic? What made the poet suddenly connect the

vision in Italy to the hill of his childhood ten years

afterwards? That is enough ambiguity to make any reader give

up on a poem! But since the poem organizes its own temporal

structure that we can interpret as a whole from after its end,

we have a sense that the poem is as complete as it needs to

be.

In fact, the poem is about the temporal structure of

overwhelming experience, the delay inherent in understanding

any event that we will call belatedness. Even though the poem

has three glaring gaps, it achieves a sense of closure

because it is not about meaning but delay, the belatedness

involved in any understanding of the temporal experience of

life.

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One way in which the poem achieves closure is risky

because it verges on the clichéd ending, “It was all a

dream,” a convention no longer used except in soap operas or

parody. Instead of resorting to convention, however, Hecht

intimates the experience of recounting a dream and the

initial stage of interpreting a dream by trying to form

coherence between repressed experience and its

manifestation. The work of interpretation will only

approximate the original dream but never recuperate it.

Interpreting the poem psychoanalytically is

unavoidable: Hecht invites us to do so. In "Anthony Hecht:

Anatomies of Melancholy," J. D. McLatchy, a fellow poet,

offers his psychoanalytic reading.

[“A Hill”] seems more of a private poem than a

personal one. Its juxtaposition of images – piazza

and hill – is evidently charged with private

associations and meant to operate both within the

poem and on the reader as dream-work will. The

images are not superimposed, but displaced, the

one by the other, the later by the earlier – and

both recalled, as if by an analysand, a decade

later. The poem cannot be read as any simple

alternation of manifest and latent meanings. The

action here is the emergence of a suppressed

memory.

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McClatchy intimates the relationship between metaphor and

metonymy that Jacques Lacan draws from Freud’s The

Interpretation of Dreams. The metonymic associations of Hecht’s

memories function as displacement in Freud’s dream-work,

whereas the hill becomes the condensation of metaphor that

neither the poet nor the reader can quite make out. The poem

reflects the unconscious structured as language. McClatchy

concludes his interpretation:

The speaker reverts to childhood, and stands – as,

in a sense, the reader does too – before the hill

in winter, blank as a page. The clarification and

connections we might expect to follow are omitted.

But the point of the poem, what the reader is

invited to contemplate, is not really the

explication of personal experience, but an

understanding of the forces of experience

itself . . . The poem ends with an image, not a

moral . . . to underscore the fact that he is

describing a condition rather than an occurrence.

The poem emphasizes forces of experience as opposed to explication of

experience, which is how the poem remains irresolute but

creates a sense of closure nonetheless. In his battle to

transform condensation and displacement into figuration, the

poet discovers that the sublime is unavailable for

interpretation until its effects, always delayed or belated,

allow for conscious articulation.

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Hecht himself is as uncertain why he stood transfixed

by this hill when he was a child as he is about why it took

so long to make the connection to his flashback. It remains

a visual enigma more associated to the latent content of a

dream. The experience of flashback is as sudden as it is

inexplicable. The poem describes “a condition,” but it also

describes “an occurrence.” The occurrence itself eschews

interpretation, but its effects upon Hecht allow him to form

a sense of meaning that gives the poem, no matter how

provisional, a form of closure. The “condition” Hecht

describes is,

Nachtraglichkeit

A poet always writes after experience that is too

overwhelming to dictate as a direct account. Poems that

claim to be a direct account forge an appearance of

immediacy. For instance, Coleridge cleverly prefaces “Kubla

Khan” with a little story about the poem’s origin. It is

supposedly a record of an opium-induced dream he scribbled

down as soon as he woke up, when, alas, a debt collector who

came knocking at the door caused him to forget the rest of

the dream. Hence, Coleridge calls “Kubla Kahn” a “fragment”

to compel us to believe it is the unfinished result of

automatic writing. In a lovely reading of the poem, Marjorie

Garber argues that Coleridge’s poem is ultimately about the

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delayed response to a life-interrupted. The debt collector,

the “man from Porlock,” symbolizes how all of life itself is

constituted by a series of interruptions. We live in the

aftermath of a Platonic division from a whole that we are

always attempting to reconcile in our fragmented state. “So

the life of mankind,” Garber writes, “is an attempt, a plot,

to restore what has been interrupted. Or, rather, to

acknowledge that that myth of interruption is life itself”

(122).

Living through time insures that events will always

interrupt any order we believe we have established to give

it meaning, particularly if an event is traumatic. Coleridge

conveys how the unexpected or unbidden visitation from “the

man from Porlock” fragments his drive to provide his poem

with a form of closure. It is not what we would necessarily

call “traumatic,” but the interruption of thought is

traumatic enough for a poet! More importantly, the poem

shows that there are many experiences that result in

belatedness. His dream, if we are to believe the noisy

detail of the poem, is certainly a sublime experience in the

sense that Edmund Burke defines it in terms of terror. In

many ways, Anthony Hecht’s poem is a contemporary revision

of Coleridge’s.

It is impossible to capture unbidden experience in its

moment, inevitably making delay both necessary in actual

life and an ironic trope in literature. Delay is encoded in

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all acts of writing. We are always writing after the fact.

There is no writing that occurs simultaneously with the

experience represented. Trauma widens and complicates this

delay since the experience that needs recounting was too

overwhelming to understand when it occurred.

Freud economizes the temporality of trauma in his

paradoxical term, Nachträglichkeit, which is roughly translated

as afterwardness. The original event requires a deferred and

secondary future event in order to provide it with meaning.

The arche of trauma is always inextricably linked to its

telos. A flashback, in other words, depends upon a future

event, a flash-forward, as one struggles to reconcile the

mysterious past and the unexpected flashbacks that evoke its

sense of meaning. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud explores

the drive for continuity in life that psychodynamic forces—

the life and death instinct—always frustrate. Experience

becomes the tortuous movement we associate with plot.

They are the true life instincts. They operate

against the purpose of the other instincts, which

leads, by reason of their function, to death . . .

It is as though the life of the organism moved

with a vacillating rhythm. One group of instincts

rushes forward so as to reach the final aim of

life as swiftly as possible; but when a particular

stage in the advance has been reached, the other

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group jerks back to a certain point to make a

fresh start and so prolong the journey.

This psychodynamic and vacillating rhythm Freud

describes has immense influence on literary criticism that

we will explore in more depth in Part II. For now, trauma

(or the unbidden interruption) as an isolated phenomenon

itself has no meaningful context. Freud’s notion of

Nachträglichkeit encompasses an original trauma whose

reverberating traces summon events yet to occur. We imagine

a possible future based upon the trauma or catastrophe of

the past, which accounts for our trenchantly anticipatory

nature. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, we imagined the

next one and prepared in various ways for it to occur.

Freud derived his astounding theory of Nachtraglichkeit

from a paradoxical situation he frequently encountered in

his case studies. The event that causes neurosis in a

patient is never present as an event, but manifests as

uncontrolled unconscious activity at a later time, such as

nightmares, flashbacks, anxiety, hallucinations. Further,

these traumatic symptoms of the original trauma are

triggered by a secondary event. The traumatic event, which

cannot be known at the time of its occurrence, returns to

haunt a victim in the future. Billy Pilgrim could not

experience the trauma of Dresden as a witness. This horribly

interruptive experience requires the secondary event,

another interruption, of surviving the plane crash to

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trigger the prior trauma. In this paradoxical temporal

structure, the effect of trauma precedes its cause. The symptoms force

one to work-through the crisis (the telos of getting closure)

by working back to the original event(s) (the arche of

experience) what Cathy Caruth refers to as the “temporal

paradox of trauma.”

Trauma, therefore, is structured around a doubling of

events in a temporal distortion that can only be articulated

or represented in a literary mode. In Unclaimed Experience,

Caruth focuses on the temporal structure of belatedness in

trauma as a way to theorize about literary representation.

Trauma is not necessarily caused by a “breach in the mind”

of stimulation too overwhelming for consciousness, but by

“the lack of preparedness to take in stimulation that comes

too quickly.” Therefore, trauma consists “solely in the

structure of its experience or recognition: the event is not

assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only

belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who

experiences it” (4-5). Therefore, the incomprehensibility of

history can only be represented on a literary level.

Since the experience is too overwhelming when it

happens, trauma delays its effects so that its articulation

forms an afterwardness for future memory. Freud’s dual

structure of trauma implores anticipating a future by

forming the anxiety that was missing in the past. Anticipation

is paradoxical in that we must be anxious in order to work-

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through trauma. Anxiety defensively guards against

experience in the future that one was not prepared for in

the past.

Freud makes a crucial distinction between anxiety, fear and

fright.

‘Anxiety’ describes a particular state of

expecting danger or preparing for it, even though

it ma be an unknown one. ‘Fear’ requires a

definite object of which to be afraid. ‘Fright,’

however, is the name we give to the state a person

gets into when he has run into danger without

being prepared for it; it emphasizes the factor of

surprise. I do not believe that anxiety can

produce a traumatic neurosis. There is something

about anxiety that protects its subject against

fright and so against fright neurosis. (11).

Trauma is the result of the inability to receive an event

caused by fright (Schreck) because it exceeds comprehension.

Traumatic neurosis, claims Freud, “is created by the lack of any

preparedness for anxiety” (emphasis mine 31). Repetition

compulsion in the form of dreams or verbal representation

prepares for the delayed over-excitation of trauma. Trauma

entails “endeavoring to master the stimulus retrospectively,

by developing the anxiety whose omission was the cause of the

traumatic neurosis” (emphasis mine 609). This temporal delay

in registering trauma accounts for its peculiar double

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structure in which a subsequent event triggers the initial

one into cognition, forcing us to confront it.

Belatedness poses a lot of problems for interpretation.

How does narrative and poetry configure the temporality of

belatedness or afterwardness? How does literature inform us

about our own sense of coming-after? What can be salvaged

from the traumatic sense of entropy that follows the serial

catastrophes of the past century? What survives in the ruins

of trauma or catastrophe? What remains of value in our

inherent rage for order, our drive to make sense even when

meaninglessness achieves a privileged position in our

reading and understanding of the world in ways it never had

before?

The most valuable aspect of literature, I argue, is how

narrative or lyric embodies a retrograde future. The double

structure of trauma is the temporal structure of literature.

Trauma itself is not sui generis. A great deal of confusion

concerning the application of trauma in literary

interpretation arises from the word “trauma,” which means a

“wound.”

There is a vast array of experience that informs the

temporal structure of literature that is non-traumatic, but

which confounds immediate comprehension.

Since no study of trauma understates its temporal

experience, I believe that it is crucial to examine the

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nature of time in its relationship to the ways in which we

temporalize life. We never experience time; we only

experience how we temporalize experience that is propelled by

time’s ruthless movement forward. In a way, time itself is

traumatic, an experience that we cannot confront in its

happening but can only respond to belatedly. The biggest

trauma about time is that its sole function is to bring

things to an end. It is also a brute reality we expend a

great deal of energy to deny. So I will turn to the abstract

notion of time itself that, despite its abstraction, is a

brute force in every aspect of life.

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CHAPTER 3

The Arrow of Time

Meaning and Time

The British astronomer Arthur Eddington coined the term

the arrow of time in 1927 to describe time’s irreversible

forward motion. Time moves in only one direction, which

means the flow of time is asymmetrical. When the actions of

time are examined on a microscopic level, however, the

processes are symmetrical: if you reverse time’s direction,

like running a video of two people playing catch backwards,

the theoretical statements about physical processes remain

true. The laws of physics apply to both the universe and its

mirror image. On the macroscopic level, however, such as our

daily experience of living in and through time, we see only

one direction. We do not go through life self-conscious of

how physical laws remain the same when things go in reverse.

Even though we do not read in reverse, we understand a

text interpretively by working our way backwards from the

end intuitively all the time, right down to the level of a

sentence. The last words of a sentence provide meaning to

the sentence as a whole by relating them to the first words.

In other words, a sentence has a beginning, middle, and end

that, like a text or a poem, can be divided up into causes

and effects made meaningful by subject, objects, and

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actions. Unless you have an incredibly eidetic memory,

however, words read in reverse make no sense. The physical

laws of the mirror image of a text might still apply, but

most of us would find it impossible to read in reverse. This

is why Leonardo da Vinci wrote some of his works in reverse,

as a mirror image, to evade scrutiny of his more heretical

ideas by the same type of authorities that put Galileo under

house arrest. The fact that we can configure the words in a

sentence and sentences in their order from a beginning to an

end in a text is a remarkable facet of human consciousness.

Irreversible processes are at the heart of the arrow of

time. It is the brute fact of the universe that things

happen in one order and never in reverse order. This reality

is deeply ingrained in how we live in the world in the terms

of causality. The forward motion of time insures that cause

always precedes effect. Again, you can see this at the level

of the sentence. Words are always in a causal relationship

with each other, a sequence of actions and consequences made

possible by that incredible device, the verb. **

The arrow of time toward an end means, alas, its target

is death. This is why eschatology, the belief in an afterlife

that redeems time after death, is so central to faith (which

will be a focus of Part II). In some versions of Christian

eschatology, time not only becomes renewed or redeemed, but

we return to the original state of paradise, a primordial

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beginning before finitude became such a brute issue. Some

eschatology describes paradise returning to earth as a New

Jerusalem descends from heaven. (In some passages of

Revelation, angels, like celestial real estate developers,

literally measure out portions of the earth for heavenly

habitation!) This is a cyclical belief in time, which is

prevalent in the circular narrative, such as Joyce’s

Finnegan’s Wake, in which one returns to the beginning, but

with a difference. As T.S. Eliot says in a passage that

could serve as the epitaph to this book: “What we call the

beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a

beginning. The end is where we start from.”

Religious cosmologies are akin to the fantasies of time

travel in which one can return to the past to mend a

catastrophic mistake or travel to the future to stop the

effects of a catastrophic mistake from occurring. Such

tropes tap into the powerful desire to transgress finitude.

We never tire of the trope of time travel in fiction, as in

Vonnegut’s very successful application of it in Slaughterhouse

Five. We do not like to believe that the past becomes waste

and the future leads to an ultimate ending. More

importantly, the finality of death terrifies us. In an eternalist

universe, as in Slaughterhouse Five, the past still exists and

loved ones remain alive. As Billy says,

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore

was that when a person dies he only appears to

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die. He is still very much alive in the past, so

it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral.

All moments, past, present, and future, always

have existed, always will exist.

Time travel is ultimately a fantasy of immortality.

As far as we know, time travel is impossible, and for

a very good reason! One would not want to experience a world

in which people are capable of tampering with causality.

Science fiction comes up with all kinds of loopholes to make

time travel seamless. For instance, in a seemingly

irreversible forward movement of time in an eternalist

universe, we would never really know if everything that

happens is the result of time travellers tampering with

causality. Look at many episodes of the highly underrated

television show Fringe. Some science fiction has as its

subject the fragile causality of time, like Ray Bradbury’s

“The Sound of Thunder,” or the Back to the Future franchise.

Other science fiction, like Star Trek IV, dispenses with any

temporal concerns: humans from the future make whales

temporally swap in order to save the earth. The fact that

the good guys save the planet in the end trumps logical

closure.

Time as we know and experience it is rather determined.

There is no reason to believe that the past can be changed

or that future mortality can be evaded. This is why Greek

tragedy is so claustrophobically wrapped up in fate and why

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the consequences of trying to circumvent fate are so dire.

The irreversible direction of time means that death is

everyone’s destiny.

Self-consciousness about mortality is the most vexingly

human trait. We are the only beings that know we will die,

which makes self-consciousness about death the single most

important aspect about what it means to be human. A

philosophical inquiry about time confronts us right away

with a somewhat ghastly paradox that Freud famously states

in Beyond the Pleasure Principle: “The aim of all life is death.”

All of the energy we put into making sense of the world and

our quests for what it means to be human results in death.

Death is the ultimate ending that must be accounted for in

any meaningful understanding of life.

But death is also the most traumatic experience each of

us has yet to experience. It is the controlling pole of all

figurations of future tense; but death annihilates meaning

because there is no way we can anticipate our own death. It

is always my death, but I can never know my own death. It is

impossible to experience one’s own annihilation. This is the

central interpretive knot of Heidegger’s Being and Time. I can

never know the most important event of my life.

Death is the biggest threat to meaning because it

remains an irreducible mystery, but it is where all our

quests for meaning lead. Therefore, the question, what does it

mean to be human? is one and the same as the question, what

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does it mean to die? All of life is a process of anticipating

and coming to terms with death. And so is all of literature.

The quandary of mortality is at the center of the most

famous passage in literature when Hamlet claims that death

is

The undiscovered country, from whose bourn

No traveler returns . . .

Hamlet recognizes that the impossibility to know death is

the only thing that makes meaning possible because it

Puzzles the will,

And makes us rather bear those ills we have,

Than fly to others that we know not of.

In other words, the inaccessibility of death—the

impossibility for me to experience my own annihilation—

forces me to remain in the world I am familiar with because

death has no meaning. In his De rerum natura, Lucretius urges

us not to bother about death since we will never experience

it.

Another reason that Hamlet races away from death is

because, like all of us, he is a scaredy-cat, or “pigeon

liver’d,” as he calls it, a fear that is inextricably bound

to trepidation over the unknown. The more I allow the

unknown to terrify me, the more I fear and loathe life, like

Hamlet for whom the world is “an unweeded garden” that is

“gross and rank in nature.” The paradox is I must live my life by

living with my death, the one experience that is impossible to

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know and futile to try. Adumbrations of death as nothingness—

the impossibility to know one’s own annihilation—resonate in

all of our actions. This is, I believe, the central message

of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy. Death vibrates in all endings,

literary or actual. Therefore, anything that brings closure,

like making a decision or acting on either thought or

instinct, resonates with the most personal relationship to

death.

Death is the impossible possibility of meaning. The

search for meaning and self-knowledge is predicated upon

this impossibility of death. If we were immortal—if living

were to go on into infinity—life would be meaningless

because it would be impossible to know that this is life.

Life in comparison to what? Knowing is possible not in

opposition to ignorance, but in opposition to nothingness. We

will see this is the reason why Wallace Stevens embraces the

change and finitude self-consciousness of mortality brings

in which “death is the mother of all beauty” in opposition

to the infinite and immutable realm of heaven.

Since an eternalist view of the universe is not

available to us, we can never envisage with absolute

certainty the effects of our actions. To reiterate,

adumbrations of death as nothingness, the impossibility to know

one’s own annihilation, resonate in all of our actions. And

this is because all actions are predicated upon consequences

just as all sentences depend upon a verb in order to make

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sense. We distinguish the past from the future because of

ordered causal relationships. A cause in the present

produces effects that form the future. We can only say that

something happened afterwards, as a result of a cause, by

looking back at the past, not by looking forward into the future.

For example, when I throw a baseball to my son, I

assume that he will catch the ball. When my son catches the

ball, I see it as an effect that comes after the action.

Effects, therefore, are always bound up in afterwardness.

Unlike physics in which nature runs equally forward and

backward in time—the view of the universe in a rearview

mirror—for us the past is fixed and the future is malleable.

To put it another way, whereas nature does not have free

will, we believe in our will to make choices that can change

or cause effects in the future.

The term free will is bound up with our ability to form

the future tense, which I think is the most miraculous

aspect of the English language. As Stephen Pinker says in

his remarkable The Stuff of Thought,

Rather than being a form of the verb, it is

expressed by the modal auxiliary will. It’s no

accident that the future shares its syntax with

words for necessity (must), possibility (can, may,

might), and moral obligation (should, ought to),

because what will happen is conceptually related

to what must happen, what can happen, and what

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should happen, and what we intend to happen. The

word will itself is ambiguous between future tense

and an expression of determination . . . and its

homonyms show up in free will, strong-willed, and to will

something to happen . . . language is affirming the ethos

that people have the power to make their own

futures (196).

The notion of free will—which is on of the most difficult

issues in Christian theology—derives from my belief that my

intentions can will something to happen, like making a

future. “I will throw the ball to my son.” My freedom leaves

the results of my actions up to the malleability of the

future. Will my son catch the ball?

Most effects in the world are predictable. If effects

were not fairly predictable and if we did not have some

control over the consequences of our actions, all of us

would be paralyzed, second-guessing every choice and move we

make in an infinite regress. Most effects follow action with

a certain amount of predictability. But we act in an

indeterminate field nonetheless. Although I am pretty sure

the sun will come up tomorrow, I can never know what comes

next with absolute certainty. Just as easily as I have

intention and will, I might throw a wild pitch to my son and

the ball ends up in the neighbor’s yard; or my son drops the

ball; or he throws his glove down in the middle of the

ball’s flight toward him to call it quits; or the ball

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smacks him in the nose and I have to rush him to the

hospital. And so on and so on. It is the series of possibilities

of causation that makes the future look free and the past

frozen. But it is also this indeterminate field of future

possibility that makes me, and Hamlet, terrified of making

the next move. (The endless series of possible outcomes

resulting from an endless series of possible actions is also

the basis for a great deal of multiverse theories.)

The openness and malleability of the future terrifies

us. The human’s seeming stalemate in the middle, caught

between the beginning and the end, past and the future,

which Frank Kermode calls the “middest,” is the crux of

Hamlet’s soliloquy.

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprises of great pitch and moment

With this regard their currents turn awry,

And lose the name of action.

After reflecting on the impossibility to know death, Hamlet

universalizes the self-consciousness of mortality. The fear

of death, its radical mystery, suffuses life with the fear

of doing. Any action, any choice, no matter how small,

actualizes an unknowable future. Hamlet, as we all learn in

high school, suffers from chronic indecisiveness, his

ability to act smothered by his far more powerful ability to

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think (although after Act II, he seems to kill with a great

deal of alacrity).

The consequences of action, therefore, terrify us

nearly as much as death, making cause and effect bound up

with the same apprehension as the mystery of death. Doing

always entails the loss of something in the process of

gaining what we desire. Life, like narrative, is driven by

desire. Whenever we make a choice, some other possibility

gets left behind. There is always a “road not taken.” Making

a decision and acting on it annuls another possible future.

The human, therefore, recoils from action because the

irreversible arrow of time drives choice and, ultimately,

drives life to its end. So we return to “the pale cast of

thought.”

It is fitting that near the end of the play, Hamlet

seems to dispense with free will, telling Horatio,

There’s a divinity that shapes our ends

Rough-hew them how we will.

It could easily be Billy Pilgrim’s epitaph.

Meaning and Entropy

In 1850, at the height of the Industrial Revolution,

the engineer, Rudolph Clausius, came up with a formal

statement of a physical phenomenon concerning combustion.

The principle, which we call the Second Law of

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Thermodynamics, states that no process is possible whose

sole result is the transfer of heat from a body of lower

temperature to a body of higher temperature.

It sounds ridiculously simple. We know that a pot of

water does not heat itself up but that it does cool itself

down. The heat has been conserved, redistributed to form

equilibrium with the uniform temperature in its space. From

this principle, engineers developed formulas for entropy,

which is the measure of the uselessness of a certain amount

of energy resulting from increased activity. Left to its own

devices, any system, including the entire universe, will

eventually run down by equilibrating into a uniform

temperature. The prevailing theory is that the universe will

end in a state of absolute entropy, a process that has the

scary name, “heat death.” According to the laws of physics,

the universe will not end with some heavenly celestial event

or a catastrophic apocalypse, but a slow, billions of years

long anticlimactic cooling off of all energy into one flat

and uniform plane of inactivity. The universe won’t

disappear; instead, it will become infinitely uniform. Since

entropy is the general tendency for things to lose their

original properties and grow more “disordered,” the

principle is at the center of pretty much everything

concerning time’s arrow.

Everything in of itself has one forward movement toward

entropy. The ice cubes you put into your soda will move from

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a state of order to disorder as it melts and equilibrates

into uniform temperature. You cannot reverse the process and

return the melted ice to its original cubes. In the example

physicists like to use, you cannot turn an omelet back into

an egg. A system cannot turn itself back into a state of

order. Something that is cold cannot make itself hot. A car

cannot un-rust itself. These principles of thermodynamics

were important for engineers in the Industrial Revolution

because it put to rest any possibility for creating a

perpetual motion machine. In order for a system to do work,

to produce energy, it must be disturbed. Energy from a

system must be conserved and its source replenished.

(Someone has to always shovel coal into the furnace to keep

the locomotive moving.) A system cannot run itself. Again,

even the universe will eventually run down.

The metaphors of entropy as decadence, disintegration,

and dissipation abound, which is why it has become adopted

by literature and literary studies by misreading the word

“disorder.” Most physicists regret that the word “disorder”

entered into the scientific lexicon concerning the measure

of wasted energy. We who study the humanities appropriate

the term “disorder” to relate entropy to literary

representation in a very different sense from its use in

thermodynamics to describe the movement of a system’s

singularity to uniformity. In 1910, for instance, Henry

Adams proposed a method for teaching history based upon the

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Second Law of Thermodynamics (it never took off) by arguing

that one can interpret the eventual disintegration of any

civilization in terms of entropy. The increasing energy of

history as we reach the peak of modernity becomes riddled

with waste, which accounts for the decline of civilizations.

But Adams’ vision of entropy in the chapter, “The

Virgin and the Dynamo,” that nears the end of his famous,

The Education of Henry Adams, has staying power. It represents a

perspective of speed leading to collapse that most modernist

authors in the early twentieth century shared. With awe and

horror, Adams witnessed the exhibition of gigantic dynamos

(what we now call generators) at the 1900 World’s Fair in

Chicago. These dynamos that powered the fair’s machinery and

nearly one thousand incandescent light bulbs must have been

overpowering for people who had never seen machines of such

magnitude. The vision led him to predict that the energy of

modernism would dissipate cultural permanence; the dynamo,

in all of its speed, will magnetize people with a similar

sense of religion. Adams himself

began to feel the forty-foot dynamo as a moral

force, much as the early Christians felt the

cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive,

in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily

revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within

arm’s-length at some vertiginous speed, and barely

murmuring.

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In fact, he wondered if he should pray to it.

Whereas we once worshipped objects that signify

eternity because they provoke the stillness of contemplation

(“the Virgin”), we now worship the flux of the machine,

(“the Dynamo”). The machine will replace God with

devastating consequences for civilization. (Looking at our

technological age today, Adams’ prophecy is not particularly

off the mark. As I ask my students, how much time do you

spend essentially venerating your smart phone?)

Critics often cite the phrase “things fall apart,” from

Yeats’ poem, “The Second Coming,” as a description of

entropy. The massive scale of decimation in World War I made

possible by technological advancements permeates Yeats’ poem

he wrote in 1919, but the poem also exhibits a delayed

response to world catastrophe. Most of the major poets had

written their poetic statements about the war in the

preceding few years. Since Yeats was the poet of the time,

“The Second Coming” became the most anticipated poem of

modernism. (Yes, there was a time when a poem was

anticipated with the same excitement as the next iPhone.)

Reading the terrifying poem in terms of entropy is

understandable; it resonates with the sense of imminent

apocalypse that any era has in the wake of catastrophe

(which will be the subject of Part II). It is why “The

Second Coming” is one of the poems most evoked in times of

crisis, like 9/11. It captures the terrifying feeling of

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history careening out of our control foregrounded by Yeats’

symbol of the “gyre,” an image that bears a striking

resemblance to a dynamo.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold

The world and its familiar categories of meaning spiral

apart as the falcon circles further away from its master,

mimicking the spinning gyre; once the center of the world

like the falconer mastering his bird, the human loses grip.

If one imagines any system that spirals out of control, one

can visualize Yeats’ image. His vision is a bit like a

pottery wheel turning faster and faster so that the

centrifugal force flays the top of the clay to pieces (an

image seared into our contemporary consciousness,

unfortunately, because of the movie Ghost). It is a crafty

image of a world spinning into catastrophe.

Identifying with the abandoned falconer, the speaker

witnesses the brink of destruction and tallies the signs of

imminent Armageddon.

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

At first the speaker believes that historical catastrophe

fits into a providential pattern of divine revelation.

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Relying on traditional biblical prophecy, he imagines that

all signs point to Christ’s triumphant return.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming!

Just as he predicts Christ’s return, the vision of the beast

defies his expectations. The gyre that widens to its event

horizon does not generate the apocalyptic unveiling that the

speaker anticipates. Instead, like a dream, the terrifying

beast crawls into the speaker’s sight and ends the poem by

undoing Christian assumptions of benign coherence.

Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;

A shape with lion body and the head of man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The stupefied speaker represents the human awakening to

the modern world bereft of coherent mythologies of

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providence. World War I shocks the West out from the

millenarian spirit that led them to a sense of divine

mandate. Whatever it is that “Slouches towards Bethlehem to

be born” does not prefigure the evolution of a messianic

West. Instead it suggests progression toward further

dystopia that civilization conjures unconsciously in its

nightmares. The poem, therefore, shares the modernist

skepticism over the Progress of Man, the optimistic

narrative of the arrow of time born in the Enlightenment.

Yeats explained his philosophical system two years

later in A Vision (1921), arguing that history moves in 2,000-

year cycles in which the gyre is the central symbol. It is

not an easy read. “The Second Coming” illustrates his

prophecy in A Vision that a new world hegemony will rise out

of the centrifugal collapse of Christianity that had reached

its peak one thousand years earlier. History is like a

dynamo that generates energy into millennial movements that

are born during the height of the previous period. The next

movement of history widens out of the ruins of the previous

one, forming a series of gyres or vortices of history. Look

up Yeats’ A Vision or his system of gyres online, and you will

find incredibly complex graphics, some of them animated,

that illustrate the geometry of his historical system. I

cannot begin to do justice to the intricacy and weirdness of

it.

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In physics, entropy is a lot simpler: everything,

including the universe, eventually equilibrates, moving from

the singularity of heat to the uniformity of cold. In

literary criticism, however, entropy describes how modern

dynamism and speed will lead to chaos and collapse:

everything moves from a state of order to disorder. Things

fall apart. An immense amount of modern literature focuses

on the dichotomy of order and chaos. It is the theme of

modernist literature.

Not all modernists depict historical entropy with

violence, however. One of the most haunting passages in

literature is the “Time Passes” section that comes in the

middle of Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse. From a seemingly

inhuman, godlike perspective, we witness the Ramsay’s

summerhouse, abandoned during the several years surrounding

World War I, gradually decline into a state of disorder. The

interior that Mrs. Ramsay so artfully arranges, climaxing

with her beautiful dinner party, falls prey to the

vicissitudes of time. Leaks form. Wallpaper curls. Books

become waterlogged. Shelving collapses. Weeds choke the

walls. The garden grows unruly. The dissipation all happens

intransitively, without human action.

“Time Passes” focuses on the abandoned house falling

into disrepair in order to emphasize death. Many of the

characters with whom we have identified throughout the novel

die off-stage, so to speak. In curt parenthetical moments we

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learn of the various deaths of family members, including

Mrs. Ramsay. They serve as laconic reminders that death

hangs over every moment of order in life, represented by

Mrs. Ramsay’s dinner party that serves as the climax to the

first part of the novel, “The Window.” There are very

convincing arguments that the parenthetical deaths in “Time

Passes” are meant to reflect the perfunctory telegrams that

would announce the death of a loved one in a battle, these

telegrams arriving at English homes thousands of times a

day. The speed by which news travelled, thanks to the new

networks of cable rapidly crossing Europe since the late

1800s, made World War I the first war people could follow on

a daily basis. The modern speed of information also resulted

in the rapid development of propaganda. The powers that be

needed everyone in England to believe in the ideals of a war

that was, in reality, pure carnage.

The effects of death and war, like the delayed effects

of trauma, waits for the final section of Woolf’s novel,

“The Lighthouse,” which shows time’s survivors reconvening

at the summer house. The war is never mentioned, but it

haunts “The Lighthouse” with reminders of how much was lost

in the context of what remains.

T.S. Eliot’s poetry, probably more than any other

poet’s, depicts disorder. In his famous poem, “The Love Song

of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Prufrock reflects entropy when he

exclaims, “Do I dare disturb the universe!” As he passes his

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middle age, Prufrock grows dreadfully aware of his wasted

youth, the measure of his increasingly useless energy.

“Time” is the most prevalent word in the poem. Prufrock

tries to comfort himself that “There will be time, there

will be time,” but recognizes how its passage leads to

waste. “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”

Instead of asking his “overwhelming question,” he expends a

great deal of energy mentally convincing himself that

confrontation, asking the question, only leads to disorder

and misunderstanding. In one of the most remarkable stanzas

in the poem, Prufrock anticipates his own decline. THE

STAIRCASE

The irony in the poem is that Prufrock spends his life

trying not to disturb the universe, but all of the effort he

puts into preserving his timidity has led him to age

prematurely. He has, in the end, wasted time, a unique

metaphor that only becomes possible in our modern ability to

personalize time with timepieces. His vacillations

concerning desire and action throughout his life makes time

a useless expenditure. In the end he imagines himself

expiring “When human voices wake us and we drown,” a common

ending to a work in the past hundred years in which

everything succumbs to annihilation.

Like so many modernists in the early twentieth century,

Eliot perceives civilization declining into a state of

entropy. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is a study of

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a mind alienated by the rapid changes of modernism in which

the increased energy in mechanized industrialism fragments

consciousness. In The Waste Land, which we will examine more

later, a literary culture, like the dystopia of Adams’

dynamo, becomes swallowed and fragmented by mechanization

incapable of fostering permanence. The benefits of speed

will be offset by the more intense production of disorder.

Finally, and most importantly, thermodynamics is at the

heart of Freud’s entropic view of trauma that becomes

particularly pertinent after World War I. As we will see,

Freud’s economy of psychic forces was directly influenced by

thermodynamics. Psychoanalysis, for Freud, is build upon a

complex conservation and distribution of conflicting psychic

forces he calls psychodynamics. Emotion (in which the word

“motion” is integral) flows through pipes and channels that

store (cathexis) and release (catharsis) psychic energy.

Freud considered emotion a constant that eventually comes to

rest once it is discharged, or catharsis. In the end, the

human is designed not only to reach a state of entropy,

which Freud calls “stasis,” but desires it.

On a structural level, a literary work is a

psychodynamic system that introduces and develops conflict

that an ending discharges (a phenomenon that has a slippery

relationship to Aristotle’s term, catharsis) and is brought to

a certain amount of resolution through closure. The conflict

between life and death instincts in their formation of a

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masterplot of a human life in Beyond the Pleasure Principle is the

paradigm by which Peter Brooks bases his psychoanalytic

reading of the structure of narrative in his famous Reading

for the Plot. The ways in which a work ends and the level of

resolution it provides is integral to the ways in which we

understand and interpret it.

The implications of entropy as a trope in literature are

at the heart of this book. The chaos, fragmentation, and

contraction of an increasingly connected world preoccupy

modernist and contemporary authors. The brute fact of

entropy challenges the Enlightenment belief in human

progress, particularly after the trenches of World War I.

Retrospection and Time

Entropy might measure disorder (or, in technical terms,

the amount of useless energy a system produces), but

disorder is meaningless only to the extent that one allows

the vanishing present to make it so. Eliot is prescient on

this point in his very time-conscious masterpiece, Four

Quartets.

A people without history

Is not redeemed from time, for history is a

pattern

Of timeless moments.

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The forward movement of time makes existence possible

since life would be unlivable if effect preceded cause! But

the backward glance over time’s movement to the present of

history rearranges the effects of events in order to arrive

at the cause. As David Hume argues, no one lives self-

consciously aware of the arrow of time and causality. It is

hard enough, he claims, to define what cause and effect

actually means. Instead we recognize that time moves in a

manner of sequence that we constantly arrange and rearrange

into the unique sequences of time through which we live.

Without making arrangements out of the past, a time of pure

sequence makes its experience meaningless.

We do not understand history as a chronicle, a bare

sequence of events moving forward linearly. Historians up

until a couple centuries ago believed in a history of pure

consecution that accommodates the human as a singular being

in God’s providential plan of progress. Today we recognize

history more in terms of what Nietzsche refers to as

genealogy. Instead of returning to the past and examining

sequence linearly, we examine some present point or

condition, and work our way toward the past in order to

interpret how the effects of history were caused, or how we

got here. In many ways, the television show, Mad Men, is a

genealogy.

You can see the genealogical effects on fiction. The

novel and short story increasingly dispenses with the

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beginning, “Once upon a time,” placing the reader instead in

the middle of things. In the 18th and 19th centuries, most

novels began with background to the protagonist or a rundown

of the history that leads up to the beginning. The long

family history that begins Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov

is a perfect example. By the 20thC, most novelists show the

background to character and action through flashback,

dialogue, or by leaving the past itself as a gap that the

reader must educe. Background becomes more of an issue of

foregrounding; ellipsis takes the place of delineation.

Further, many novels begin at the end or provide the

consequences before the action like Slaughterhouse Five or the

movie Memento, in which the protagonist must move backwards

from the end in order to figure out how he got to the

terrible position he finds himself in at the beginning.

MORE ON ELIOT

The irreversible forward movement of time allows

fictions and poetry to form meaning because literature

arranges causality within an isolated and hypothetical

teleological structure. Literature produces visions in which

the effects of causes continually impress new arrangements

that serve as models for how we make sense of a seemingly

meaningless existence. As many philosophers like to argue,

narrative is a model for life, which, as we will see, poses

great problems for interpretation.

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The little world a poem embodies discloses a life

invested with a sense of meaning, which is implicated in and

problematized by the irreversible arrow of time. A

circumference, a frame, a boundary that provides a place

where you can dwell within all possibilities of experience

can open up life to a sense of meaning bestowed by its

various forms of an ending. At the same time, language is

embedded in time. The words we read are just as implicated

in time’s forward movement that relegates experience to the

vanishing present. The fact that language exists within time

makes meaning, like the attempt to grasp a present moment as

it vanishes, very tricky business indeed, if not impossible.

Death is the ineluctable fact that gives life meaning,

but life only makes sense by looking back over the duration

that leads to the end. The teleology of life is,

paradoxically, orchestrated by ever-lengthening

retrospection. The pursuit of meaning is always

retrospective, which further exacerbates the tricky business

of interpretation. We are always in the middle of things!

Since it is impossible to examine life from the point of

death, one must occupy provisional endpoints from where to

look back retrospectively.

There is never a moment, however, when the future will

not change the perception of the past in our backward gaze.

If only one could stop time in order to make sense of

experience, to turn chaos into order, to configure

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everything with the structure of a coherent narrative! The

impossibility to turn life into a whole, Augustine realized,

is the agony of finitude. The presentist that he was,

Augustine dwells on the impossibility to freeze time in

order to grab hold of its meaning. Time stands still only in

eternity, which is unavailable to us in finitude. It is

impossible to stand outside of time to examine the self as a

whole.

When writing Confessions Augustine knew that he could

only offer a fragment of his story that would never see

completion. Once the writing of his narration reaches the

present of his life, the mergence of two disparate but

urgent points of time—which we define as crisis—leaves nothing

left to reflect on but the act of reflecting itself. He ends

his autobiography, fittingly, by seeking union with God in

the act of writing theology. USE THIS AS AN OPPORTUNITY TO

DISCUSS SPECIOUS PRESENT?

Fragmentation and Time

Because of finitude we never feel whole. Within our own

lifetime there will always be more experience than we can be

conscious of: neither our birth nor death are events we

remember. Paul Ricoeur calls the fact that our life will

never be available to us as a whole, the pathetique of misery.

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There is always more existence than consciousness can

enclose: the self is not only a part of the whole, but also

a fragment of its self. This is why we tirelessly search for

ourselves, a quest that always remains elusive. If you think

you’ve found yourself, think again.

As I have argued, time is not meaningful unless we

provide grammar to its passage that gives value to the

events that measure and plot its passage. But since we are

always in the middle of things, it is impossible to see any

experience as one complete whole. To speak of an individual

life as a whole, one would have to speak in terms of a

future tense that envisages things yet to be. Further, we do

not see simultaneity. Instead we see one configuration and

another in a sequence again and again in varieties of

configurations. Each is somehow distinct. Sequence puts

different instances in an order that allows for a degree of

continuity through time.

But configuration and sequence also insures that the

experience of life remains fragmented. A way to define a

world or a universe is a set of all events, every point in

space at every moment in time. It is a whole that is

impossible to see since we are within it. We are a part of

its constantly shifting configurations and sequences just as

we are apart from any temporal configuration as a whole. A

way to define a work is a world verbally or visually

constructed that makes its presence as an artistic

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construction evident. A work can exist as an ontological

whole, but it is always a fragment of the whole in which it

exists.

In Essay on Man, Alexander Pope expounds upon the tension

between the parts and the whole of experience.All are but parts of one stupendous whole,Whose body Nature is, and God the soul;That, chang'd through all, and yet in all the same,Great in the earth, as in th' ethereal frame,Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze,Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees,Lives through all life, extends through all extent,Spreads undivided, operates unspent,Breathes in our soul, informs our mortal part,As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart;As full, as perfect, in vile man that mourns,As the rapt seraph that adores and burns;To him no high, no low, no great, no small;

He fills, he bounds, connects, and equals all. The aphoristic couplets illustrate fragments that go into

making the whole of the poem. Throughout Epistle I Pope

expounds Deism, in which God sets everything in motion and

then otherwise remains aloof. The poem derives from

Leibnitz’s optimistic theory of sufficient cause in which

everything, no matter how discordant, results from the

perfection of God’s creation. An increased awareness of

life’s disasters, such as the Lisbon earthquake, tended to

turn his optimism into folly by the late 18thcentury,

particularly Voltaire’s satirical attack on him in Candide.

(Leibnitz’s mathematics had a big influence on Einstein. In

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fact, Deism adopts the new technologies of time keeping of

the era by describing God as “the watchmaker.” )

For Deism, it is epistemological folly to begin with

God or the supernatural as a means to understand the world.

Instead, as Pope claims, “The proper study of mankind is

man.” Reason involves avoiding the Pride that results in

thinking we can understand the whole of the universe, and

blaming its imperfection when we undergo personal

misfortune. We simply cannot see the greater design. Pope’s

famous conclusion hints at something similar to an eternalist

universe: “Whatever is is right.” The equivalent in religious

cliché is “God moves in mysterious ways,” or, “It is all

part of God’s will.”

The process Pope pontificates concerning the part

versus the whole is known in philosophy as the “hermeneutic

circle.” You can only understand the parts of something by

understanding the whole. But you can only understand the

whole by understanding its parts. The continual back and

forth movement between the parts and the whole entailed of

interpretation can make it seem like a vicious circle. It is

impossible to break out of the circle, although later I will

argue that the enclosed nature of the circle (the ontological

world within our world it forms) can provide disclosure that

allows us provisional ways to stand outside or about the

circle. The closure of the circle discloses its secrets of

meaning. Literature can occupy a pocket in time that,

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paradoxically, circumscribes the whole. FIND CURRIE’S

EXPLANATION

In literature the hermeneutic circle reflects the

relationship between form and content. You can only interpret

the content of a work by recognizing its form. But you can

only recognize its form by interpreting its content. I

identify that a poem is a sonnet because its parts are

comprised of fourteen lines of iambic pentameter verse. My

recognition of its form allows me to return to its parts in

order to interpret how the sonnet structure informs the

content’s meaning . . . and then I return to examine how the

content’s meaning informs the sonnet’s structure. And so on.

Another way of describing the hermeneutic circle in

literature is that the necessary back and forth examination

of form and content is possible only because a work offers

itself as a form of closure. The poem’s form, for instance,

is available because it comes to an end, while its content

is all the verbal material that reaches that end and defines

its contours.

It is apparent that the hermeneutic circle is more

vicious in its application to life “in the middest” and

relegated to a state of alienation. The whole of a life only

makes sense by examining its parts, but the parts of life

only make sense in light of its whole. It is impossible to

stand outside of time to see life in its entirety, so

retrospection forces us to return to the parts of life from

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a particular temporal vantage point, a provisional ending

that allows tentative moments of closure. While events in

the past remain fixed—we cannot travel back into the past to

rearrange them—the future arrives, and keeps arriving,

providing new events with a measure of predictability and

surprise. One can anticipate and project visions of the

future, but one cannot know the future. Fortunately the

human is not an oracle. We draw anticipation and visions of

the future into the act of configuring wholes out of present

duration that continually vanishes, but for the most part we

are relegated to making sense out of the parts of an entire

experience.

The basic necessity by which we divide time into tense

allows us to see some semblance of a temporal whole, but we

remain temporally fragmented. As Allen Grossman says,

We do not remember the future. Hence the part-whole

perception in the analysis of the literary work is an

anticipation of the mind in contemplation—per impossible—

of the whole career of consciousness as a completed

system. In the work of art meaning is complete in a

version of being, thus fulfilling by anticipation the

state of affairs in immortality—the accord of meaning

with being as a whole (425).

Since the future is unknown, we must balance the known with

the unknown in our efforts to make sense of things while at

the same time we accommodate the surprises the future

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brings. The past and the future combine to give the present

meaning that can only be provisional. The unexpected can

easily vex whatever sense we make of life. Something always

comes along to disturb the order we think we have created.

Pope’s adage, “Whatever is is right” might be soothing

in a Zen sort of way—although it is unlikely that Pope was

thinking about anything Eastern in his Deist didacticism—but

we are more likely, particularly in our contemporary world,

to feel like “the time is out of joint,” as Hamlet says.

There is always the greater possibility that something comes

along to disturb or traumatize order. The more that

experience defies expectations of reliable order, the more

our responses to experience become belated. We need, in

other words, more time.

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Chapter Four

The Rage for Order

Aboutness and Afterwardness

A literary a work is a frozen entity. A text does not

rewrite itself. A text does not move. An alternate ending or

translation only creates another frozen world. The book you

are reading is not going to change the next time you open

it. It is not going to magically rewrite itself overnight.

Whatever movement or change to the text results from your

process of reading and the acts of ordering and making sense

you impose on a text. To that extent, the text itself, the

literary object, is like a block-universe in relationship to

the reader’s time-consciousness. It takes a lot of strenuous

cognitive work to make the frozen text come alive!

The reason we enjoy film and television is the

exhilaration of flux we can experience passively. Whereas we

have to engage in the difficult (and time consuming)

activity of reading to understand a novel or a poem, we do

not have to do anything when we watch television or a movie.

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It remains an unexamined phenomenon that moving images do

not render the printed word obsolete. Fixed type plods on

against all odds. We are still drawn to print. Even though

visual media provides the movement and sensation that

fiction and poetry work hard to embody and describe, we

continue to put in the effort required to read. The mind

still hankers for fixed forms.

Keats depicts the paradox of art as frozen vitality in

“Ode on a Grecian Urn” in which he both celebrates and

laments the fixedness of artistic form. The poem is in the

tradition of ekphrasis, a poem about a work of art. The urn is

adorned with images of a man chasing a woman around a tree

accompanied by flutes in a frenetic, Dionysian movement. At

the same time the urn is dead, frozen, timeless. One of the

functions of an urn, ironically, is to carry the ashes of

the dead, which accounts for the other image on the urn in

the background of the romantic chase: villagers proceeding

to make a sacrifice. This is a lot of activity gyrating

around the urn! But the central paradox is that nothing

actually moves or makes sound. It is as a complete work of

art that Keats can examine that the urn creates the

semblance of vitality.

In the final stanza of the poem, Keats addresses the

urn as he might address a poem,

Thou, silent form! dost tease us out of thought

As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!

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When old age shall this generation waste,

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours . . .

The work of art, however, depicts a full and permanent world

suspended in time. The poem ends with Keats’ reflection on

the urn that seems to analogize it to a poem,

a friend to man, to whom thou say’st

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

SMITH ON THE ODD CLOSURE HERE

What alters the perception of any given text and that

makes the images on Keats’ urn move is the power of the

imagination to impose patterns of meaning on the parts of

the artistic whole that an author constructs. And this

magical ability to transform a text that does not in reality

change is possible because we stand outside of its temporal

structure. When we ask, “What is a poem about?” about means

from the outside.

Keats enacts the aboutness of the reader to a poem. The

urn is at arm’s length from Keats as an object for

inspection like a book before us. There is literal, physical

distance between a reader and a book that impacts the

interpretive dynamic of reading. Everything we perceive,

including books, is at a remove. If one factors in the speed

of light, a book is also a millionth of a second in the

past! Everything in our field of vision, actually, is in the

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past, no matter how infinitesimally so. We all learn in

childhood that one can time travel by looking up into the

night sky: the stars we see are anywhere from several years

to millions of years old.

Not only is there a physical distance between a reader

and a text, but also there is an historical distance. A text

is something written in the past. A gap opens between the

time of a reader and her present and the time that a text

was composed in its past that compounds the ontological

alienation one experiences between language and the world.

Phenomenologists call this historical distance, distantiation.

The urn Keats examines is not only physically separate from

the poet, but an object created in an ancient past that

distantiates us from it. Just as we are physically separate

from Keats’ poem, we are separated by the poem by nearly two

hundred years.

Like a reader, Keats imaginatively enters into the

world of the urn and engages its story, but he still remains

outside of the object, lurking about it. Entering the work of

art is purely phenomenological since you cannot physically

inhabit a work. (Woody Allen’s short story, “The Kuglemas

Episode,” wonderfully depicts the horror that ensues if one

actually does inhabit a work of literature.) You are always

outside or about what you examine or read. Situating oneself

within a work historically is also challenging. One can

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imagine the time when a work is written, but one cannot

inhabit that time just as one cannot return to the past.

The aboutness of Keats’ poem expresses its conflicted

belatedness. The work of art precedes Keats by over two

thousand years, emphasizing our place both outside the text

and after its end. Reading is temporally and spatially

alienating in that we come after the text and stand outside or

about the space it occupies, which means that the aboutness of

text is always wrapped up in its afterness. A reader is always

a latecomer to a text that came before her. We come from

outside of and beyond the text’s time. This means that the

retrospective activity of interpretation also allows us to

dwell after the end.

It is the ability to inhabit the afterness of text, to

dwell after the end, that bestows a literary work with its

magical structure that is not replicable in life: you can

exist after the future that the temporal self-sufficiency

and closure of a work provide. In other words, a work of

literature does allow you to remember the future.

Modern poetry becomes far more interested in

delineating the process by which belatedness plays into the

making of a poem. Poets become much more interested in the

making of poems themselves, an activity that is in itself

good. This is Wallace Stevens’ project that climaxes in his

notion of the “supreme fiction.” His famous poem, “The Idea

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of Order at Key West” is, in many ways, a contemporary

revision of Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”

The Poet as Maker

In “The Idea of Order at Key West,” the speaker

witnesses a woman singing at the edge of the ocean, her song

imaginatively reconfiguring the setting. Her song does

nothing to alter the natural world. “The water never formed

to mind or voice,/Like a body wholly body, fluttering/It’s

empty sleeves.” But her singing does change the poet’s

perception of the setting nonetheless. The speaker calls the

woman a “maker,” the Greek definition for a poet, in order

to make her activity distinct from the natural world.

For she was the maker of the song she sang.

The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea

Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.

Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew

It was the spirit that we soght and knew

That we should ask this often as she sang.

Her song can shape perception, but it cannot alter

nature. Although the sound of her song and the sound of the

ocean remain two separate realms, something about the woman

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singing makes the speaker think of “spirit.” It is what

unifies the disparate realms of human and nature, but its

indefinable presence becomes the speaker’s cognitive

conflict, something he needs to think through. “If it was

only the dark voice of the sea,” he speculates, “If it was

only the outer voice of the sky” the setting would express

merely “The heaving speech of air . . . And sound alone.”

Her song, “More even than her voice” amongst “The

meaningless plungings of water and wind” fills the setting

she inhabits with an excess of experience we associate with

transcendence.

It was her voice that made

The sky acutest at its vanishing.

She measured to the hour its solitude.

She was the single articifer of the world

In which she sang.

In fact the speaker claims that the woman singing has, like

a poem, come to embody a world complete in itself.

As we beheld her striding there alone,

Knew that there never was a world for her

Except for the one she sang, and singing, made.

If the poem ended here, the experience would be

marooned in abstraction, leaving the speaker’s aesthetic

ruminations didactic. As if to emphasize human connection,

however, the poet addresses another witness to the song in

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the penultimate stanza (the poem up until this point is in

the third person plural).

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,

Why, when the singing ended and we turned

Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,

The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,

As the night descended, tilting in the air,

Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,

Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,

Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

The description certainly sounds transcendent!

Something has transformed as a result of the woman’s aria

despite the poem’s distinction between nature as creation

and human as maker; something about the woman’s song has

altered the setting and infused it with beauty. It is indeed

“enchanting.” It has created something new and unique out of

the natural world by casting the streetlights, the boats,

and the lights glowing from the masts into a spiritual glow

that remains, at the same time, firmly rooted in the

ordinary world. It has brought these objects to life by

“arranging” them in a world that had been previously

inchoate. The boats turn the ocean into a map and the lights

atop masts turn the harbor into a sidereal landscape. By

“portioning” and “arranging” reality, the poem turns the

lights into “emblazoned zones,” the imaginary lines traced

between stars that demarcate constellations, a beautiful

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image of the way in which we provide the world with a plot.

The memory of the song transfigures the setting into a

picture of experience that the speaker frames to make

available for artistic reflection.

Although it is not as directly apparent that this poem

is about an art object as “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “The Idea

of Order at Key West” is also written in the tradition of

ekphrasis. The work of art is the woman’s song; but it is

also the rearranged setting that the poet witnesses as a

side effect of her music. In this case the poem is doubly

ekphratic. The poet describes the woman singing, and then he

describes the reimagined setting after the song has

poetically transformed it into a picture. The woman’s song

has inspired the poet to envision the harbor as a work of

art. Perhaps this climactic moment of charged vision

inspires the speaker to write the very poem we read. The

word inspiration, of course, derives directly from the word

spirit, a wind that breathes life into inanimate matter. All

of Stevens’ poems are, in some ways, about the poet

breathing life into the ordinariness of things.

It would seem the penultimate stanza would be a fitting

end. But the final stanza serves as falling action to the

poetic narrative at the same time as it breaks the

suspension of disbelief.

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,

The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,

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Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,

And of ourselves and of our origins,

In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

The poem moves with the temporal structure of drama: the

woman enters, sings her aria unaware of her audience, and

exits, after which the speaker allows us to exit the drama.

In fact, the final lines sound somewhat hyperbolic and

pedantic, like an epilogue to a play.

It is easy to miss that the penultimate stanza is a

question. Nature is no longer innate—nature is no longer

natural—but staged for evaluation. It has become a still

life. In a tone of aesthetic disinterestedness, the speaker

answers his own question in a way that subtly disenchants

the fullness of experience. He attributes the transformation

to the poet’s rage for order, his desire for “keener sounds”

to clarify the noise of nature. But the compulsion for order

threatens to drain beauty from the experience. It is easy

not to notice the subtle shift in which reality is suspended

at the end.

Stevens’ explores belatedness. His vision of the

setting transformed by the woman’s song occurs afterwards.

During the sublime experience of the music cognition is not

fully operative. The sensations are too overwhelming. Once

the woman finishes her song the little setting of the harbor

arranges itself for the poet’s perception. And yet, there is

a sense in which the “rage for order” has a tendency to

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intellectualize the experience. Has the “enchanting”

experience that has been infused by “spirit” become

falsified by the poet in the necessary process of forging it

into the form of the poem itself?

Heterocosm

In literature, ontology is concerned with a work’s mode

of being, asking questions such as, what is a literary work?

What makes a work unique? What are the different categories

of literature? Although ontology remained relegated to

formal attributes and classifications of literature

(Aristotle’s Poetics being the most famous), the questions of

a work’s ontological status have become much more complex.

Traditionally ontology viewed a work as an abstract

entity with no spatio-temporal location. A poet, for

instance, abstracts from reality what she represents in the

poem. The poem is an isolated entity that achieves its own

status as a world in itself. As T.S. Eliot says, a poem is

“autotelic,” which means that the poem is self-sufficient.

The poem has its own purpose. It exists for its own sake,

and must be interpreted as a unique being. The poem is.

The notion of the autotelic poem means that it occupies

and creates its own space and time. This is, of course, the

aesthetic philosophy behind the New Criticism, which

emphasizes close reading of the elements integral and unique

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only to the poem itself. In its extreme—although New

Criticism is never quite this austere—the interpretation of

a poem eschews the poet’s intention (the author is dead),

the reader’s response (the “Affective Fallacy”), and the

socio-historical context (no historicism). After such a

reduction, which philosophy calls “bracketing off,” what you

have left is the phenomenon of the poem itself. The poem

becomes an object for inspection or an artifact that

achieves a timeless status as a uniquely formed linguistic

utterance.

Although New Criticism compels the critic to conduct

complicated and nuanced analyses of language, form, and

figuration—a new critical essay always reveals how the poem

“works,” as if meaning magically arises from the poem like

the secrets locked in a sacred vessel—the downside is that

the poem becomes a fetishized object of reverence. The sort

of quasi-science of New Critical analysis that treats the

poem as an object for inspection, like Keats’ urn, turns the

poem, interestingly, into a sacred object. Like the divine,

meaning is hidden within the poem that the critic must

unveil. Despite the strenuous work of unveiling, the meaning

the poem yields is the integrity of its own being. Like a

tautology, the poem, in the end, simply exists. It has

ontology.

In the pursuit of immutability, writers and artists

going back to the ancient Greeks desire the word or the

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image to transcend time and become the symbolic moment of

eternity. The Romantics desire the poem to rise above

finitude. (In Chapter ** we’ll see that this desire for

poetic transcendence is partly born from the increasingly

disposable and instant experience of industrialism.) In “Ode

to the West Wind,” Shelly desires to become one of the

leaves that swirl in the autumn wind that strips the trees

bare in order to be reborn in the spring. It is not possible

to become nature—“I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!”—

so the leaves become a metaphor for the pages of his poetry

blowing across the world in the eternity of seasons.

In “Sailing to Byzantium,” Yeats inherits the Romantic

dream in his desire to transform into a work of art by

becoming a permanent fixture in his own poem, the golden

bird perched forever in a great hall in Byzantium. EXAMINE

THE LAST STANZA

Shakespeare expresses the terror of mortality in his

sonnets. He perpetuates the trope by which the mortal poet

can insure posterity through the poems themselves: the poems

become their own eternity. This also means, as Eliot says,

“Every poem is an epitaph.” Unlike monuments that can

crumble in the future, like Shelly’s Ozymandias, poems are

progeny. “So long as men can breath and eyes can see,”

Shakespeare’s sonnets continue his bloodline figuratively.

The romantic tradition attempts to reconcile the human

and nature, the immutability of spirit and death. Romantic

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poets begin to recognize how modernity alienates the self

from the world while the modern world grows increasingly

indifferent to poetry. Poets start to treat language itself

as a conflict. (Wordsworth on words) In his prologue to

Songs of Innocence, Blake’s speaker describes writing as

“stained.” There is something both necessary but defiling

about turning experience into words, a similar sense of

trespass that writers experience when expressing inviolably

traumatic events.

A work’s being, however, complicates the notion of its

status as an abstraction. The limits and dangers of twisting

language to suit figural purposes testify to a fissure

between the self and the world: words serve as surrogates to

the thing itself while imposing the personal vision of the

poet on his or her material. But words are temporally bound,

their meanings destabilized by the slide of time into the

vanishing present. As language becomes problematized by the

mutability of time, and as the poet strives for self-

understanding in an increasingly alienating world, romantic

and modernist poets yearn for poetry to inhabit a timeless

status. The desire for artistic freedom from the

vicissitudes of life conflicts with the poet’s desire to

elevate language to a more substantial level than the

ephemeral material world. Poets, like Wordsworth and

Coleridge, raise the poem to the status of a living entity.

The tension is pronounced in Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,”

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in which the Grecian urn represents the stillness of an

eternal object of art while the poem struggles to activate

the “Cold Pastoral” into living form.

Language both unites and divides the human from the

world; words both obfuscate and clarify experience. It is

the duplicitous nature of language that makes Plato

suspicions of poetry in The Republic when he famously banishes

the poets from the ideal state.

The rift language forms between the self and the world

creates ontological alienation. The self drifts apart from the

world. The poem seeks to reconcile this rift and to redeem

time from entropy. If literary language obfuscates truth,

what kind of reality does a work signify? Does a poem refer

to any reality at all, or is a poem purely self-referential?

HETEROCOSM

Let’s look at another poem by Stevens, “The Emperor of

Ice Cream.” Stevens claimed it was one of his favorite

poems. No doubt the poems two stanzas, its cadence, and the

refrain that provides it with lyricism, gives the otherwise

surreal language a sense of closure. The poem, as Stevens

claims, is complete in itself.

“The Emperor of Ice Cream” is a clever carpe diem poem

that reveals a playful relationship between the poet as

maker and heterocosm. The speaker serves as a sort of master

of ceremonies who summons activity. The declarative

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statements mimic the Genesis God who both decrees and

requires cooperation connoted by the word “let.” “Let the

wenches dawdle”, “Let the boys bring flowers,” “let the lamp

affix its beam.” The speaker directs us to arrange a

celebration in a kitchen in the first stanza and a makeshift

wake in the second where the old woman lies in bed with her

sheet over her face “cold” and “dumb.” Structured around two

stanzas of equal lines, the poem would seem to suggest

dichotomous experience. The two stanzas do not contrast life

and death, however. Instead they juxtapose two rooms—the word

stanza means “little room”—dwellings within dwellings where

differing ontological spaces become the juxtaposition of

poetic appearances of the world.

The carpe diem message suggests that we must celebrate

life not because eventually we will be “cold and dumb” but

because we aren’t. We must celebrate life because it is here

and we can make it appear good. Stevens’ heterocosm is not

concerned with origins but the aesthetic arrangement of

appearances. Creation for Stevens suggests a world that

began not with divine decree but a trope. Arranging not just

places but ideas, the speaker compels us to accept the old

woman’s death as an ultimate end to being and to celebrate

our ability to go on seeming. The repeated refrain at the

end of the poem gives it a cozy sense of closure. We might

not know what the poem means, but it sounds meaningful

because the repetition provides a sense of completion

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emphasized by the phrase “Let be” (which is the equivalent

of “amen”), and “finale.”

Let be be finale of seem,

The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

So, how might this odd little surreal poem inform

closure and the belatedness involved in the temporal

structure of literary experience?

Death is at the center of all of Stevens’ poems because

endings are infused in the endless mutability of reality.

That the woman’s song comes to an end in “Idea of Order at

Key West” that is a good in itself allows the poet’s vision

to begin. The dead woman in “The Emperor of Ice Cream”

allows those who are alive to revel in a life that one can

arrange into an appearance, or a seeming of vitality, which

is a fiction that is a good in itself.

For Stevens, a belief in the ultimate ending of death

compels us perpetually to reimagine the world. Heaven is

inert, a dead place compared to the endless means by which

we can reimagine the richness of reality around us. Beauty

and vitality is contingent upon death, a mutability heaven

eschews in the frequently quoted lines from “Sunday

Morning.”

Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,

Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams.

A disembodied voice offers running commentary upon a woman

who feels conflicted about enjoying the lazy beauty of her

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morning instead of attending church. “Why should she give

her bounty to the dead?” the voice asks. Is it necessary, he

wonders, for “the dark/Encroachment of that old catastrophe”

to turn the beauty she luxuriates in to become “things in

some procession of the dead”? Stevens exhorts the woman to

rely upon her own religious vision, to find something divine

in the natural world.

What is divinity if it can come

Only in silent shadows and in dreams?

Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,

In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else

In any balm or beauty of the earth,

Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?

Divinity must live within herself:

Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;

Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued

Elations when the forest blooms; gusty

Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;

All pleasures and all pains, remembering

The bough of summer and the winter branch.

These are the measures destined for her soul.

The frozen idea of heaven is a far less desirable fiction.

And in his omniscience, the speaker in the poem seems to

serve as the poet standing behind the scenes, luxuriating in

the same beauty as the woman, and lording over the poem as

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its creator. He espies on the woman like a voyeur to his own

creation.

For Stevens, the poet can find a disinterested joy in

the “rage for order” that becomes something more than a

final good. God might be dead in the context of Stevens’

quest for a “supreme fiction,” but something of Matthew

Arnold’s argument that the study of poetry replaces the

attenuation of religion lingers in the background. In Opus

Posthumous, Stevens writes: “After one has abandoned a belief

in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as

life’s redemption.” The loss of eschatological belief allows

Stevens to revel in the beauty bestowed by the finality of

death that directs people to turn their eyes from heaven to

earth, from earth to poem. Unlike Sartre, Stevens does not

seem particularly troubled by the burden that the loss of

God places upon moral choice and freedom. Stevens is an

atheist but he is not an existentialist. He believes in the

radical finality of death yet he avoids the despair that

results from Heidegger’s being-toward-death.

Yet the loss of eschatology makes Stevens’ vision of

the imagination slippery. “Reality” becomes an indeterminate

category. In the attempt to find a fiction to replace the

abandoned god, however, the poet encounters a great problem.

Direct knowledge of reality is not possible. In his essay

“Imagination as Value,” Stevens argues, “The truth seems to

be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the

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reason has established them.” We generally consider the

“imagination” to be a realm in which unconscious instincts

and impressions undergo sublimation whereas “reality”

correlates to an external world outside of ourselves that is

static and available to consciousness. Imagination, in other

words, is an effect of reality. For Stevens, however, reality is

the effect of the imagination in its act of shaping the world.

Reality is contingent on the power of the imagination to

give it shape. Since we always search for more satisfying

ways in which to shape reality, it is not static, like a

metaphysical truth. Reality is always in a process, like

poetic creation, alive and organic because of our will to

make it so. The world’s mutability is not just the result of

change that death brings about, but the ways in which our

perceptions continually reconceive the world. Making sense of

the world, therefore, is a process without end, and the relationship

between art and the world never settles.

THE PLACE TO INTRODUCE KERMODE

Frank Kermode argues early on in The Sense of an Ending

that Stevens, like other modernists, must struggle to

reimagine outmoded paradigms in order to create a fiction

that contends with shifting perceptions of reality.

The pressure of reality on us is always varying,

as Stevens might have said: the fictions must

change, or if they are fixed, the interpretations

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must change. Since we continue to ‘prescribe laws

to nature’—Kant’s phrase, and we do—we shall

continue to have a relation with the paradigms,

but we shall change them to make them go on

working. If we cannot break free of them, we must

make sense of them. (24)

Stevens likes to call his poetry from around the point of

“The Snow Man” a search for the “First Idea.” But the First

Idea always becomes reconfigured into a new appearance that

must be broken by another poem.

If we think first of modern fictions, it can

hardly be an accident that ever since Nietzsche

generalized and developed Kantian insights,

literature has increasingly asserted its right to

an arbitrary and private choice of fictional

norms, just as historiography has become a

discipline more devious and dubious because of our

recognition that its methods depend on an

unsuspected degree of myths and fictions. After

Nietzsche it was possible to say, as Stevens did,

that ‘the final belief must be in a fiction.’ This poet, to

whom the whole question was of perpetual interest,

saw that to think in this way was to postpone the End—

when the fiction might be said to coincide with

reality—for ever; to make of it a fiction, an

imaginary moment what ‘at last’ the world of fact

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and the mundo of fiction shall be one. Such a

fiction—the last section of Notes Toward a Supreme

Fiction is, appropriately, the place where Stevens

gives it his fullest attention—such a fiction of the end

is like infinity plus one and imaginary numbers in

mathematics, something we know does not exist, but

which helps us to make sense of and to move in the

world. (Emphasis mine 36 – 37)

Reality takes on shape and pattern that results from

the imagination’s rage for order. Accepting in the final

estimate that, in the crisis of arriving at the end, the

only fact is ultimately and fundamentally fiction, Stevens

imposes order over reality to the extent that reality becomes

defined by that order as opposed to something available for

objective study.

Chapter Five

Remembering the Future

Deconstructing Causality

TRANSITION

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Of course we cannot literally remember the future. The

past future tense is also a trope. You can only make effect

precede cause by playing language games, by seeing the world

figuratively, by making fictions. But these fictions have

consequences. As Pinker says, words “are not just about

facts about the world stored in a person’s head but are

woven into the causal fabric of the world itself” (9).

There are many aspects to Deconstruction that allow us

to reimagine literature, but a great deal of its

interpretive approach, to me, at least, involves playing

games with language and time that are already inherently

part of the complexity of speech and writing. Since words

are embedded in the vanishing present, language and meaning

is a very slippery business indeed. A poem might be

linguistically frozen, but the meaning of words are always

ambiguous, an indeterminacy that deconstruction loosens text

with much more fervor than New Critics would dare.

Deconstruction, therefore, has forced us not to treat

literary discourse as if its words are etched into temporal

stone, showing how meaning is always a floating target.

At the same time, deconstruction can also empty

language of human spirit and make interpretation impossibly

skeptical business. Derrida’s notion of trace means that the

meaning we accord to language becomes, like experience in

the vanishing present, the ghost image of the truth and

reality it attempts to signify. Language is the only means

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we have to describe the world, but the temporal slipperiness

of words can only leave behind traces of meaning. It is

impossible to know anything with certainty. In other words,

there is no such thing as Truth or Reality (with the scare

capitals included), only a chaotic network of truths and

realities that shifts and changes with every verbal

inscription. Everything is always already the product of

writing, which means that Reality and Truth are constituted

by tropes. As Nietzsche says in the frequently quoted

passage from, “On Truth and Lying in the Non-Moral Sense,”

Truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms,

anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human

relations which have been subjected to poetic and

rhetorical intensification, translation and

decoration […]; truths are illusions of which we

have forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors

which have become worn by frequent use and have

lost all sensuous vigour […]. Yet we still do not

know where the drive to truth comes from, for so

far we have only heard about the obligation to be

truthful which society imposes in order to exist

The danger of suspicion is extremism. The impossibility

to determine an absolute truth does not mean that it is

futile to speak of truths. Certainly language is just as

slippery to grasp as the experience of the vanishing

present, but temporality does not mean that it is futile to

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make value judgments. As much as I think that deconstruction

has opened up interpretation that traditional forms of close

reading or aesthetic evaluation keep closed, I also believe

that its practitioners have a tendency of bringing

interpretation to a dead end. Is there really that much

difference between a New Critical reading of “Ode on a

Grecian Urn” that examines the integrity of the poem

structured around paradox and irony to prove it inherently

means, and a deconstructive reading that uses the same

devices of literary analysis to prove that it is impossible

for the poem to inherently mean anything at all? Both

approaches do justice to the strenuous analysis that Keats

demands of a reader while leaving the poem in a state of

inertia, a pile of ashes.

In On Deconstruction, Jonathan Culler illustrates how

language can subvert sequential order by using Nietzsche’s

“pin / pain” example of indeterminate causality. When you

sit down in a chair you feel a sharp pain in your ass, so

you jump off the seat and look down only to discover a pin

sticking up from the cushion. Which came first, the pin or

the pain?

You experience the situation as a temporal structure

that makes the pain precede the pin: effect precedes cause.

In the moment that the present vanishes, you turn your

experience of the pin into a miniature but coherent

narrative. For all intents and purposes, the mental

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construction you make out of sitting on the pin is a true,

mimetic representation. But it is a fiction nonetheless.

Therefore, Culler implies, language deconstructs itself

because perception already subverts temporal causality.

Supposedly, this temporal indeterminacy proves that all

foundations of signification in the Western world are

encoded by the same illusions of causality. Meaning is

propped over an abyss.

Nietzsche’s game with causality, however, shows that

nothing has really been “deconstructed” about time at all.

Instead, reality results from the metaphors we use to

describe it. The pin does not become the future cause of an

effect. The pain may lead to your discovery of the pin, but

the pin still causes the pain. The conscious experience of

events out of causal order does not mean that time suddenly

runs in reverse. The reversal of causality occurs in time-

consciousness: it is simply the order in which you

experience time that unfolds in spite of you. Additionally,

it does not mean that language undermines its ability to

refer to the world. In fact, the pin-pain illustration shows

how meaningful and necessary language is. Think how poetic

it is that we can convince ourselves that our pain produced

the pin. At the same time, we know that such experience is

fiction. It is an amazing aspect of human self-consciousness

that we can willingly suspend disbelief while we have the

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ability to stop suspending disbelief when we want or need

to.

Part of my argument concerning the importance of

literary closure is that language can explain experience.

TRANSITION

How we use language to describe the world and to

persuade others of that vision can, and certainly does,

become inevitably wrapped up in politics. The linguistic

relationship between fiction and reality can be

deleteriously abused, but the abuse of language does not

mean that words inadequately signify experience. It means

that a healthy culture requires critical scrutiny of how

language is used and for what purpose. (There is no doubt

that a great deal of deconstruction in a critical response

to the traumatic violence fascism wrecked on language, and the

ways in which rhetoric continues to be used to falsify

truth.)

We should never take language for granted. Suspicion of

the meaningful effectiveness of language, and the way we use

language, is vital. But hyper-suspicious modernity also

drains a belief that language can do things that are not

solely materialistic.

One reason, I believe, that the Harry Potter novels

are so incredibly popular is that they recuperate a belief

in the magical properties of language lost since the late

Middle Ages. The students at Hogwarth’s can conjure spells

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by uttering magic words: language creates reality. Rowling’s

novels depict the magical function of language that looks

like a fairytale to us today, but which was very real up

until the Reformation. The Harry Potter series evokes a

religious nostalgia for Medievalism when words were the

cause of effects in rituals, like the sacraments. Today

words have become merely signs that refer to effects. The

only people who seem to retain the belief in the magical

ability of language to create reality are politicians. The

poet is no longer consulted. No wonder we are preoccupied

with linguistic nihilism!

The little pin / pain example points to the ways in

which we do use language to rearrange the order of events

all the time to make sense of the world. Time does not

rearrange itself to make sense for us. Widen the scope from

pin/pain, and you discover that fiction is entirely built

around perversions of time and tense.

Anachrony, a term I have used several times now, was

coined by the famous narrative theorist, Gerard Gennette, to

define any devise an author employs to play with or deviate

from the arrow of time. He divides anachrony into many

classifications as a way to bring more nuance and complexity

to the simplistic and traditional notion of flashback and

foreshadowing. I will be adopting the two most common forms

of anachrony, analepsis (retrospection) and prolepsis (the

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future-present or anticipation) throughout this book for the

convenience of discussing narrative convention. The pin/pain

example intimates the past future tense (or the prolepsis)

of fiction. In prolepsis, the pin is the realized future

that must be reached by interpreting the pain.

Making Memories: Causal Paradoxes

It is impossible to remember the future, but we make

the present available for future memory all the time and at

an accelerating rate in this age of what Walter Benjamin

calls “mechanical reproduction.” Our contemporary culture is

preoccupied with “making memories,” a phrase that is wrapped

up in prolepsis.

Ponder for a moment the grammatical brain-twister of

the phrase, making memories.

Memories result from the mental recollection of past

experience that are bidden, as in Wallace Stevens’ artistic

retrospection in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” or

triggered, as in the flashbacks Anthony Hecht recounts in “A

Hill.” But to make a memory entails consciously turning the

present into something that we envisage ourselves

recollecting in the future. To make memories means to

actively treat moments in the vanishing present as something

we save away for future recall. It is an activity that puts

afterwardness into action. It shares, therefore, the doubled

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time structure of belatedness, except that, by consciously

deferring present experience for future memory, we attempt

to control the future by anticipating it. THE EXAMPLE OF

PRUFROCK TURNING ON THE STAIRS

Photography and videography—our cellphones that allow

us to record any experience at any moment—accelerates our

drive to make memories. Digital technologies allow us to

archive representations of the present that we can access in

the future. Photography or video records something in the

present as though it is already a future event. They insure

memories for the future, which makes them inherently proleptic

forms, artifacts of afterwardness.

The activity of crafting likenesses that transgress

mortality goes back to prehistoric times. The status of

images as sacred objects and spaces envisaged as inhabiting

a post-apocalyptic world persists today. The drawing,

photograph, or video of loved ones substitutes their loss.

They occupy the same gap as language between the self and

the world that grows increasingly wide since birth.

For a moment, think of someone photographing you at an

important event: when you become self-conscious of how you

look “now”—are my eyes closed? is my hair out of my eyes?

should I smile with teeth or not?—your mind is actually

anticipating how you will look for future inspection.

We all pose for the future when we are photographed or

video recorded. We do not necessarily create a record of the

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moment but an archive that anticipates our desire for

recollection in the future. In the temporal structure of an

archive, the present is an activity that anticipates future

memory.

The future envisaged by an archived present creates

complicated inversions of causality. For instance, Derrida

argues that the media records an event not because it

happens; the event happens because the news records it.

Websites like Facebook turn the image into the event; the

event does not inspire the image. Consequently, postmodern

thinkers in the context of a world surrounded by digital

reproduction are pestered by the question, what is real? The

original moment that is the object of representation, or the

reproduction?

In Simulacrum, Baudrillard argues that mechanical

reproduction replaces reality. The world, therefore, has no

depth; there is no “hidden meaning” that is the usual

impetus for interpretation because the image itself is the

meaning. The surface is reality. Marshall McLuan famously

claims, “The medium is the message.” Therefore, archiving,

for deconstructionists like Derrida, rejects original and

present meaning. Instead, meaning is forever deferred by a

chain of “signifiers” that ride along a slippery surface of

reproductions, like language or image, which “supplements”

an ever-vanishing present. The result is that we live in an

increasingly deepened and perpetuated present.

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The proleptic, anticipatory mode of reproduction throws

the whole structure of literary closure into question. This

suspicion of the efficacy of language, as we will see in

Chapter ***, have real consequences: all of reality is a

linguistic house of cards; meaning becomes as provisional in

the “now” of a vanishing present.

In Archive Fever, Derrida deconstructs the priority of the

notion of authenticity and originality in historical

records, or the archives we keep of the past. We have an

inherent belief that there is an original source to ****

My feeling throughout this book is that Derrida and

other “deconstructionists” are not necessarily wrong. At the

same time their reliance on modernist phenomenology

forecloses other possibilities. The future-past dynamic of

archive fever has a lot to teach us about the unique

temporal value of narration and lyric. How does fiction and

poetry create the future? To what extent does literature

make memories for the future?

Chapter 6

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Clearing Places

Endings and the Still Life

A work of fiction or a poem reaches an end out of

necessity. Endings are the indispensible fact of fiction.

The challenge for authors and poets is how to manage

surplus: there is always more to say and an endless chain of

possibilities by which one can envisage a future. Fictions

must narrow endless possibility down to a finite form.

Augustine encounters this crisis when self-narration

cannot move beyond his current moment in time in Confessions,

which he resolves by turning time itself into an object for

self-reflection. The universal theme of “finding yourself,”

or the search for self-knowledge, runs in literature since

Homer. We can never be completely present with the self

because we are always temporally torn between the future and

a present that constantly vanishes. The capacity for words

to mean and the capacity for self-knowledge is limited and

destabilized by finitude.

In Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys, for instance, the

novelist, professor Tripp, is writing a novel that he cannot

figure out how to end. It approaches an unwieldy 2,600 pages

long. As his lover says to him after she reads the monster-

manuscript, “you do not make any choices.”

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The form of an ending requires an author to be

ruthlessly selective. The necessity of an ending conflicts

with contingency. The haphazardness of life always

frustrates narrative coherence. Professor Tripp cannot end

his monstrously long novel because he cannot make the tough

choices of what not to include.

We like to think the novel is such a wonderful form

because of its inclusiveness: like James Joyce, the novelist

can absorb all circumstances of the world in a network of

different voices. But this is a terrible misunderstanding of

a novel’s narrative form. A novel that tries to represent

the summa of life would be unreadable.

When Virginia Woolf depicts the nuances of every hour

during a single day in Mrs. Dalloway, she makes the narrative

come alive through her selectiveness—particular moments,

places, and events. Stream of consciousness follows a

network of people, all in some way entangled with Mrs.

Dalloway and converging on her dinner party. It is Woolf’s

ability to select a particular vision of her characters from

within the indeterminate passage of time that makes it so

successful. The stream of consciousness technique allows her

to record the impressions of characters’ memories throughout

the day, but Woolf does not reject consecution. The “leaden

weight” of clock-time reverberates through the bells of Big

Ben right from the beginning, as if to entrench time’s

forward movement. The sequence of hours serves as a temporal

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roadmap for the reader, but it also emphasizes the

haphazardness of human consciousness in contrast to clock-

time. Big Ben functions like a metronome counting out the

time around which Woolf must organize her material.

Even though the ending does not conclude anything for

Mrs. Dalloway (there is still a party to attend and many

more in the future), we feel a sense of closure because we

witness a moment of heightened time when she tries to

confront her own fear of death when Dr. Bradshaw comments

perfunctorily on Septimus Smith’s suicide. Dispensing with

the pat Victorian ending that resolves in resolution to

action, Woolf allows the novel to achieve a climax of

consciousness, or what Joyce designed into the literary

device of epiphany. Her protagonists experience a sort of

provisional epiphany, remaining open to the malleability of

the future. The closure she creates allows us to dwell in

these spaces of temporal suspension, whether it is the

moment when Mrs. Dalloway descends the stairs, or the

memories during the day influenced by Peter Walsh’s return

that interrupt her present happiness. Critics like to speak

of such endings as open or irresolute; however, there is a

firm sense of closure in which, at this moment of all

moments in a sequence of hours and days, each character has

achieved, no matter how provisional, a sense of self.

The same type of triumph of consciousness as opposed to

action occurs at the end of To the Lighthouse when Lily Briscoe

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completes her painting while Mr. Ramsay, James, and Pru

finally reach the lighthouse. Everyone experiences a

personal reckoning rather then a final action that resolves

the suspense at the novel’s close. Lily’s vision remains as

open and impressionistic as the shape she tries to fit into

the composition of her painting. Like Stevens’ “The Idea of

Order at Key West,” the final section of To the Lighthouse turns

Lily into a sort-of novelist in the novel; the novel is

about the process of turning flux into order available as an

object for inspection.

Even when Joyce attempts to depict the entire

unconscious of the West within the mind of a single person

in Finnegan’s Wake, he achieves closure craftily (and rather

traditionally) through its circular structure that provides

the text with a frame. Finnegan’s Wake is probably the

furthest a novel can take inclusiveness. As remarkable as

the work is, not many people desire to read it. The same

difficulty to get through narrative occurs with postmodern

fiction. The openness to all experience creates both wonders

and pitfalls for the postmodern tome. The form of the

postmodern epic in its encyclopedic representation of

experience poses great challenges for a reader. Pynchon’s

Gravity’s Rainbow (which has one the best beginnings and endings

in literary history) clocks in at over 800 pages, making it

the most famous novel that few people finish reading.

(Spoiler Alert: even though the novel forgoes traditional

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narrative linearity, the ending cannot be anymore

conclusive: the V2 rocket Slothrop rides is about to destroy

the very movie theater in which we supposedly sit, watching

the novel we read.) It is not the distance between the

beginning and the end that makes it difficult. There are

plenty of gigantic Victorian works, including multi-volume

works, that people read through with ease. It is the

disorienting means by which Pynchon gets us to the ending

that is difficult. Nineteenth-century novels bring you to

the ending; postmodern novels make you work for it. (James

Woods)

Nothing betrays the fictiveness of a text more than an

ending. Life does not round off like a story! Endings in

fiction are artificial. An author makes crucial choices

about how to balance an ending with the open-endedness of

life. Even modern and postmodern authors who express the

meaninglessness of life or hyperrealists who want to depict

plain quotidian experience with exactitude are constrained

by the architecture of a story that determines meaning and

compels a reader to make sense out of the most muddled

representation. The artificial pose of definitive endings,

like “they lived happily ever after,” can leave a reader’s

innate sense of reality unsatisfied. Harlequin romances

might satisfy but they are never persuasive. They offer

formulas of closure that amount to cheap conflict

resolution. Likewise, the overly pat endings of melodramatic

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Victorian novels with all of their coincidences appear naïve

to the contemporary reader. By the late nineteenth century

their conventions come under satirical scrutiny. Oscar

Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest ends by lampooning the wild

familial coincidences that resolve the plot of typical

melodrama.

Authors increasingly defy expectations of an ending in

a more complex world in which visions of an ultimate end are

ambiguous. Our modern sense of spatial disorientation in a

vast and relativistic universe no longer allows for the

entrenched beliefs in a definitive, literal end of the world

that a cozy Ptolemic cosmology accommodates. Today a reader

must feel compelled to divine patterns of meaning from the

text. This is because we are in a rare phase in history when

meaning and interpretation are important.

The priority of hermeneutics has everything to do with

closure and endings. We often forget that interpreting a

text and figuring out its meaning have not been particularly

important activities in a majority of literary history. Most

literature up until the end of the 19thC comes with

assumptions about cosmology and the biblical truth of

endings already baked into an author and reader’s

expectations. A majority of literary history, therefore, is

dominated by evaluative criticism, preoccupied with

questions such as: is it aesthetically pleasing? Is it

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morally acceptable? Does it make sense in the context of the

world that we live in?

The single most important shift that led to our current

interest in literary analysis was the availability of the

Bible in print during the Reformation in the early sixteenth

century. Interpreting the Bible rather than orally accepting

the Word became integral as a result of print. A print

culture turns reading into a far more personal activity.

Therefore, the shift from and oral to a print tradition is

not just integral to the growth of literary analysis, but

also for the growth of human self-consciousness of

individuality. Literacy and the dissemination of text made

the American Revolution possible.

As Paul Fry argues, interpretation and meaning only

become important when texts grow difficult and the disparity

between assumptions and reality increases. For instance, the

interpretation of law becomes very important for the first

time in the 18thC because, as democracy and nationalism

rises, laws not only become more complex, but since law

matters to people on a personal level they want to find ways

to figure out how to utilize it.

The “fictions of concordance,” as Frank Kermode calls

them, no longer jibe with a more complicated “sense of an

ending” today. Disparity arises in the past one hundred or

so years between the world and an author’s personal

perception, including disparity between the author and

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his/her own perceptions that characterizes the divided self

that preoccupies Freud. It becomes impossible to read a work

of literature with assumptions about meaning and order that

determine a text, particularly if the author (always

considered the authority) is in a state of unknowingness. As

we will see, the unknowing voice is prevalent in twentieth

century literature, which poses difficulties for

interpretation (and, hence, makes determining the meaning of

a text a priority). We have already seen how Anthony Hecht’s

unknowingness in “A Hill” places a great deal of

interpretive onus on the reader. If the narrator does not

know, we have to ignite our own interpretive energy.

The emphasis upon hermeneutics forms a new causal

relationship in which meaning becomes the effect of interpretation.

When we assume that meaning is stable, like the Truth upon

which it is predicated, there is nothing to cause that

meaning but the absolute Truth itself. Today a text is no

longer a tautological object. A poem’s meaning no longer

precedes and precludes its interpretation. In fact,

evaluation looks like a naïve, conventional form of closure

today in contrast to what Ricoeur calls “hermeneutics of

suspicion.” Reader response criticism, which focuses on the

reader’s subjective experience in producing value in a text,

would have made absolutely no sense in the 18thcentury that

assumes eternal and universal value that exists regardless

of the self!

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The result of this shift from what is called Absolute

Truth to suspicion and subjectivity means that if an ending

does not force us to question and interpret a text as a

whole—if an ending does not deliver some level of irony—the

work becomes inert. We dispense with the text, or judge it

beneath interpretation, because it does not ignite our

increasingly inherent drive for meaning. Today has inherited

the grand suspicions of absolute truth in the previous two

centuries so that when we read we no longer assume meaning.

We interpret meaning.

We still want plots to satisfy, and numerous vehicles

of entertainment provide a plethora of quick and easy

endings. But we are also highly self-conscious of how

closure is a literary convention and not a natural

condition. UMBERTO ECO’S ANALOGY TO CONVENTION. If

postmodernism is partly defined as a period when readers and

writers become hyperaware of convention, then the biggest

victim of our disbelief has been the biblical end of the

world.

Although Shakespeare, as we will see, challenges the

models of time that insure a “promised end” and turns

apocalypse into tragedy, the eighteenth and nineteenth-

century novel maintains a tragic mentality that draws from

an older, biblical apocalyptic tradition. Authors become

much more self-conscious about the nature of endings and

closure at the advent of modernism and the challenges that

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European, British, and American literary artists pose to the

predominantly Christian-humanistic notion of the “progress

of man.”

Endings and the Imitation of Life

TRANSITION So an ending is more than just the place

where a text stops. It is, as Henry James calls it, a highly

charged and indeterminate “stopping place.”

The prime effect of so sustained a system, so

prepared a surface, is to lead on and on; while

the fascination of following resides, by the same

token, in the presumability somewhere of a

convenient, of a visibly appointed stopping place.

Forming a “stopping place,” James recognizes, is arbitrary

and requires great labor. The writer must struggle to find

and forge one. “We have, as the case stands, to invent and

establish them, to arrive at them by a difficult, dire

process of selection and comparison, of surrender and

sacrifice.” Forming closure out of the mass of material that

goes into the narrative mix is laborious, a “dire” process

that entails a great deal of loss—what do you leave out?—in

order to gain the shape of a novel. As Marianna Torgovnic

says, “an ending defines a work’s geometry.”

As I said earlier, there is also nothing more

artificial in literature than the ending of a work. When an

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author creates a “stopping place,” she forms an illusion

that life poses for inspection. An ending provides

retrospection that compels the reader to return to the

beginning and middle in an activity that complicates

causality.

In its ancient definition, fiction imitates reality in a

process known as mimesis. Mimetic representation (from where

we get the word “mime”) should not be confused with copying

or replicating. It is not photographic representation, but a

process by which art and writing represents reality to

create a form that says something more about the world than

a mere replication. The development of photography in the

mid-1800s poses the greatest challenge to mimetic

representation in both literature and art. It is no

coincidence that the radical experimentation indicative of

Modern Art explodes at the same time as the camera becomes

ubiquitous. It is not so much that modern artists were

trying to compete with mechanical forms of reproduction

(although certainly they were), but that the ways in which

they reimagine visual space emphasizes the vast difference

between representation and replication. Concurrently,

modernist writing develops fragmentation, impressionism, and

stream of consciousness in order to differentiate

replication from representation.

Mimesis represents an aspect of action in the real

world, inviting the reader or the viewer’s aesthetic or

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ethical response. Mimetic criticism, dominant throughout

most of literary history, examines this locked and

transparent relationship between the word (or image) and the

world that reaches a height with literary realism and neo-

classical art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The major question for mimetic criticism tends to be, how

well and in what way does a work describe or depict reality?

In other words, until fairly recently in literary

history, a reader has no reason to question the efficacy of

language to describe the world. Nor does the reader have

reason to question the authority of an author to implement

that language. The usual prerogative of literary criticism,

then, boils down to whether or not a work is aesthetically

and morally successful, not necessarily what the work means.

This causes big problems for Shakespeare’s plays, which,

despite their incredible popularity when they were

performed, did not fare moral scrutiny well in the 17th and

18th centuries: his works are, no doubt, aesthetically

remarkable but morally questionable.

Even in the most mimetic work, however, an ending

reverses the causality of representation. It forces us to

reexamine a text to question how we reached this particular

endpoint, this singular moment when the words end followed

by blank space. Such reconfiguration of meaning an ending

poses is nowhere more explicit than in shocking endings

(which will be the subject of Chapter **), such as the

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ending of King Lear, which forces us, even when we reread it,

to reexamine everything that precedes it; or in pretty much

all of the violent endings of Flannery O’Connor’s short

stories that force us to ask, “Yikes! What caused that?” and

then we go searching for the pin that caused the pain.

But the ending of a work does not just make us examine

the text. In mimesis, a text always refers to the world, which

means it has something to say about the world and the way we

know it. If an author has a viewpoint, or a moral vision, he

or she obviously wants us to entertain the possibility that

the world in some way conforms to that aspect. The plot of a

narrative organizes the potentially endless haphazardness of

contingent experience into a structure, but the sopping

place and the frame that an ending provides that gives a

work closure reciprocates such literary emplotment by

turning the world into an arrangement. (RICOEUR’S MIMESIS 3)

Life becomes a work of art in of itself that the author

represents. Mimesis means that art imitates life. But reading a work

also means that life can imitate art.

The world as a realm outside of a work becomes layered

with structures of language or visual composition that we

associate with the inside of a work. The poet might say that

the poem makes a beautiful landscape speak, but the

beautiful landscape in turn speaks to the poet. In other

words, the closure of a work refigures the way in which we

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see the world. Reality becomes reimagined. We see the world

as artists and writers imagine it.

We can see this shift toward foregrounded artifice by

examining visual arts. As landscape painting becomes much

more prevalent after religious patronage wanes, the

phenomenon grows in the nineteenth century by which an artist

does not necessarily represent nature, but nature offers itself up as the subject of

a work of art. It is as if nature starts to pose for the scenes

depicted in landscape paintings. One can see this phenomenon

clearly in subject matter that becomes “hackneyed,” such as

beautiful sunsets. By the twentieth century, it becomes

impossible to paint a sunset without carrying the baggage of

all of the other beautiful sunsets that have been painted

before. A painting of a sunset must contend with its own

cliché. Literary or artistic convention makes reality look

increasingly conventional!

This peculiar reversal of reality is prevalent in

nature poetry during Romanticism. The poet not only frames

the natural world in the same way as an artist selects a

scene for composition; nature seems to compose itself for

the poet’s eye. As Angus Fletcher argues in A New Theory of

American Poetry, the lyrical poems of William Wordsworth or

John Clare exude the uncanny sense that the landscape poses for

the poet. Nature intransitively arranges itself into a still

life. The poet looks to the natural world for inspiration

and the natural world busily conforms to the poet’s desire.

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Wallace Stevens turns this phenomenon into cerebral games

with nature and reality in such poems as “Anecdote on a

Jar.” “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” or “The

Rage for Order in Key West.” Endings emphasize the dialectic

between reality and artifice: the ending places a frame over

nature while nature itself remains essentially independent

of the poet’s verbal imposition. Nature does not exist in

frames.

When “stopping places” make reality pose for our

attention, the reader’s interpretation becomes

retrospective. Reality freezes into a still life that we can

walk through. By moving backward into the text, the reader

can examine how a poem or narrative moves forward toward its

ending. We examine how the text composes the very frame that

gives it closure. The temporal order teleology provides

stands out almost compositionally in the same way that the

traditional rectangular shape organizes the visual world of

a painting, forcing the eye to move from border to horizon,

from horizon to border. In this respect, two-dimensional art

is very conventional: it visually offers up the trick of its

own artifice.

In actuality, we do not see the world framed by a

square or rectangle. The eye must search and select places

of orientation in reality; in art the picture’s frame keeps

the experience regulated and guides the eye to examine the

artist’s composition. The artifice of poetry and visual art

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is part of the reason why Plato and the ancients prefer

mathematics. Transcendent “ideas” for which the philosopher

must reach always descend into the world to become mere

shadows of higher truth. Even nature is the corrupted shadow

of transcendent ideas. The forms are buried within the

haphazardness of our perception and nature’s own inherent

unruliness that merely shadows the perfect mathematical

shapes transcendent to our sensible world. This is why

ancient Greek architecture is so rectilinear and austere.

Their buildings are designed to represent a geometric

perfection of transcendent forms freed from the obfuscation

of nature.

There is, in fact, much more of a temporal relationship

between visual arts and literature than we think. A general

assumption is that paintings provide a non-temporal form of

representation—everything is there, instantly available to

us, all in one space—whereas narratives can only be

understood by moving through a sequence of action and a

consecution of space. This is, for the most part, true. A

book requires time; a painting is immediate. Narrative and

poetry require much more work from a reader than a painting

requires from a viewer. But this does not take into account

the intricate ways in which space provides movement for the

viewer that is temporal in paintings, such as Caravaggio’s

Abraham and Isaac, where the composition compels the eye to

scan from the angel’s future interruption into Abraham’s

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current distraction from the knife as Isaac’s horror recedes

into the past. In Picasso’s Guernica, the classical pyramidal

composition that brings everything to one instant viewpoint

competes with the horizontal movement of the bombing from

outdoors to indoors to outdoors again. The fragmented

horizontal movement of female figures from right to left

breaks the frozen moment of atrocity, emphasized by the

bull’s terrified stare. By reversing the left to right

movement of reading, the painting prioritizes the effects of

the bombing over its causes. This allows for immediacy.

Picasso wants to foreground the suffering and destruction.

Forms of closure, the limitations an author or artist must

place on a work, creates a sense of meaning for the reader.

Therefore, the circumference and the end frame an abstraction

of life, a part drawn from the whole, that refers to an

entire experience nonetheless. Closure allows one the

ability to temporally suspend life in order to engage

interpretation.

Arrested time, however, is an illusion. But the reader

suspends disbelief and treats a work as if it were a stilled

moment, like the painting of a still life or a portrait. As

the subject matter of both literature and art becomes more

intimate, we become more attuned to the ways in which life

imitates art. For instance, we understand human personality

because of its characterizations in our fictions, like the

distilled and frozen essence of the person posing for the

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artist. Character types in life arise because of the

arranged contexts and settings we live through. We all know

how a group involved in a project or sequestered together

for a period of time, like a dormitory or a tightknit

workplace, produces discernible personalities. It is as if

the setting arranges a cast of characters in advance: the

leader; the clown; the geek; the ditz; the straight and

narrow one; the villain. The television show Gilligan’s Island

repeats such stereotypes with great popular success that

could not be duplicated today in our more ironic stance

toward convention. The movie, The Breakfast Club, looks silly

today with its Gilligan’s Island stereotypes cast in the context

of serious cultural commentary.

Abstraction from life for representation enhances

personalization. You can see this shift in the creative

relationship toward reality in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The

catalog of characters the narrator introduces in the General

Prologue is not realistic. It is a novice’s mistake to

presume that Chaucer is a kind of realist novelist before

his time. The unassuming and trenchantly ironic first-person

narrator is himself one of the pilgrims, and, therefore, a

type of figure amongst many others Chaucer represents.

Instead, Chaucer provides verbal “portraits” of each pilgrim

that verge on cartoon.

How Chaucer “frames” the description of each pilgrim

allows their personalities to rise above temporal

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contingency. They are not individuals but what we have come

to call “stereotypes.” The closure he provides to figures in

his work turns the usual personification of abstract

concepts of medieval literature into what we recognize today

as “character,” each one unique because he gives them a

particular frame of reference, a world vision made possible

because of their teleology. It is Chaucer’s genius that each

pilgrim he catalogs in the General Prologue offers a picture

of their character, but that the “ends,” or the telos of each

personality comes to fruition through the stories each one

tells. In other words, the pictures come to life because

each pilgrim performs his or her personality by storytelling.

Chaucer makes the portraits speak. Narrative provides a more

complete picture than portraiture. In the end, identity is

narratively bound. We know who we are because of the story

we can tell about ourselves.

The revolution of character based on portraiture

inaugurated by Chaucer has a powerful influence on

Shakespeare, who knows more than any other author how much

artifice goes into the development of character. For

Shakespeare, personality is performance. Instead of the

conventional depiction of character—Vice, Virtue, the

Ancient, the braggadocio, the crumudgeon, etc.—Shakespearean

characters construct their identities through the roles they

play and their self-consciousness about performance. They

become self-creators or what Hegel called “free artists of

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the self.” For Shakespeare, we all form portraits of

ourselves so that it becomes impossible to know which comes

first: the person or the personality.

Such play with the mimetic commerce between the artist

and reality is exactly what contributes to the sense

everyone has of Shakespeare’s universalism. His characters

exist, as Samuel Johnson claims, for all times. It is not so

much that Shakespeare is brilliant at representing actual

human personality. Instead, Shakespeare invents, as Johnson

claims, “species” because each of his characters develop by

the same force of artifice as the teleological drive of

narrative closure. It is from Shakespeare that we begin to

derive the notion of the self as a narrative construction

that we see taking shape with Chaucer’s pilgrims performing

stories about themselves. And if the self is a narrative

construction, one of the most important issues at stake in

life is the end. TRANSITION ON TELOS

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Chapter 6

Forms of Teleology

Ending and Being

An ending is one of the few elements integral for

turning narrative into story. Endings, however, like

beginnings, are arbitrary. As I’ve said, a work of fiction

makes itself no more explicitly fictive than when it ends

because it forces a writer to balance contingency and form.

This balance foists order over a work, a form of closure,

which makes literature most unlike life. Life does not

present itself to us with the constructed selectivity by

which literature offers something akin to a still life. This

disparity problematizes the notion that narratives are

models for life.

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Quite simply, endings falsify life. But the falsifications of

fiction are as true to the world of the story or poem as

they are dissonant to actual experience. The falsification

of fiction has been the center of Platonic arguments against

poetry throughout history going back to Aristotle’s retort

to Plato in Poetics. As a result, poetry (a term used to

encompass all literary genres) has always been on the

defensive, even today when its utility, what it can deliver of

quantifiable value to students, is called into question in

higher education. Perhaps the greatest defense of poetry,

and one of the earliest pieces of literary criticism, was

Sir Philip Sidney’s A Defense of Poesy. At the center of his

rhetorical acrobats designed to counter-argue the prevailing

Puritan indictment of theater—he treats the issue as though

poetry is on trial—is the accusation that poets are liars.

Brilliantly, Sidney turns the argument upside down based on

logic: a poet does not purport to tell the truth, so a poet cannot lie.

Therefore, the poet has the freedom to explore truths that

other thinkers cannot share because they must deal with the

demands of their specialty. This notion becomes the basis of

Coleridge’s famous argument over two hundred years later

that readers willingly suspend disbelief when they read

poetry. They know it is not truth, but they allow themselves

the freedom to believe in the world that fiction purports to

express.

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The greatest falsification literature embodies is its

form of closure that gives a work temporal autonomy. Since

an author or poet can abstract and frame her representation

of life, a work embodies its own unique temporality: a fully

formed future that the reader can presentify. The beginning of a story

promises an ending that we can read first if we want. We can

jump to the already formed future of a book. Not that a book

would make much sense, but we can enter the plot at any

point.

The simple fact that a work has to begin is disruptive.

The beginning sets a plot or the lines of a lyric into

motion from a singular starting point. Beginnings,

particularly in modernist literature, might simulate the

sense of a story set in an ongoing continuum of life—many

modern stories begin in the middle of dialogue to fabricate

this sense of entering in the middle of things—but it is

still a selected origin. In contrast, lived experience is

always ongoing. We cannot consciously know a singular

starting point to our experience. And we cannot select our

origin, which is why Heidegger argues that we are thrown into

the world. The forward motion of plot that begins by forging

an arbitrary origin, however, and draws a reader to an end,

makes fiction organic, whether the plot is linear, circular,

or temporally fragmented. Stories breath, poetry has a

heartbeat, because closure motivates the frozen marks of

language.

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A poem is complete in itself. It has being, or what

I’ve called ontology. But it has being in ways that

distinguish it from other inert objects in the world. Most

of us can agree that a literary work exists in ways that are

different from, say, a table or a chair. A poem or a story

can be in ways that are distinct from how a table or a chair

can be.

Certainly a poem is; but if no one reads and wrestles with a

poem, it remains inert. Again, a poem is frozen. As we have

it in whatever form, it is not going to change. But when we

read, we turn the poem’s being into a state of becoming, a

classic dichotomy made somewhat hackneyed by existential

philosophy. Most of Emily Dickinson’s poems were merely a

secret stash of the scraps of paper until her family

discovered the treasure trove (thank God!) and archived the

poems for readers. All writing becomes literature because of

the active ways in which we make a work become literature. A

poem never is literary just as a poem never means. Meaning is

always a product of active interpretation that allows a poem

to become literary.

A poem’s existence depends upon its active relationship

between the poet, reader, and world. A poem, therefore, is

always in a state of becoming. It grows and changes because

it compels us toward thought. We are drawn toward thought as

Plato and Aristotle would argue that the human is drawn to

the Good. Although a work is frozen, the mere activity of

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reading, a process that occurs in time, creates motion. A

work, therefore, always becomes something more in its

relationship with readers, with other works, with the world

in which the text exists and we inhabit.

A work’s state of becoming, therefore, poses another

question of ontology: does a poem know?

It might be an unusual question to ask. A work of art

or a piece of literature has as much sentience as a table or

a chair. It does not know anything. But as entities on to

which we project vitality, a work of literature reciprocates

consciousness. A book or a poem has an uncanny sense of

consciousness in a way that a chair is not. Georges Poulet,

a famous literary phenomenologist, argues that a reader’s

consciousness shares the consciousness of a piece of

literature. A book itself, Poulet argues, waits for us to

open its secrets, as if it has knowledge that it awaits to

share. The experience of reading revolves around this

inhabitation or indwelling of consciousness. POULET

The compulsion to interpret a text for meaning is bound

to the seemingly illogical question, what does a text know? This

is because we are compelled by the belief that a work

contains something unknowable to us, a secret we need to pry

open. When we interpret a text, we are trying to unveil the

knowledge that a work seems to keep under wraps.

This belief in the consciousness of a text that hides

its true meaning beneath a surface develops as a result of

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Freud. So much of our inherent understanding of

interpretation assumes that meaning is a text’s unconscious.

For Freud, all experience—action, behavior, thought—masks a

deeper cause. Dreams, daydreams, jokes, neuroses, are all

tropes, a screen, that distort a deeper unconscious that

informs the self. Psychoanalysis is the process of

discovering the origins or the authentic crux of the problem

that produces such distortions. We are all, then, walking

texts that keep its secrets under lock and key.

Today interpretation is ineluctably bound to the belief

that a text, written by an author with a distinct viewpoint

and personality, has an unconscious that serves as a

repository for hidden or repressed meaning. The goal of

interpretation is to compel the text to disclose its

secrets. Literary analysis, therefore, is a form of

psychoanalysis.

The psychoanalytic process of literary interpretation

has developed from (and has reacted against) a religious

belief in the sacramental power of words. Language once had

a divine relationship with the world to which it refers. As

George Steiner claims in Real Presences, up until fairly

recently in history there existed a covenant between word

and world. Authors and poets believed a “real presence”

underwrites and insures meaning analogous to the belief in

the divine power of words in the Eucharist. The divine is

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the Absolute Truth from which language transubstantiates

into meaning.

Going back to the ancient Greeks, Logos is not only the

power by which words describe reality, but the metaphysical

permanence or force that makes the world coherent. Logos is

the divine ether that permeates everything with its hidden

but essential Truth. The opening of the Gospel of John

transports the ideals of logos into a divine context. John

emphasizes that the Word is incarnate in the figure of

Christ. It is not just God who becomes flesh, but the Word

of God that is present in the beginning and promises an

everlasting commune between human and divine. As a result,

particularly in the development of hermeneutics—the

interpretation of the Bible—words become sacramental objects

that point to and participate in the reality they describe.

Derrida deconstructs the Word by arguing that this

belief in the consummate coherence of language is logocentric,

or fallaciously dependent upon the arbitrary nature of

language to refer to reality. The dominance of logocentricism in

the West has, essentially, hidden a truth too traumatic to

confront: the coherence language makes of the world is an illusion.

Language is a screen, a system of tropes that distort truth.

Unlike Freud, however, who believes that analysis can

recover an original or authentic origin to the distortions

that make us ill, deconstruction argues that there is

nothing original or authentic beneath the tissue of language

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we use to prop up consoling terms of metaphysical

permanence. Every utterance, even the Word of God, is a trace

of a previous meaning left behind in the detritus of

language. Not only is closure impossible, but those who

foist a sense of closure over meaning as a way to freeze

experience into an absolute truth violently elide the more

traumatic realities of a contingent existence.

As we will see in Chapter ***, the broken covenant

between Word and World, born out of catastrophic changes and

events in recent history, is bound to our contemporary and

psychoanalytic sense of the divided self, a self that is

fragmented and alienated from itself. The recognition that

language alienates us from the world and from ourselves is

in of itself traumatic. It is a wound that haunts all

literature. The broken covenant wounds literature.

But literature is resilient. It always takes on the

challenge of its own deconstructive properties. Instead of

falling into the ashes of its own tissue of reality,

literature stirs the ashes to bring forth new forms of

closure.

One aspect of writing that alienation affects the most

is teleology, the purpose or ends of processes, which is bound

to and impacts ethical consciousness. Since closure is an

illusion, even a violent one that elides traumatic

realities, we can speak of ethics, which are bound to a

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transparent causality and the ends, or telos, of effects made

possible by language.

Teleology

Endings presume purpose. The act of reading itself, as

we have seen, is bound to the forward motion of time. And

like an action, reading is a future oriented activity. We

work toward a realized future that we presentify, and then we

reread and reimagine that realized future as an entire

temporal structure. Closure turns a text into a block-

universe that frames a world vision, a theme, a viewpoint

constructed from an abstracted aspect of the world. The

vision that the enclosed block-universe a work expresses

does not necessarily have to be one the author shares. (It

is often just plain practical to bracket-off the author when

you examine a work, particularly for students. So much

frustration happens when you try to factor in the author’s

intention. The work itself is the intent. Sorry to be

austere on this touchy issue. But I just do not think that

it yields much beneficial interpretation to go about

speculating what goes on in the author’s mind when he or she

writes a work.)

It is the active relationship between a text and a

reader, and the ways in which a text produces thought (as if

a text knows something) that makes a work more akin to a

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living entity than a chair. But we have to be clear

concerning the resemblance between a poem and an organism.

Too often critics employ nature in ontological terms that

tend to emphasize, ironically, a poem’s inertia more than

its vitality. In his aesthetic examinations of poetry, for

instance, Coleridge often compares poems to plants. The

problem with comparisons of poetry to nature is that it

tends to turn the poem into an intransitive object, or it

makes the poem something that is created with the same sort of

divine spark of Creation in the Book of Genesis.

For instance, the Romantics use of the Aeolian harp as

a symbol for inspiration by Shelly, Keats, Coleridge, and

Wordsworth, is beautiful but flawed. The Aeolian harp looks

like a lyre, but instead of human hands, the wind strums the

strings. The metaphor emphasizes the poet as a medium for

nature. The problem is that it turns the poet, like the

analogies of poems to botany, into a passive, intransitive

vessel played upon by natural, inspirational, or divine

forces. It makes the poet and the poem both creative and

determined at the same time.

The organic vitality of literature makes it a worthy

study for Aristotle, whose ontological classifications of

genres is ultimately tied to his ethical concerns. Verbal

representation has the potential to become a form like wood

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has the potential to become a table. The poet crafts words

in order to produce the ideal product of its intended kind.

The ancient Greeks, therefore, provide a way to

understand the end as a goal that is different from a

termination: telos. The telos of something entails the ideal

form that an entity is designed to take. Aristotle was

particularly firm about telos in the teleological notion of

final cause. Whether something acts on itself for its own

purpose (I want to do something that makes me happy) or acts

on something else (I want to do something to make you

happy), all activities have a final cause or the end result,

the goal or purpose for its endeavor. Whether or not that

end result is satisfactory is a matter of the means utilized

to achieve it. Either way, things end with a final cause.

Poetics is completely structured around the telos of

literature. Aristotle’s attention to form is why he

separates and classifies writing into different genres. He

does not see literature like we do, as text that weaves and

counter-weaves language in an errant and orphaned state of

writing that, for Plato, divorces words from the stable

presence of speech. Writing for Aristotle conforms to and

fulfills different forms. Today we call forms, genres. In

its representation of complete and coherent human action, a

literary genre grows toward its own unique and particular

end, its form. The content of a work is less important than

the plot since plotting is the activity by which an author

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provides coherence to a work so that it realizes as clearly

as possible its ideal form, a process of completion

Aristotle calls entelechy.

The entelechy of an entity, including written forms, is

the almost self-governing force that compels something to

form a whole. In fact, Aristotle subordinates character to

plot, arguing that a good play does not necessarily need

fully developed characters as long as character fulfills the

role ideally warranted by genre and plot. The notion of

round or complex characters is fairly recent in literary

history. Character for Aristotle is an agent or function

that allows the plot to achieve the representation of a

complete human action, which is why so many characters in

Greek tragedy are already always wrapped up in a

predetermined plot toward which they inexorably fulfill to

the end out of their control. Plot is the equivalent of fate.

The self-creating character, the character with agency,

does not begin until Shakespeare and the early modern period

as individuality and self-consciousness grows rapidly from

roughly 1500. Whereas freedom for the modern human comes to

mean the agency of the individual to form one’s own destiny,

for the Greeks freedom entails the confrontation and

acceptance of necessity. Ancient Greek tragedy is so

powerful because it forces an audience to confront the

illusion of freedom in the face of determining forces in the

world, a confrontation, paradoxically, that frees the human

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in the acceptance of limitation. What is more important for

Aristotle is how character conforms to the necessity of the

plot to fulfill its ideal form, a process which appears to

us, the audience, as the character’s fate despite his or her

tragic effort to overcome it. We will see later in Chapter

** how the dizzying freedom of modernity in the emphasis on

individualism and self-consciousness that we associate with

modernity leads Freud to return to an ancient Greek and

primitive notion of determinism beneath the illusions humans

create to affirm human progress, but with dire consequences.

Teleology is at the center of almost all of Hegel and

Marx’s philosophical systems. History moves toward a final

cause. For Hegel history drives toward an inevitable

equilibrium of human conflict to achieve a state of absolute

spirit; for Marx history drives toward an inevitable

equilibrium of material circumstances, which means that

history will evaporate because class struggle will

disappear. Notice how both of these teleological theories of

history also evoke entropy?

One of the huge shifts in the 19thC is science’s

rejection of teleology and final cause. When science,

philosophy, and Church had been partners, the assumption was

that everything in the universe evolves providentially. The

universe is in the hands of God’s plan. He has

foreknowledge: as the First Cause He can see a block-

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universe in its entirety. Like a poet’s poem, the universe

is God’s creation. A providential, teleological universe

means that the human is singular and special, and that the

arrow of time is bound to human progress. Everything in time

brings the human closer to the Messianic time. Although not

all, certainly, but most scientists, even the brightest

among them, formed theories and created cosmologies in ways

that tried (sometimes with tortured and hilarious results)

to conform to a human-centric universe in which Man is God’s

singular creation.

Darwin, almost singlehandedly, does away with

teleological paradigms in science, the notion that the human

is destined toward a great or Utopian final cause. Natural

selection proves that human evolution is the result of

accident and pure contingency. There are some critics who

argue that Darwin, more than any other thinker, transformed

the ways in which we understand what it means to be human.

There are very few scientists today who assert that the

natural world is guided by a teleological force, or try to

prove theories based upon the ideal ends or final causes of

things. It is perhaps one of the most salient features that

divide Church and science. It makes sense that proof of the

Big Bang through microwave static in the 1950s was applauded

by the Vatican as proof of a divine spark that ignited the

universe “In the beginning…” You do not hear too many voices

from the Church, however, applauding the fairly certain

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final cause of the universe as absolute entropy, a slow,

empty heat death.

It is easy to see how ethics are wrapped up in ends.

The purpose and the means to achieve your ends, and the

nature of the ends you desire, are all a matter of ethics.

With John Stuart Mill in the 19thC, teleology becomes a

practical or utilitarian issue of achieving pleasure while

maintaining individuality in the face of a world that

demands soul-crushing conformity. The purpose of things

should entail the best and most effective (and efficient)

ways in which to reach the most optimal results. Mill is

concerned with what will achieve the most pleasure as

opposed to pain while maintaining individual autonomy. It is

because of utilitarianism that we evoke the awful sounding

adage that always gets associated with fascism, “The ends

justify the means.” In other words, the ethical implications

of action matter less than the goal, which is to achieve the

best results for the most people. Most modern ethics have

been an attempt in some way to come to terms with Kant’s

belief that action is a matter of duty, that one has the

obligation to act ethically even if such action might

conflict with one’s belief or the best outcome.

*****

Endings are immanently anticipatory and, therefore,

always ongoing. A human life has teleology. Each life has

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its own end that constitutes the ideal form it can take. The

ends of human life are to fulfill the best elements of what

one is destined to be. The telos of a life is not the same as

the satisfaction of desires. It means becoming the ideal of

one’s potential being.

The Greek emphasis on teleology has important influence

on Christianity. The ultimate tragedy of the Fall of Man is

the result of hubris. For Christianity, however, the telos of a

life is morally bound in a manner foreign to the Greeks, who

did not see teleological form as contingent upon

monotheistic morality. The Christian is driven to flourish

as the beings that God creates one to be in the desire for

life to bear witness to God’s grace. In Christian teleology,

the end is not the last chapter, but a possibility of

ongoing fulfillment that breaks into experience everyday,

providing the ordinary world with vision and enchantment,

epiphanies that contribute to the formation of a beautiful

life. The Christian is exhorted to remain open to God’s

summons toward revelation everyday. Each human, therefore,

is a unique eschatological being, according to Hans Urs von

Balthasar, that begins with Adam, the incomplete man, and

resolves with Christ’s perfection. Culture reflects the

cultivation of creation in the effort to shape the world

toward redeeming ends in preparation for the final end. It

is an end that keeps fulfilling itself to reach another end.

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Ethics derive from conscious and unconscious purposes

that motivate actions. Every action, no matter how small,

has consequence. Ethical sensitivity depends on self-

consciousness about the purpose of actions and the ability

to envisage a future that results from them. Therefore,

ethics is inextricably bound to teleology. All actions have

an end toward which they are directed. Whether one believes

that the ends of actions derive from an intrinsic good, as

in Aristotle, or that they are conducted in the light of

duty, as in Kant, or that they serve utilitarian ends, as in

Mills, all action has purpose. This means that our ethical

concerns are tied to the future and its relation to the

past. Teleology is our continual preoccupation.

Narrative shares the same concerns with actions and

events that occur in time as ethics, which is why every age

is concerned about the influence of literature and human

behavior. Plato, of course, famously banishes the poets from

his Republic because he believes that poems and poets,

particularly rhapsodizing, malignantly intoxicate an

audience. Poetry falsifies because it produces a mere

imitation of a world that is already a shadow of higher

forms.

Most of us are not particularly grateful for Plato’s

verdict on poetry. But if you consider it from his point of

view for a moment you can at least appreciate his

perspective. It is not just that poetry falsifies truth.

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Fiction, by definition, is the opposite of truth. Since

fiction does not need to tell the truth, poets have a

dizzying freedom from the particulars of science, history or

politics. This freedom allows a poet to say anything, and in

a far more entertaining way, than the philosopher. For

Plato, if the subject of poetry remained a conservative

representation of ideal human behavior, serving as a model

for good conduct, so to speak, it would be harmless enough.

But for Plato, most people who are crafty with language and

freely use its power to persuade do so for selfish purposes.

Replace “poet” with “politician,” and I think you get an

understanding of the type of power of rhetoric Plato fears.

No doubt Plato betrays a certain amount of jealousy

toward poets. People are more inclined to watch a play or

listen to a rhapsodic performance than they are driven to

listen to philosophy. There is a certain amount of the

scholar’s resentment of the attention placed upon athletics

in the university in Plato’s fears. About a thousand years

later, the Puritans would use similar Platonic invectives to

rail against the sinful dangers of the theater in London

that draw the public toward performances instead of church.

During the dozen or so years of the English Republic, they

succeeded in shutting the theaters down!

We are more comfortable with Aristotle’s ethical

anatomy of fiction than Plato’s invective because we are all

inheritor’s of the Romantic elevation of poetry to a divine

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and visionary status. Poetics examines how good poets do not

just revel in a rhapsodic freedom. Good poets create form

out of an endless set of possibilities. It is the perfection

of a crafted form that is both plausible and appropriate to

the subject matter and the goal of the poet that makes for a

product that is ethically effective. Since a story is not a

set of noetic propositions but a hypothetical account of

actions and events, literature has the freedom to depict how

people act in an endless variety of situations. As Paul

Ricoeur says, fiction is an “immense laboratory for thought

experiments in which this connection is submitted to an

endless number of imaginative variations.” To say nothing of

the fact that people know the difference between reality and

fiction, poetry, for Aristotle, offers people a possible way

to see aspects of human action in the world. As a

hypothetical construction, the poem or the play does not

obfuscate truth. Poetry is not in competition with reality.

Instead, the fictional form becomes its own reality, to be

treated with as much dignity as a teleological object like

any other in the world.

Since ethics focuses on action, not necessarily truth,

fiction offers endless scenarios of causality and satisfies

human curiosity about how people respond to and resolve

conflict. Because fiction is a hypothetical construction, it

can serve as a model to guide our own actions. More

importantly, the ethical interest in literature derives from

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the myriad ways by which an author can draw conflict to a

resolution. Since actions are teleological, stories reflect

our concern over purpose: the goal of plot is to resolve

conflict by reaching an end.

Aesthetically, the completion of a story provides

pleasure from a sense of fulfillment. Ethically, however,

fiction offers the complete shape of human action and its

possible consequences for our reflection. How an author

shapes action and provides resolution to narrative reveals

her view of the world, a shape that we understand as theme.

We can discern similar patterns of conflict in the actual

world, which allows us to question different frames by which

to understand ethical behavior. Further, fiction allows us

to reimagine the themes that inform our understanding of the

world.

Since an author controls the resolution of conflict in

a story, a narrative creates what one might call a moral

point of view. The transparently moral voice dominates the

novel in the nineteenth century, such as the God-like point

of view that concludes George Eliot’s Middlemarch or the

epilogue Tolstoy offers at the end of Anna Karinina. The novel

orchestrates an array of conflicting voices from different

social worlds, a plural aspect of fictional narrative that

Michael Bahktin famously calls heteroglossia. But the many

diverse elements of the narrative are controlled by an

authorial presence. It is a presence that can be close and

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transparent, as in nineteenth-century novels, or distant and

oblique, as in modernist works, depending upon the distance

an author creates between her and the enunciating narrator.

The reader interprets the world vision that the author

implies in a narrative. The reader makes judgments based

upon the distance between his vision and the author’s, to

assess the extent to which he shares the author’s

perspective or if the author challenges his stance. One of

the reasons I recommend avoiding an author’s intent is that

we have no certainty about an author’s own stance toward the

moral ambiguity in a work. I think it is better to think of

the author, like Gerald Prince, as an “implied” voice as

opposed to the actual voice. The author, then, becomes

intertwined within the fabric of voices in a story, the

heteroglossia, compelling the reader to negotiate responses

between plural perspectives that might conflict with the

implied authorial voice in a work.

Such a conflict of perspective is particularly

difficult if a central character occupies an ironic position

that might be antithetical to the author’s, like Billy

Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. Pilgrim’s

surrender to his belief that deterministic forces render all

moral action useless might conflict with Vonnegut’s moral

vision that emphasizes the necessity of human action.

According to Vonnegut in one of his moments of intrusive

narration, the only character who becomes a human being,

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albeit briefly, is Edgar Derby when he stands up to the

American Nazi recruiter, Howard Campbell. Otherwise,

everyone in the novel is a plaything to the force of

history.

For most people the ethical implications of stories

grip more deeply than noetic implications. The former

generally accounts for the goal of fiction to entertain

while the latter accounts for the grunt-work of

interpretation that I have to do for my job as a professor,

(and which most people imagine turns the joys of reading

into drudgery).

Reading does not just allow us to learn from models of

time posturing for our inspection. Reading is far from a

purely heuristic activity. The attention reading requires

and the time it demands from us provides a clearing space where

we can dwell in the fragmentary middle of life that allows

us to envision an experience of closure to events. Between

the covers of a book (or the beginning and end of the scroll

to a digital text) exists an imitation of a complete life.

The fact that a literary work creates a semblance of meaning

in its highly constructed pose of completeness makes reading

the most vital activity in the human desire to interpret

things. At the same time reading satisfies the human desire

to “get closure,” which we will turn to next. I have been

calling the ways in which literature aids us in

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interpretation that produces a sense of meaning, forms of

closure.

Since we are temporally fragmented beings trying to

make a whole out of the passage of time, we are driven to

gain a sense of closure. The drive for closure inspires us

to turn life’s haphazardness into form. To draw a story out

of life requires one to pause the quotidian duration of the

present, a sort of suspension of time that I have been

calling clearing spaces. But the creation of story also

requires models of narrative configuration. Stories and

poems are as much about other stories and poems as they are

configurations of life that pose for our reflection.

Interpretive reading and rereading is the most powerful

activity that allows us to form clearing spaces.

Now, however, we need to examine the very recent

psychological phenomenon of “getting closure” in a literary

context and, at the same time, to differentiate this psycho-

talk from the goals of literary interpretation.

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CHAPTER 7

Getting Closure

Psychobabble

The term closure has become lingo in pop-psychology to

mean the end of mourning. In order to move on from loss,

whether from the break up of a relationship or to move on

from experience that violently robs one of a sense of

meaning, life requires “getting closure.” The phrase often

comes in the form of a future imperative: “You need to get

closure!”

Most people suffering from trauma or melancholy,

however, cannot imagine getting closure. In fact, trauma

keeps one from moving on. It is pretty rare for a person

suffering from trauma or melancholy to pressure him or

herself into getting closure. There is a sense, then, that

“getting closure” is a societal imperative. After a certain

period of mourning or trauma, when a friend or family member

suggests you need to get closure, they are usually implying

that it is about time you get closure.

Typing the term “getting closure” into a Google search

yields over 150,000,000 hits in .32 seconds. The entries

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that receive the most hits involve getting closure over a

breakup or a divorce. A majority of them fall into the genre

of do-it-yourself therapy with titles preceded by, “How to,”

such as “How to get closure after a breakup.” Most of them

offer enumerated steps to achieve closure, like recipes for

recovering from trauma. The final mix promises the

resolution of conflict or the acceptance of loss.

Getting closure is a uniquely American phenomenon in

its promise of a quick fix. Self-reliance can lead to

success. There is an element of character reinvention in the

notion of closure. One can shed emotional pain like losing

weight. Mourning is not attractive. Achieving closure

promises you will be a new person ready for success.

Capitalism does not allow one to dwell over loss for

too long. Melancholy is not an industrious value. Work does

not get done when one dwells in emotional pain. We do not

offer a leave of absence for people in mourning or suffering

from trauma. Therefore, the need for closure is ingrained in

the legal process. Suits for restitution are predicated upon

the loss of work and the emotional time required for the

victim to get closure. Money becomes the final deliverance.

Closure is a valuable investment.

Closure, therefore, signifies abstract concepts:

freedom, autonomy, and self-fulfillment. At the same time

closure is a commodity, something that has market value. If

one does not pay to get the treatment required to get

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closure, it might be costlier down the road. Emotional

wellbeing is not just incumbent upon getting closure, but

also getting back to work.

Although our awareness of trauma has increased

exponentially over the past few decades, the time we allow

ourselves to mourn has grown shorter. The rapidly growing

industry that caters to trauma makes it possible to recover

with more fine-tuned treatment and pharmacology. As the

treatment of trauma grows more advanced, the prognosis for

the time of recovery shortens. An industrious society

exhorts one to expedite mourning. “You need to get closure.”

I argue that getting closure as it is understood in the

past decade bypasses a necessary confrontation with trauma.

The energy we invest in moving on puts us out of touch with

emotional darkness valuable in understanding what it means

to be human. The necessity for normalization estranges us

from the melancholy that is an essential part of our

experience. Moving on usually amounts to resisting the

difficult wisdom psychic wounds can impart and keeps us out

of tune with the contingent nature of life itself. It has

made melancholy vile, other, foreign, odious. As Julia

Kristeva has argued, melancholy turns one into an abject

figure that society shuns. Contemporary society that values

and rewards kinetic activity, production, and mental

hygiene, punishes the reflective time one dwells in when one

is suffering from depression.

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The route through darkness, negative capability. Dwelling redefined.

Getting Closure in the Digital Age

The computer does not allow one much opportunity to

dwell thoughtfully. It also does not allow for the kind of

temporal suspension that fosters an aesthetic consciousness.

But the Information Age is, no doubt, developing a different

kind of consciousness, the nature of which should demand our

attention. It makes no sense to resist the advances of

technology and its encroachment into our personal lives

since there is a sort of inevitability to virtualization.

Although the computer dominates life and distracts from the

type of attention required for literature, this does not

mean that a different, perhaps equally rich relationship

with fiction won’t develop as a result.

Our dependence upon digital information and its

encroachment in our life is evidenced in the unusual

phenomenon by which, every now and then, one feels incumbent

to take time off from the digital network we are all hooked

up to. One needs to take the occasional “mental health” day

from the Internet. Conversely, it is increasingly apparent

how helpless we are disconnected from digital sources of

information. The Internet, email, Facebook, Twitter all

demand our attention. Depending upon your job or your

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function in life, losing access to the virtual social world

can be, even in a brief span of time, detrimental.

People speak of feeling symptoms of “withdrawals” if

they lose their cellphone or access to the Internet for an

extended period of time. I have felt withdrawals myself if

my Internet goes down or on the few occasions I have lost my

cellphone. It is a distinct feeling of itchiness,

discomfort, disconnection, impatience. Forms of digitization

seem to connect us up socially so that we feel, ironically,

disconnected from human contact when their virtual presence

disappears. Digitization has also oriented us temporally and

spatially. The time and the space we inhabit now in a life

informed and regulated by hyperactive information create a

much thicker, extended, and instantaneous present, a sort of

perpetual “now” in contrast to the recent past.

What provokes me is the nature, both aesthetically and

psychologically, of this thickened, extended, and frenetic

experience of “now” and how literature responds to it. Is

the future any more or less important today than in the

past? Are we better off today with such immediate access to

immense quantities of information? What effects does it have

on self-reflection and, in particular, our relationship to

the past into which we allocated the repository for our

mourning?

In the second section of this book I will argue that as

the past becomes much more obliterated by the congested and

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extended present today, mourning gets “paid forward,” so to

speak. It is not so much that we get over things more

quickly now, although that is the semblance digitization

provides of working-through mourning or trauma. Instead

mourning and trauma become archived, paradoxically, in the

future. In order to work our way back to the aesthetic

interests of literature and the closure it provides today,

we need to anatomize, at least cursorily, the digital world

that most of us inhabit whether we want to or not. I am not

a digital humanities scholar, thank God. I still do not

quite understand what this new discipline is. So pardon me

if my interpretation comes across as both tolerant and

resistant. You could say I am still catching up to a

technological learning curve.

* * *

The surplus of information available makes the current

experience of the world rich with a seemingly infinite

amount of instantaneous options. But online and hyperlinked

networks of media sources also drowns out thought and makes

information disposable. Like the step-by-step methods the

Internet provides for getting closure, the contemporary

world compels one to move on from events or experiences with

an increasing amount of thoughtlessness. In fact, there is

so much available right now in the present moment to draw

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attention and entertain that it results in the inability to

adopt a stable viewpoint or to own a position on a topic or

issue. To put it another way, digital media makes it easy to

relinquish moral perspective and choice. Although we have

access to and control over information at our fingertips,

information also accesses and controls us.

News media in particular has grown into an industry

that owns and dominates every second of life, which means

various outlets can use their information to control viewers

into docility. This does not conduce reflection. Digital

distraction threatens to impede the attentiveness required

for interpretive reading.

We are never free from reminders of life’s calamities,

and this cuts two ways. We can remain alert and informed

about the current condition in the world—at any given moment

we can be students of “current events”—but the continual

digital delivery of information also creates noise and

clutter. In the 1960s, Nathan Scott, Jr., one of the great

and underrated literary critics, argues that the media

creates a feeling in which you are “being flicked at.” Today

he would more than likely describe media in terms of “being

subsumed.”

At home and at work we can access streams of

information about world activities dissected by the second.

For instance, the online news outlet, The Huffington Post,

maintains a running chronicle of news stories. It features a

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front page with a headline, like a newspaper, followed by a

vertical series of stories scrolling in descending order of

importance through the center of the page. Unlike newsprint,

however, the headlines always shift. You can watch one

headline replace another in a blink. A fresh story or one

that was less important bumps the prior headline to a

secondary position. World events move in and out of priority

as more news filters in. The most current and urgent story

of one moment becomes a palimpsest beneath the next. Walter

Cronkite’s famous wrap-up, “And that’s the way it is,” no

longer makes sense today. The news does not stop after the

end of the evening broadcast and the next morning’s

newspaper.

Electronic digitization of information might make the

world smaller and more familiar, but it does not allow for

stilled moments in time. It does not give one a break.

The continually shifting stories on The Huffington Post

would seem to epitomize non-closure. The site resembles the

fragmentary simulacra characteristic of postmodernism where

nothing achieves wholeness because information moves

infinitely on a surface without depth. At the same time it

reflects Derrida’s “archive fever,” in which media does not

report on the event, but the report itself becomes the

event. The news provides the future with its retrospective

archive to the extent that it prefigures the future. In fact

there is nothing more apparently in-the-middle-of-things

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than today’s twenty-four hour digitized news cycle. Stories

do not originate from any particular point nor do they reach

any particular end. Whereas world events were something that

occurred for thirty minutes to an hour a few decades ago,

today events in the world stretch out in a so-called real-

time. The live updates from blogs, news wires, and Twitter

can keep stories deeply embedded in a thick present. The

present tense of news keeps the current running in current

events by turning each moment into a nanosecond dissection

of crisis. Since there is always information to replace

what had moments before demanded attention, sites like The

Huffington Post provide constant opportunities to move on from

the past.

Media serialization feeds impulse symptomatic of

digital stimulation. The rapid movement of news maintains a

constant state of arousal; expectations are fulfilled within

the instant of an image. Like video games that keep the

gamer charged by ever increasing speed, the constantly

shifting stream of news provided by websites and television

deny the possibility to dwell reflectively. Digital speed

even controls the attention paid to catastrophes that

afflict national trauma. The urgent dialogue concerning gun

control instigated by the Sandy Hook massacre petered out as

the nation moved on to other conflict. Those who continue to

mourn the horrible event must also mourn the loss of

national attention while the rest, according to Baudrillard

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and Zizek, hunger for another disaster to satisfy the need

for digital hyperactivity.

To dwell hinders virtual speed that comes to replace

our perception of reality. The brain, as neuroscientists

have shown, cannot cope with the staid movement of life

outside of the screen. The gamer or the newshound requires

more digital kinetics. The world detached from a screen

moves too slowly. In an irony born out of digital speed, one

cannot keep up with the slow pace of the non-virtual world. A

conversation demands more attention than a “text” or a

“tweet.” The non-virtual world becomes a world in slow

motion. Reality’s consecution makes one impatient for the

speed of digitization.

News in a digital age provides rapid closure, closure

on the cheap. As much as a site like The Huffington Post insures

a steady stream of conflict to keep one unsettled in a world

filled with unresolved events, the same chronicle of

calamity stores the past in the invisible but ever widening

digital archive that has become a sort of online

unconscious. The design of The Huffington Post visually depicts

repression. The eye draws to the headline driving other news

downward and beneath the bottom of the screen, representing

how closure requires forgetfulness. There is always fresh

conflict ready to become conscious so that we can forget a

previous event. The past can remain conveniently retrievable

in the “cloud.” But like the image conjured by “cloud,” the

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past can also be forgotten. Digital archives, permanent as

they are, ironically threaten historical obliteration. The

pain of loss evanesces from the margins of the screen into

the cloud’s digital unconscious. The cloud into which the

archive for future retrospection has lodged becomes the

repository for our mourning. In a sense, as I will examine

in more depth in the next section, we no longer leave

mourning and trauma in the past, but project conflict

forward as something to confront in the future, like the

unveiling of apocalypse, an endpoint when closure can be

achieved.

The digital chronicle that neutralizes loss is also

integral to the social network. Facebook connects us to our

social world with a design similar to The Huffington Post with

its vertical series of posts surrounded by material in the

margins. Facebook provides momentary closure in

schizophrenic linearity. You can post the announcement that

a loved one has died within a clutter of ephemeral

information—reports of a good dinner, catching a cold, a

picture of kittens, an upcoming television program. Matters

of grave importance and little consequence flatten out into

one plane of discourse. Your statement of personal anguish

can appear in between an advertisement for penis enlargement

and a picture of kittens. The information does not compete

except for the strange popularity contest involved in

“liking” a post. It is ironic that one can “like” your

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announcement of a loved one’s death or losing a job. When

your post accumulates “likes” it twists the word into

different connotations. Instead of mere approval, “like”

also connotes kinship, a community of “like” souls helping

each other to achieve closure. It is the fantasy of

Baudrillard’s simulacrum where the virtual replication of

image replaces actuality. Experience has no depth because

reality is a consummate surface. There is no beneath the

surface in this virtual world. The community on Facebook is

bodiless. One could virtually cultivate an entire nation of

friends who do not bodily exist.

It strikes me that posting personal anguish on Facebook

not only levels and defuses conflict, but also makes

conflict familiar. If one’s pain becomes part of the same

chronicle of experience that includes kittens, fart jokes,

political venting, or the innocuous indication of how one is

feeling at any given moment, then pain finds a home in

banality. Bad news on Facebook can never achieve pathos, but

it can certainly make one feel like they have gained

closure. If you feel compelled to express despair on

Facebook, it is equally possible that, as your pain

accumulates “likes,” it can reach the same consoling status

as a picture of kittens in a basket. As getting closure

becomes a national pastime, trauma can also become banal.

Trauma becomes digitized.

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Tense, Aspect, and Fragmentation

Cronkite’s famous sign-off, “And that’s the way it is,”

expresses vague grammar that makes time slippery. At the

same time we could always intuit what he means. Although his

statement looks like the simple present tense, “the way it

is,” the aspect of the sentence—how the viewpoint gives the

sentence temporal shape—suggests that “is” indicates an

ongoing state unfolding in time. Therefore, his sign-off,

particularly with the word, “And,” feels like the present

progressive tense. Unfortunately, this is not satisfactory

either. Given that he repeats his statement every evening

combined with the fact that he refers to the news he has

delivered (and we know that events do not end just because

we turn off the television), his statement could indicate

the unfolding of states and events between the past,

present, and the future.

Indicating the tense, in other words, does not

necessarily clarify the temporality of grammar. We intuit

that, since they are the final words of his news program,

the sign-off says something like, “And that’s the news” or

“And that’s what happened,” to suggest a complete action.

Each of these implied statements imparts the possibility

that the events Cronkite reports are finished or that they

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are ongoing. It could be both! Further, it is difficult to

determine whether he means, “That is what happened,” or

something more complex, like, “That is the news as I have

reported it.” The first is an action indicated objectively,

as though it occurs in the past and as a whole. The second

indicates action seen from within its ongoing unfolding in

time, which establishes a viewpoint.

A way to boil this down is in the form of two different

questions one might pose about current events: “What

happened in the news today?” or “What is happening in the news

today?” I can guarantee you that the former was the question

one might ask over three decades ago when the news was

something that occurs in the past and is reported in a

distinct present location: the morning papers, the evening

news. The latter, however, is the question more frequently

asked today when the news perpetuates an ongoing and thick

present progressive tense on cable or online digitized news.

In many ways this suggests that in the past we could put the

news behind us. Today we are always in the thick of it.

The conflicted ways in which we can inhabit language

with ease—we generally know what people are telling us—and

the mental work involved to temporally situate ourselves in

the language that describes events and states in the world

makes the byzantine ways we grammatically structure our

words to form thoughts and statements somewhat

schizophrenic. Language is intuitive, habitual, easy to use;

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at the same time, language is opaque, complex, difficult, if

not, at times, impossible to grasp. Frequently history

proves that language can be dangerous.

We always speak of the tense of language, but rarely do

we think of or examine the aspect. Aspect is as essential as

tense for us to understand writing and speech. In fact, it

could be more important since particular cases and nuances

of aspect, as in the future tense, are unique to English.

Aspect is an element to language that can make learning

English an almost impossible endeavor for certain non-

English speakers who must discriminate between subtleties of

speech, such as how it is improper to say of a victim of a

traffic accident, “she is having a car accident.”

Both tense and aspect are the ways in which we encode time

in grammar. The most familiar code is tense. It is the

easiest to detect because it indicates the temporal place or

the location of an event, action, or state language refers to.

He goes to the store; he went to the store; he will go to the store, or present,

past, future.

Aspect, however, is more difficult because it indicates

the shape of an event in time. Grammar can indicate an event

or action completed instantaneously, or in what linguists

call the “specious present” because the action does not

usually coincide with its narration, unless speech records

events in real-time, like an announcer crying out, “He hit

the ball! It’s a homerun!” The temporality of grammar also

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indicates an action or an event that is open-ended. For

instance, “He hit the ball” is an instant and complete

action whereas “he is kicking the ball” indicates an open-

ended timeframe. Unless the enunciator tells us for how long

he kicks the ball, his action could go on indefinitely.

Further, the temporal encoding of aspect manifests a

grammar’s viewpoint of an event. An event can be described as

if seen from the inside as it unfolds in time, or it can be

described from the outside, seen as a whole. He was driving the

car recklessly, smashing into each mailbox on the block has a very

different viewpoint from He drove the car recklessly and smashed each

mailbox on the block. In the former we accompany the “he” in the

ongoing and incomplete action; in the latter we see the

event after it occurred as a whole or as an action completed

in the past.

What makes aspect so complex and often confusing is how

distinct it is from tense, but aspect and tense are wrapped

up with each other nonetheless. An action or event unfolds

in time in a distinct way and from a viewpoint. But this

temporal unfolding can occur in any tense, past, present, or

future.

What we witness in any sentence is how slippery and

often disconnected language can be from time. In fact, the

local level of any utterance evidences the speaker and the

event’s relative position to time and place. Language

expresses time so imprecisely because it relates to the

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imprecision of the way we experience and recollect time.

Although Einstein’s theory postulates that time is relative

to the inertial spatial frame in which it is measured, he

does not mean time is subjective. But the relationship

between time and space for Einstein does somewhat relate to

our psychological experience of time as we express it in

language.

* * *

In our post-9/11 era in which we not only fear but also

desire the next disaster, the prerogative of most people who

suffer from personal or national trauma is to move on. Media

does not generally exhort us to confront the antinomies of

the self. The drive to get closure does not interpret the

vicissitudes of mourning but catharsis without

interpretation. Digitization, therefore, threatens to leave

trauma meaningless.

Getting closure is a fiction that we live by, and it is

most fully experienced in fiction. Literature recuperates

presence in the face of loss, and continues to draw us to

read because of the ways in which its different forms offer

life the shape of closure. As Shelly claims in “Defense of

Poesy,” literature is a “difficult pleasure.”

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It is difficult to define pleasure in its highest

sense; the definition involving a number of apparent

paradoxes. For, from an inexplicable defect of harmony

in the constitution of human nature, the pain of the

inferior is frequently connected with the pleasures of

the superior portions of our being. Sorrow, terror,

anguish, despair itself, are often the chosen

expressions of an approximation to the highest good.

Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this

principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of

the pleasure which exists in pain. This is the source

also of the melancholy which is inseparable from the

sweetest melody. The pleasure that is in sorrow is

sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself. And hence

the saying, “It is better to go to the house of

mourning than to the house of mirth.” Not that this

highest species of pleasure is necessarily linked with

pain. The delight of love and friendship, the ecstasy

of the admiration of nature, the joy of the perception

and still more of the creation of poetry, is often

wholly unalloyed.

The extreme emotions poetry can express—sorrow, terror,

anguish, despair—elicit “pleasure which exists in pain,” an

issue concerning the tragic effects of catharsis that we

will explore fully in Chapter **

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Literature disturbs. It leaves marks. We like to think

of literature as comforting. Certainly it can be. But, like

pleasure, it is a “difficult” comfort. We can get comfort

from a lot of other sources that are much easier than a poem

or a novel. In fact there are numerous activities that are

far more comforting than reading literature. The literature

that endures and continues to inform who we are makes

demands of us.

I am wary of escapist notions that reading transports

us out of our weary life and offers us different worlds to

experience. Certainly literature does this. But the

literature that grows in us and defines who we are forces us

to confront the self in different contexts. We discover the

self by entering into another imaginative space. Despite

reading for academic reasons or for book clubs, reading

remains a solitary endeavor. It is one of a few activities

that sanction selfishness. You give yourself the right to

read. As I often tell my students, it is a gift that you

give yourself to set aside serious time to read.

The poem, the story, the play allows for clearing

spaces of reflection upon the self and the world by breaking

what it represents. Literature is most urgent and affirming

when it enters into and interacts with our ruins, when it

disturbs. Literature wounds before it heals. A literary

text, I argue, serves as a traumatic moment, a little

catastrophe resolved that puts our own disjointed existence

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into refigured contexts. As its own virtual apocalypse, a

literary work creates a clearing space for reflection where

we confront experience incomprehensible in life.

I am not arguing that literature cannot console, nor am

I arguing that people do not seek and find consolation in

literature. Literature might force one to think on

psychological levels, but the therapeutic value of reading

literary texts is dubious. There is no inherent relationship

between reading a poem and mental health just as there is no

inherent relationship between reading literature and being a

moral person. Oscar Wilde deflates the equivalence of

morality and writing: “There is no such thing as a moral or

immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That

is all.” We must look more squarely at this entrenched

belief in the consolatory power of literature juxtaposed to

literature’s more powerful ability to break forms, a

destructive process that we do not necessarily like to

acknowledge.

The pleasure of reading derives from the consolation of

closure. But it is a conflicted pleasure. Naysayers of

critical theory argue that interpretation sucks the pleasure

out of reading. Frequently protecting the pleasure of the

text is the prerogative behind anti-interpretation, and I do

have a lot of sympathy for arguments against hermeneutics.

But we need to look more squarely at this notion of the

pleasure. Obviously the pleasure we gain from a P.G.

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Wodehouse novel is different from the pleasure we experience

reading Ernest Hemingway. Where does this pleasure come

from? What does it depend on? What does it mean that we gain

pleasure from literature that is demanding or disturbing,

which most literature is? What does it mean, for instance,

to gain pleasure from King Lear or Blood Meridian or Miss

Lonelyhearts? Why do we like to revel in brokenness?

TRANSITION!!!!!

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PART II

Introduction

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How does the belief that the critical moment of crisis

is now, prevalent in any era, transform into apocalyptic

anxiety and our contemporary addiction to post-apocalyptic

scenarios? Between the late nineteenth-century and today

there is a distinct development in the way that literature

treats apocalypse that moves in four stages.

1) Modernism reimagines an eschatological notion of

origin and apocalypse. The modernist novel or poem ends at

the edge of a limit-situation, the threshold of knowledge or

revelation coupled with a powerful, often subsuming sense of

unknowingness at the same time. Closure becomes markedly

contested and irresolute, breaking the tight concordance of

nineteenth century plot or lyric to reflect the self in a

struggle with ambivalence over hope and hopelessness, belief

and unbelief, memory and desire. The Romantics replace

belief in the literal biblical apocalypse with the

apocalypse as an individual conflict, which continues to

shape the modernist imagination. Further, fiction and poetry

seek to redeem time from the ravages of finitude as writers

become intensely time-conscious, seeking new ways in which

to reimagine the past and the future in their preoccupation

with the relationship between finitude (the haphazard

contingency of everyday life) and eternity (an aesthetic

realm that takes on an often spiritual quality to occupy a

space deserted by religion). Despite the assumption that

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modernism arrives by departing from the past, romanticism

remains a powerful influence.

2) A religious tenor continues to shape the modernist

imagination up until and just beyond World War II until the

hope inherent in eschatology rapidly wanes in the 1960s and

70s. Instead postmodern literature dispenses with the

hermeneutic nature of endings to emphasize apocalyptic

catastrophe that destroys the possibility for disclosure.

Postmodernism also rejects the tragic vision of modernism

(or at least the more religious tones of tragedy),

substituting it with absurdity, as in Vonnegut’s “gallows

humor” or Beckett’s nothingness. It is an absurdity that

R.W.B. Lewis argues vacillates “between the wrath and

laughter.” The literature divorces the word from the world

that language can no longer describe, and foregrounds the

consummate artifice of fiction or poetry, including the

conventions that construct the literariness of a text.

3) By the 1980s and 90s the absurdity of catastrophic

world destruction transforms into hyper-philosophical

arguments that the world has already ended. The apocalypse

already happened and we missed it. We live in the ruins

after the end where life moves on nonetheless. The

apocalypse is no longer imminent, about to happen at any

moment, but immanent, thoroughly within the world.

Disenchantment over reality and literature reaches a peak as

literary and cultural studies confirm that late capitalist

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culture desacralizes, recycles, and empties everything of

value. At the same time as the Internet and other virtual

realms congest the imaginative space of literary reflection,

millennial anxiety creates a new foreboding over omens of

total annihilation, such as Y2K, religious fundamentalism,

terrorism, and occultism.

4) After 9/11, the sense of coming after the end

transforms into post-apocalyptic trauma. Trauma theory,

which begins in the 1990s in the field of Holocaust studies,

widens its scope to include all realms of life past and

present. It attempts to interpret the effects of catastrophe

already manifest in the disasters of the past century and

which invades our home on 9/11. The development of trauma

theory (although there are specific reasons why it took

shape in English departments) reflects the broader concern

with personal anxieties. The shift from apocalypse to trauma

discloses not the end of the world that has already

happened, but the trauma of disenchantment from which the

world has never recovered. Currently we exist in what feels

like a period of serial crises without teleology.

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CHAPTER 8

Forms of Apocalypse

Trauma and Closure

Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending remains the classic

study of endings, but it serves as a departure for my

examination of the psychology of closure in relationship to

literary endings, our current apocalyptic mindset, and the

extent to which fiction and poetry can heal our personal and

collective trauma. For Kermode, fiction is central to life

because it is bound up in our compulsion for coherence and

the need for comfort. The human is driven to find patterns

in life that make sense out of contingency. But the

paradigms by which fiction ends must change as the world

changes. As knowledge of the world evolves in its formation

of new paradigms of reality—for instance, a heliocentric

universe, evolution, the unconscious, nuclear annihilation—

while demythologizing old ones—the Ptolemic universe,

singular creation, human progress, the biblical end of the

world—the paradigms of the end reflected in fiction and

poetry also shift to accommodate new ways of making sense of

and representing life. In particular, the novel, which

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portrays the muddle of daily experience, must form sense-

making patterns. Narrative represents (or mimics, as

Aristotle would say) the contingency and disorder of life in

its movement from one day to the next. But it must do so by

creating coherence, molding its representation into a form

that does not necessarily reflect the contingent and serial

nature of life itself. Even those novelists who emphasize

contingency at the sake of order—Burroughs, Barth, Pynchon,

Wallace—must create their own forms of closure that do not

accord with life as we experience it.

Kermode’s argument that endings offer consolation for

our existential terror of mortality shares Aristotle’s

analysis of entelechy, but it falls short of providing a

fuller account of apocalyptic experience, as we will

investigate in further chapters. It has become a commonplace

notion that modernism contests the traditional “happy

ending” reflected in 18th and 19th-C novels and the

metanarrative of human progress. Given that the plots of

many of these novels end far more complexly than “they lived

happily ever after,” modernism more accurately exposes and

contests the concordance of traditional plot, particularly how

it reflects belief in a total coherence behind the flux of

human experience and affirms the ultimate goodness of

humankind in his or her central role in a providential plot

of salvation.

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A gap in Kermode’s argument is the nature of reality

itself, which is why I will be putting his work into the

context of the literary relationship between trauma and

apocalypse. The poet central to his study, Wallace Stevens,

extols the power of poetry to shape reality with its

imaginative patterns. Is the diurnal experience from which

the artist draws material purely contingent? Or does the

external world that the poet examines already contain

inherent order? Life offers daily meaning-making patterns

that we live by and that are essential. The notion that

experience is meaningless without the poet’s power to give

shape to reality always contrasts the power of reality to

shape the imagination.

Philosophy and literary theory in the past several

decades habitually raise pure contingency to the center of

knowledge. This leads to the divorce between text and

reality during the height of deconstruction that believes

that there is nothing outside the text. Another way to put it is

that text is about nothing, or there is no aboutness to text.

Everything that a text means is bound by the text itself.

Meaninglessness, I will argue, has more to do with how

immediate experience, such as trauma, impedes retrospection

than it does the events themselves that we endure. Despite

the philosophical seduction of nihilism, people do not abide

meaninglessness. People do not generally go about their

daily life self-consciously aware that nothing makes sense.

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In fact, the human survives because she has a tacit

understanding that the cogs and wheels of life work, that

despite the seeming randomness of things, life can make

sense.

The abyss of nihilism certainly yawns wide before us,

but we are preternaturally resilient at making meaning.

Everyday we form meaning out of expectations of a future

based upon anticipated endings. We generally know what

tomorrow will bring because of what the future has always

brought to us in the past. It is, in fact, the repetition of

experience, Nietzsche’s return of the same or Freud’s

repetition compulsion, that leads to anguish over nihilism.

The calendar, which we rely on everyday to organize the

future, testifies to the human resistance to

meaninglessness. An order has been imposed on the unrealized

future; we can imagine a plot for the future in advance of

its realization. And if something comes along to frustrate

the plot, like a canceled date, we reconfigure the pattern.

No matter how meaningless life might seem, the human

continues to partition or plot its daily track, balancing

coherence and discordance. It is a provisional and fragile

balance, but one that endures.

Trauma interrupts this fine balance. A traumatic event

makes diurnal experience unfamiliar. It ruptures fragile

temporal structure and defies expectations. In an argument

seemingly counterintuitive, however, I will show how

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traumatic events ultimately give life meaning that is more

vital than any other experience. It is a deeper and, albeit,

far more painful sense of meaning that overwhelms the

interpretive ability to form patterns from contingency.

Trauma certainly challenges cognition more than any other

experience, but it does not defy meaning. Because certain

experience requires more interpretive vigor from us to educe

meaning does not necessarily mean it defies meaning.

Characterizing trauma as inexplicable or unsayable

risks eliding personal or collective catastrophe to the

sublime category of unknowingness, a common trope of the

abyss in modernist literature. The abyss is a prevalent

motif in the 20thC novel: the Marbar Caves in Forster’s A

Passage to India swallows everything, even genesis and

apocalypse, into nothingness; the depths of the Congo in

Conrad’s Heart of Darkness obliterates the differentiation

between civilization and primitivism, conscious and

unconscious, at the same time as it hopelessly obscures the

story Marlow tries to relay. But despite the abysmal

experience of serial catastrophe that characterizes the past

century, the poetic imagination persists in its rage for

meaning, whether it is in the intense energy to reconstruct

order during modernism, to remake new and alternate worlds

out of old ones during postmodernism, or to expand through

replication the virtual world today. Making sense of the

world is an activity that continues on, perhaps with

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antiquated heroism, but it is all the more heroic when done

in the face of inevitable failure.

Trauma resists closure. We cannot pin trauma with

language. Nor would we want to. Literature offers a shape

for traumatic experience—it frames events with plot or

lineation to create a semblance of a complete life—while its

shape also allows for the necessary stopping places to cope

with trauma. Turning trauma into verbal form economizes

emotion by fictionalizing it. The human would perish without

the power of language to distort direct signification.

Tropes keep the world vitally reimagined, particularly the

trope of closure. To suspend disbelief when reading, to

dwell within forms of closure while knowing that they are

tropes nonetheless, allows one to return to the reality that

exists beyond the text, a reality that is reimagined and

perhaps even re-enchanted.

Post-Apocalypse

Emily Dickinson’s poem, “My life closed twice before

its close,” expresses the mystery and doubt that surrounds

death.

My life closed twice before its close;

It yet remains to see

If Immortality unveil

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A third event to me,

So huge, so hopeless to conceive

As these that twice befell.

Parting is all we know of heaven,

And all we need of hell.

In the first quatrain the reader expects that the tragedy of

death that Dickinson laments will promise everlasting life.

Instead, however, the anticipation of further death

undermines hope, the “third event,” the tick before the next

tock. The blank space preceding the next quatrain emphasizes

the blankness of the pause before the tock, solidified by the

word “hopeless.” Instead of resolution in “heaven,” the word

“Parting” pairs with “hell” to form an unsettling

conclusion: heaven and hell are fictions, necessary

nonetheless in that “we need” them.

But Dickinson’s poem also explores a deeper notion of

endings. “To unveil” refers to apocalypse, the Christian

belief that the End will uncover and reveal God’s secrets.

The uncovering of secrets that promises everlasting life

that always “yet remains.” As Dickinson suggests, it is

impossible to affirm heaven or hell, but it is possible to

turn them into fiction, to make sense of mystery by imposing

lyrical order over the blank, un-plotted space between tock

and the next tick.

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The temporal architecture of a story or a poem

organizes the finitude of life around an origin, duration,

and conclusion, Kermode’s tick – pause – tock – pause – tick

. . . But a literary work also provides what is unavailable to

us in finitude: an experience that reaches a realized and

meaningful whole offered for retrospective analysis, the

tick—tock as a complete vision, even if wholeness, like

Dickinson’s poem, leaves one wondering what comes in the gap

after tock. We cannot look back from our own death! To this

extent, a poem or a work of fiction fulfills the fantasy of

living after the end. A work enacts its own genesis and

apocalypse.

Closure and Apocalypse

NEED A DIFFERENT LEAD UP TO TRAUMA / APOCALYPSE

Apocalypse is a term organic to religion in the spirit

of world-destruction in the Book of Revelation. When we

think of apocalypse, we conjure up images of Armageddon that

disaster movies supply. There is no end to our hunger for

catastrophic endings in the movies. The representation of

Armageddon is not necessarily new. Every age has indulged in

visions of the end. The Book of Revelation evolved out of

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the most popular genre of Jewish writing, the apocalyptic.

Artists throughout the middle ages created terrifying and

chaotic images of destruction. World War I that laid waste

to most of Europe fostered literary depictions of

civilization in terminal decline, like T.S. Eliot’s The Waste

Land. World War II, which incepts our current preoccupation

with unimaginable atrocity and annihilation continues to

provide material for representations of post-apocalypse.

Samuel Beckett’s Endgame or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road would

not be possible without visions of world destruction

supplied by the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction.

But apocalypse is a far more slippery term. In the

doctrine of eschatology, or the Last Things—death, heaven,

hell, resurrection—the eschaton is the actual imagined end

of the world revealed throughout Christ’s proclamations

concerning end time and a New Kingdom that transpires in

John of Patmos’s prophetic vision. It brings an ultimate

ending to the narrative arc from the Creation of the world

in Genesis to Apocalypse in Revelation. Eschatology,

however, promises something more beyond the ultimate ending—

a new beginning, a New Kingdom, a New Jerusalem. Any

apocalyptic mode presumes that something remains beyond the

end. Something of the world survives. The ending is never a

total ending. A total end is ultimately unthinkable for it

passes into silence no one can witness.

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A second way of understanding apocalypse is in the form

of catastrophes that resemble or prefigure a final end.

Catastrophe in our contemporary world defines the end of

something: a way of life, a way of thinking. It marks a

definitive rupture in time that creates a before and after in

history. The Holocaust, the dropping of the atomic bombs on

Japan, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 divide history into

antecedent and subsequent time. They are polarizing events

out of which emerge new understandings concerning the world.

The crucifixion stands as a pivotal and catastrophic event

in the middle of history. History surges toward the

crucifixion and prefigures its event, and then falls away

from it, progressing toward the apocalyptic promise of

eschatological fulfillment.

A final way of understanding apocalypse is its

hermeneutic function. Apocalypse means revealing, unveiling,

uncovering. It breaks apart and destroys as a means to

recreate meaning. The apocalypse is not necessarily the

eventful and final end, but the disclosure of truth that an

ending bestows, the clarification of what an end means. One

must survive an end in order to report back on it such that

only in its aftermath do we gain a sense of meaning

concerning an event. The catastrophe never coincides with

meaning. Understanding is always subsequent to an event. The

meaning of catastrophe, therefore, like the meaning behind

the event that instigates trauma, is always belated, coming

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after the fact, illuminating a truth that comes too late.

The apocalypse is inextricably bound to its own paradoxical

temporality. The end is never the end. Another seal always remains

to be broken. Another layer must be uncovered.

In the apocalyptic mode, a text announces the end of

the world while the text continues as does the world the

text represents. The ultimate ending always remains

deferred. Since consummate meaning becomes manifest only in

the ultimate ending, the truth that apocalypse uncovers

remains forever unavailable. Final meaning arrives beyond

death, an experience, as Hamlet informs us, that no witness

returns from to bear testimony. “The rest is silence”

because death is the ultimate boundary-situation. All

accounts of apocalypse come from after the end. The witness

who represents apocalypse must also be a survivor. One can

only recognize the apocalypse after it happens.

Since both involve similar temporal paradoxes, Berger

argues that apocalypse shares the structure of trauma. The

initial catastrophic event causes trauma because it

overwhelms comprehension at the time it happened. Trauma

constitutes the aftereffects of something that cannot be

understood in its immediacy. To understand trauma, to put

experience into a context, requires a second event that

triggers the initial trauma and gives it both sense and

context, affirming the traumatic neurosis that had been

previously omitted. Similarly, in apocalypse, an initial

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disaster serves to distort and disorient, but it does not

reveal. The catastrophe is too close, too sudden, too

surprising. The initial disaster requires a secondary

disaster to give it retrospective status, offering both

disasters a hermeneutic function. This secondary disaster,

one that proceeds from the first and gives it retrospective

meaning, becomes apocalyptic on a hermeneutic level.

The interplay between two or more events that rupture

experience makes the apocalyptic and the traumatic congruent

ideas. Both destroy existing structures that make identity

and the language we use to represent experience possible.

Both occlude or erase memory, requiring one to reconstruct

the past. Trauma reaches into the past as a means to

understand the present whereas apocalypse searches the

present as a means to understand a future. Trauma and

apocalypse go hand in hand. Working-through the past is a

means of making a future possible whereas imagining a future

based upon the present does pretty much the same.

The post-apocalyptic interprets the world as if it had

already come to an end, a term more paradoxical than

postmodern. Whereas “post” suggests subsequence,

“apocalyptic” is an event that is never now, that never

arrives, and if it does we would not have any means by which

to experience it. Apocalypse is anterior time, always

outside, about and beyond temporality and that can never be

located. It already occurred, is always occurring and will

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always occur. We are already always beyond the apocalypse

wondering belatedly what it meant at the same time as it is

always ahead of us, filling us with dread. In the “to be or

not to be” soliloquy, Hamlet recognizes the impossibility to

annihilate the self and then step back and contemplate the

performance. Since death is not a sensible state, and,

further, it is impossible to imagine an absolute ending,

there is something both ludicrous and alluring about

ruminating upon the post-apocalyptic. The earth shattering

effects of trauma that mark an end akin to apocalypse

combined with its temporally belated structure makes trauma

theory focus on ruptures in the referential correspondence

between language and knowledge. Cathy Caruth claims, “in

trauma the greatest confrontation with reality may also

occur as an absolute numbing to it, that immediacy,

paradoxically enough, may take the form of belatedness.”

Psychology and religion contribute to a sense of

apocalypse in two broad senses of the term: the actual

imagined end of the world, and how catastrophe traumatically

transforms familiar reality of the world. Today we equate

apocalypse with worldwide destruction, the end of the world.

Such apocalyptic scenarios are plentifully provided for by

Hollywood. These fantasies of the end, ultimately gothic,

are important and serve healthy meaning making functions.

However, I would like to examine the subtler dimension of

apocalypse: its original meaning as unveiling, a revelation

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that leads to reimagined and restored meaning. To this

extent, it becomes more important to examine what it means

to come after the end of eras as opposed to the destruction of

the world.

In what ways do endings reconfigure what it means to be

human? What does the human salvage from the ruins of an

ending? Despite the seemingly complete annihilation of

meaning from the world such apocalypse entails, all

apocalyptic depictions rescue something of sense and value

in a world that continues on. Despite the nothingness Cormac

McCarthy depicts in The Road, the novel ends with a definable—

and surprising!—Christian theology.

Since apocalypse means uncovering, it is a term germane

to literary interpretation. Interpretation is the process of

unveiling concealed meaning. Further, apocalypse denotes the

meaning of things that are secreted away when the world is

dominated by falsehood and misconception. Therefore, the

apocalypse entails suspicion of assumed truths. As Harold

Bloom exhorts, apocalyptic energy must “ruin the sacred

truths.” An examination of a literary work as an aesthetic

whole does not necessarily elide extrinsic concerns. Despite

a resistance to aesthetics in our thorny political age, a

focus on the organic unity of a text does not have to be

apolitical or totalizing. Interpretation is an activity that

casts suspicion on things. From outside textual integrity

interpretation questions the value that the reader and the

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world place on a work. A hermeneutics of suspicion can be

just as congenial to formal analysis as it is to political

criticism.

The closure that turns a work of literature into an

aesthetic whole does not mean the work is closed. The meaning

inherent in a work is not inert, nor does it function

automatically, like a circuit. Meaning does not just happen.

There is no natural sense in which a poem means anything. On

the contrary, meaning entails a struggle with a text. A

story or poem’s sense of completeness requires the reader to

breath life into language that would otherwise remain dead.

In some ways interpretation commits acts of creative

violence to a text. It takes the text apart in order to

recreate meaning. Interpretation is an apocalyptic activity

not only because of our afterness but also because it

destroys in order to create. It pries open the seals that we

assume contain the meaning for which we search, but the

seal, as in Revelation, always leads to another seal. A

trope always leads to another trope. Interpretation is a

continually generative process that never reduces a work to

a zero point but keeps a text alive that would remain inert

otherwise. Interpretation opens a reader to a text’s

fullness, or pleroma, the plentitude of spirit embodied by

form that always at the same time breaks form’s constraints.

But to the extent that reading is sanctioned selfishness,

interpretation is also self-defining. The reader’s desire

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for meaning draws a text into her own interpretive form, her

own patterns of understanding she imposes upon experience.

Life takes the form of the aesthetic integrity of the work,

or mathexis, the sense that one’s own experience is storied.

To address the many nuanced ways in which we

understand what apocalypse means, and how it is more than

often misunderstood, we need to examine what meaning means.

We live in a world in which making sense of things has

become more difficult than at any other time in history.

Interpretation is more challenging than ever. At the same

time we live in a world in which interpretation has become

disposable. Digital technology becomes our all-consuming

register for representation. There is a danger that

interpretation no longer entails work. But people hunger for

meaning.

In After the End, James Berger argues that trauma is an

apocalyptic rupture beyond which it is difficult for a

victim to conceive of life. At the center of Berger’s study

is his exciting argument that trauma is a psychoanalytic form of

apocalypse, whereas apocalypse is a religious form of trauma. Both trauma

and apocalypse share dynamics conducive to literature. In

apocalypse, catastrophe lays waste to older ways of seeing

the world, but out of destruction comes clarification or an

unveiling.

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Transition on closure versus visual media

The Apocalyptic Mindset

Every era is obsessed with the end of the world. Search

Google Images and you will find artwork as detailed and

horrifying throughout the medieval era as the digitized

phantasmagoria from Hollywood or the television today. The

depictions, whether it is Bosch, Durer, Blake, Picasso, or

the plethora of digitally created graphics online, are busy,

congested, swirling, Dionysian, sublime, exhausting. Once

frozen and anchored in in one place, these doomsday images

now move in the frenzied space of film and digitization.

Apocalypse visually surrounds us. The world has ended

numerous times in disaster movies since the 1950s and has

recently traversed post-apocalyptic landscapes on

television.

At the height of apocalyptic fever in any period,

exhaustion with end-of-the-world doom also sets in. In Saul

Bellow’s novel, Herzog complains, “We must get it out of our

heads that this is a doomed time . . . We love apocalypse

too much . . . Excuse me, no. I’ve had all the monstrosity I

want” (388). Bellow wrote Herzog just before the Kennedy

Assassination. The novel predates the Viet Nam War, 1968,

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the oil crisis, terrorism, economic disaster, and 9/11. His

words seem applicable to any period in the past two

centuries. His complaint is apropos today when we suffer

from apocalyptic exhaustion, wondering, “what rough beast”

comes next to emerge from the current apocalyptic fever?

Despite the exhaustion, it is impossible to discern

whether or not the current era is any more apocalyptic than

previous generations. Although Herzog came out just before

the upheavals of the 1960s and 70s, we must not forget what

preceded the novel: two World Wars punctuated by the Great

Depression, the Holocaust, the Eichmann trial, and the rapid

build up of nuclear armament that made it possible for

humans to extinguish everything for the first time in

history. Serial catastrophe changed everything in the five

decades before 1964 just as everything changed in the five

decades after.

Each generation believes that theirs is the generation

living in the critical moment of history. The apocalyptic

imagination turns contemporary situation into singularity.

Everything from the past has arrived here, now, at this

moment. Most apocalyptic fantasies, therefore, erase human

agency. The end of the world is never an individual issue

but the result of giant forces of history drawing everything

to a head. This is paradoxical, given the fact that the

biggest shift in the human relationship to endings has been

the wholesale personalization of death, particularly as a

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result of the erosion of literal belief in a biblical end of

the world between roughly the seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries. We have separated apocalypse from our own

personal fear of mortality. It is never my apocalypse but

the apocalypse. It is always my death but never my end of the

world. This division between individual death and a

catastrophic end is at the heart of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse

Five. The novel’s explicit message is that ending war is like

trying to stop glaciers. Annihilation is inevitable and free

will is a pure fantasy. Vonnegut’s implicit message, however,

is his furiously moral rejection of determinism, a

resounding “No!” to the Tralfamadorian philosophy Billy

Pilgrim adopts.

Before fleeing Germany in the wake of the war, Walter

Benjamin argues that an epoch always bears its end within

itself, which shares in W.B. Yeats’ system of historical

gyres. Interpreting Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, which depicts

the “angel of history” facing a catastrophic past with its

back to the future, Benjamin writes,

Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single

catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage

and hurls it in front of his feet. The Angel would like

to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been

smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has

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caught in his wings with such violence that the angel

can no longer close them.

Catastrophic events of the past always propel the angel

backwards into the future. A large part of an apocalyptic

mindset results from the mere fact that, like Benjamin’s

angel, every generation arrives at the end of a catastrophic

era. The human is always last, coming after all of history

that preceded him. I often introduce my survey course of

Western literature by pointing out to students the

incredible reality: each one of us at all moments

constitutes the end of history. Each of us stands at the

very endpoint of history’s timeline. We are the result of

everyone and everything that came before. We are not,

therefore, just figures in a linear history, but also the

collective histories of an entire past. Each of us is the

repository for all human thought and action preceding us:

Egypt, India, Persia, Africa, Greece, Jerusalem, Rome,

Europe, England, and the United States flow through us like

the rivers that flow in Langston Hugh’s veins in his

magisterial poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.”

Each of us is also the repository of genocidal wars,

slavery, economic struggle, and diaspora. Western

civilization courses through Hugh’s bloodstream because

slavery made the monuments of history we celebrate possible.

The splendor of Western civilization, the semblance of its

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“progress,” elides centuries of human sacrifice and

enslavement. We inherit, therefore, the dreams and the

nightmares of everyone who came before us. Living at the end

is both awe inspiring and terrifying, liberating and

burdensome. It is the cause for celebration, like the adage,

“today is the first day of the rest of my life!” Or it is

the cause for terror. As Stephen Daedalus says in Ulysees,

“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

The apocalyptic imagination oscillates between redemptive

and destructive poles.

The simple fact that at any given moment we come after

everything makes one believe that this is the special time,

the urgent time, the generation for which the fate of the

world depends. The future of all existence is contingent

upon our crisis. The anxiety of living at the end is very

real. There is nothing more critical than now, the present of

the present in which one must make decisions by reconciling

what one knows of the past and what one imagines and fears

about the future.

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Chapter Ten

Modernist and Closure

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In “The Art of Fiction,” Henry James famously exposes

the artifice of Victorian novels by claiming that their

endings show the “distribution at the last of prizes,

pensions, husbands, wives, babies, millions, appended

paragraphs, and cheerful remarks.” The frequently outrageous

concordance of these endings aims to console whereas

modernist endings disturb. Victorian writers believe that a

major function of art is to provide happiness and moral

clarity. The novel should serve as a model of something

proscriptive, a function for the greater good, rather than

something aesthetic for its own sake. Adhering to a fairly

Platonic notion that fictions cater to and inspire dangerous

delusion, the Victorians are wary of moral ambivalence.

Literary gloom is unhealthy. Middle class moralism views

melancholy as unproductive, which still retains its force

until today, as I argued earlier. In the middle of the

Industrial Revolution, the utility of art becomes more

questioned than it ever had before, particularly in contrast

to previous eras when art was generally assumed to establish

the health of a civilization.

Victorian utilitarianism demands that everything have a

function, so art needs to provide one or defend itself from

attacks against dysfunction while promoting its usefulness.

The British aesthetes, such as Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde,

and French Symbolists, such as Valery and Mallarme, rebel

against Victorian moral stricture in the late nineteenth

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century by reveling in dysfunction or advertising art’s

uselessness, which, we will see, is one of the most powerful

forces in the birth of modernism. The glorification of

dysfunction climaxes with the Dada movement, which seeks out

to destroy all semblances of closure and coherence with

joyful nihilism that intimates the compulsion for apocalypse

later in the century. In general, however, the function of a

novel or poem in the 18th and 19thC is quite simply to

uplift while the prerogative of literary criticism is to

describe its moral coherence and to censor departures from

accepted form and standards. A major reason why so many

nineteenth-century novels end on an affirmative note, or at

least a conclusive tone, is the political advantage of

providing people with instruments to resist dispirit and

disaffection.

Such a grand trope of coherence cannot withstand the

fantasy of concordance it is built on, however, and, as

Kermode argues, its paradigms of closure wear out when the

world becomes more complex, as it does by the first decades

of the twentieth century. Freud claims that fantasy is “a

correction of an unsatisfying reality.” The human always

accommodates the discrepancy between desire and the reality

of outcomes by projecting the fulfillment of wishes on plain

old consecution and contingency. But we know that the happy

distribution of prizes does not happen in reality.

Disenchantment is one of the sad outcomes of nineteenth-

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century capitalism, particularly in the desacralization of

society. Because you are a good person on the edge of

financial ruin does not mean that winning the lottery is

forthcoming, although one continues today to believe that

good deeds precede outrageous luck. Marriages do not resolve

in a “happily ever after,” although many couples persist in

the belief that the years that follow will continue to bring

the same joy as the honeymoon. Reality does not play out

like the ending of a Jane Austen novel. Austen herself

claimed she wanted to write an afterword to each of her

novels to tell the readers what happens to her heroes after

marriage. Austen’s slice of English pastoral life, the few

months of idyll, did not really exist, but we believe in it,

and would not want it otherwise.

Further, we fantasize that life provides moral clarity.

But actual experience does not close like George Eliot’s

Middlemarch with an epilogue on the positive progress of

humankind. It is comforting to believe that a benevolent

author composes life and orchestrates its outcomes to the

advantage of the deserving, like the novelist in the movie

Stranger than Fiction. A gnomic narrator, the all-knowing author

directs the nineteenth-century novel to make everything

work. One of the biggest shifts in the early twentieth-

century novel is the dominance of the unknowing narrator who

leaves the reader in a dizzying world of shifting and

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unreliable perspectives that expose the limitations to

knowledge.

Coincidences do occur in life all the time, and

sometimes they are happy ones. We will often attribute

coincidences to fate in order to comfort ourselves with a

life that has the shape of providence. But coincidence does

not happen on the organized and exaggerated level of a

Victorian novel in which everyone who is part of the drama

in life makes the concealed teleology come to light in the

end, such as the incredible familial connections that occur

at the end of a novel by Dickens. It is wonderfully

satisfying (and consoling) that the dark figure, Magwitch,

who threatens all possibilities for happiness in Great

Expectations, turns out to be lovingly connected to most of the

characters. It provides for a beautiful deathbed scene while

allowing moral concordance, despite the emotionally

ambivalent state with which Pip ends the novel. Even though

ambivalence attends Pip, the novel ends with the sense that

justice has been served. It could be no other way than that

Pip must live out his life with middle class limitation

instead of aristocratic excess. Novels might be one of the

few places where justice is possible, a sad indictment of

our current age that rewards swindlers, which is why Martha

Nussbaum argues that they could serve as models for public

and political life. It seems doubtful, however, that the

White House will appoint literary critics as special

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counselors in matters of domestic and foreign affairs

anytime soon.

In his Notes on Life and Letters, Joseph Conrad extends Henry

James’ criticism of the Victorian novel by claiming that

conventional endings reflect “solution by rewards and

punishments, by crowned love, by fortune, by a broken leg or

a sudden death.” For Conrad, “These solutions are legitimate

inasmuch as they satisfy the desire for finality, for which

our hearts yearn, with a longing greater than a longing for

the loaves and fishes of this earth. Perhaps the only true

desire of mankind, coming thus to light in its hours of

leisure, is to be set at rest.” The demand for closure for

Conrad compels us to keep reading. We want to know what

happens in the end, and the ending that a novel provides

compels the desire for more. The drive to read for the

ending is a form of Freud’s repetition compulsion, which, we

will see in Chapter ** relates to the craving for the

finality of the death drive.

The desire for satisfaction also makes us wary of its

fulfillment. When the pleasure of closure is premature it

ruins the anticipation of suspense. Anyone who reads

mysteries or thrillers knows the pleasure of deferred

satisfaction. We crave gratification at the same time as we

revel in the anxiety of unknowingness. The solution to the

mystery is more satisfying if the route that winds toward

the end delays gratification more complicatedly. At the same

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time a narrative that raises anxieties through complications

without allowing for an inkling of concordance—if the end is

terminally irresolute—dissatisfies a reader more than the

intellectual curiosity it might draw. A reader needs to be

taken through the labyrinth of plot for a reason—there must

be some reward—even if the author makes that reason obscure.

When Marlow ends his story in Heart of Darkness by lying to

Kurtz’s Intended that his last words were his name, it does

not resolve the plot any more than Kurtz’s actual last

words, “The horror! The horror!” In fact nothing much is

resolved in the novel, but it remains complete and

satisfying nonetheless. Satisfaction is bound to the

irresolution contained nonetheless by the framed narrative

that cannot control the obscurity of knowledge that keeps us

returning to the novel. The pleasure of interpretation

supersedes the pleasure of an adventure story. Conrad is

very aware of the easy enjoyment of that genre. Heart of

Darkness, written at the dawn of the twentieth century,

evidences modernism’s desire to break forms of closure,

reflecting a new epistemological discomfort. Before the

Great War writing already reveals a dissatisfaction and

exhaustion with concordant plots. The longer a convention

endures, the quicker it fails to persuade.

Classic “realism” inherits the implicit logic of order

inherent in the Bible. Endings provide a restoration of

order after it has been disrupted and lost. Although

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Original Sin ensues conflict, the fallen world will be

ultimately redeemed in the end. Although the story begins in

perfection that falls into chaos after sin disrupts

creation, the plot rises out of the depths of disorder to

end by restoring creation in the apocalypse. Northrop Frye

calls it the U-shaped plot of the Bible. The human is

integrally part of this plot that has a comic outcome in

happiness and integration. The catastrophe of the

apocalypse, the destruction before the falling action, does

not precede the tragic waste of futile death but the

restoration of everlasting life. The triumph over death

realized by a Christian eschatology perpetuates the ideology

of human progress integral to the Enlightenment and post-

Enlightenment, and which we still cling to today in its

tattered remnants. Humanity is moving toward its destiny of

perfection, despite bumps in the road, and the task of the

novel is to reveal this movement, to shed light on its

design. The novel’s telos is to allow the masterplot of the

Fall of Man to displace into a contemporary context.

The world comes in the shape of a story for traditional

realism. In Modernist fiction, however, there is only the

order that we perceive or construct, which makes literature

awfully difficult to interpret. Mythological order becomes

more buried, obscured, by an increasingly subjective frame

of reference. It is no coincidence that the

professionalization of literary criticism and eventually the

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rise of theory result from modernism. Its texts not only

require vigorous interpretation, but also compel us to

reinvestigate the more intricate layers of other texts in

the literary canon that had been only examined through an

evaluative and prescriptive lens. T.S. Eliot rediscovers mid

seventeenth-century poetry that had, up until the early

20thC, been generally dismissed because the more extended

metaphorical conceits of a poet like John Donne obscured a

clear moral teleology. Modernist perception moves from the

magical, outer and transcendent all-knowing eye to an inner,

subjective point of view, turning language into a far more

difficult issue than something that can be addressed by mere

evaluative and appreciative criticism. Since the temporal

order of the world becomes radically subjective, origins and

endings no longer inhere in the actual world. It is the

reader and the writer who takes control of such order.

One might call the twentieth century the era of

narrative crisis. Although we attribute the notion that the

middle of the twentieth century, as it emerges from two

world wars, witnesses the destruction of metanarratives to

Francois Lyotard, who claims the rejection of grand

narratives that shape truth characterizes postmodernism, the

epistemological suspicion of narrative is well underway in

the nineteenth century. The genetic fallacy claims that

knowing how and when something began does not mean you will

gain the truth about it. A grand narrative, like the Fall of

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Man, cannot explain everything, particularly after Darwin

postulates an indeterminate evolution of the human from

lower life forms. Singular creation and apocalyptic

completion no longer provide total coherence. Instead, we

understand Truth (with a capital T) in terms of an always-

shifting collection of miniature narratives that yield many

truths. The understanding of the world loses its wholeness

that must be found only provisionally through the many parts

comprised of the web of text, the endless strands of mini-

narratives all competing to tie some ribbon of meaning into

a whole.

METAFICTION

Narrative suggests that the world has shape since a

plot that constructs narrative coherence depends upon

consecution, a procession of cause and effect. For centuries

up until the twentieth, humans have depended upon narrative

procession to confirm such master-narratives as human

progress, the power of Reason, the development of

Enlightenment thought, the march of science, the march of

freedom, the march of democracy . . . High school history

textbooks continue to profess a linear movement of progress:

America, despite some setbacks here and there, is always

advancing toward a more perfect union. However, the horrors

of World War I show that reality is not a tidy evolution.

The most advanced civilizations in the world slaughter 9

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million in a war of attrition, forcing the human to question

belief in human progress, the lack of which is only affirmed

when the war to end all wars is followed by the genocidal

horror of World War II. It is impossible to overstate the

extent to which World War I traumatically ruptures the

notion of European progress, a catastrophe that tears

history into a before and after, and that only makes the

next war seem almost fatefully inevitable. The Great War

results in the scandal of novelists who hold on to naïve

assumptions that nineteenth-century realism can continue to

represent reality, which Virginia Woolf deracinates in “

***” If the battlefields between 1914 and 1918 reveal the

ghastly illusion of grand narratives, what remains as a

consequence are partial-truths and fragmented accounts—much

like post-traumatic expression—a web of different points of

view that do not naturally unveil an ideal, providential

shape to experience, but wind through a textual

representation. Words start to become unhinged from

reference in a stable field of representation.

If endings try to forge a design on a world textually

fragmented, they do so by simplifying and impoverishing that

world. Modernists become aware that narrating is at the same

time falsifying. Endings are tropes just like the devices by

which authors configure temporal consecution out of

duration. Modernism subverts notions of realism. Therefore

the most realistic novel, in a sense, becomes one that is

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most conscious of its falsification. The falsification of

closure, the figurative crafting of narrative duration, is

why modernist authors are obsessed with time as a fictional

construct. As fiction becomes self-conscious of its own

fictiveness, it also becomes prevalently time-conscious.

In its pivot between realism and falsification, the

most prevailing trope of modernist fiction becomes irony. The

gap between reality and fiction widens at the same time as

authors become more self-conscious of the extent to which

they make that gap manifest. Authors narrate accounts by

foregrounding their own limitations. Many modernist novels

center on the novelist’s struggle to tell a story, a

narrative in which the novelist of the novel we read takes

center stage in the genre of metafiction, a genre that

remains prevalent today despite its worn out conventions:

Heart of Darkness, The Good Soldier, At Swim Two Birds, The End of the Affair,

The Comforters.

For instance, the storyteller, John Dowell in Ford

Maddox Ford’s The Good Soldier goes to great lengths to

acknowledge the gaps in recounting the past to the point

that Ford implies the impossibility to tell a story

straight. Dowell’s refrain is “I don’t know” repeated dozens

of times throughout his narrative that moves tortuously back

and forth between a ten-year period as he tries to gain

closure after a series of tragic events of which he plays a

part. Never arriving at a satisfying ending, each chapter

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reaches the crescendo of a character’s pitifully absurd

death, only to return to the train of confusing events that

led to the disintegration of his marriage and the social

circle it orbited. Dowell’s unknowingness is so entrenched

that Ashburnham’s suicide, the “good soldier” of the title

comes at the very end as an afterthought. In fact, Dowell

exclaims that he almost forgot about the suicide! The final

death that should round off the flux in the middle arrives

instead like an ellipsis. If Dowell had more time, it seems,

he would continue to narrate another chapter in his

retrospective scan of the past as he tries to figure things

out. The ending of The Good Soldier foregrounds the fictional

arbitrariness of endings.

Even works that are not explicitly about the author

writing a novel deal with the difficult machinations of

narration. William Faulkner’s short story “A Rose for Emily”

has a narrator timid about owning his own account as he

hides behind the official sounding first person plural,

“we,” couching his narrative in the tone of a spokesperson

for a municipal committee. At the same time he jumps forward

and backward in time in order to creep up to the grisly

discovery in Emily’s upstairs bedroom as though he must

tread to the end carefully. His storytelling has an element

of refinement that puts a veneer over the grotesque

circumstances. The story ends with the ghastly revelation

that Emily had kept Baron’s corpse in their marriage bed

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like a truth too traumatic to grasp in the present. The

nearest one can arrive at the truth in modernist fiction is

to confess one’s difficulty in getting there. The modern

narrative finds ways, then, to intimate the possibility of

many versions of the subject other than its own. Samuel

Beckett’s novels, for instance, set out on one narrative

only to abort it for another one moments after it begins

that is equally pointless. Like the two tramps in Waiting for

Godot, the plot never gets anywhere but spends a lot of time

trying to, and the revelation never arrives.

Without a foundation in objective reality or a mythical

origin, modern narrative wanders through an in-between state

in search of origins and endings, which is why stories of

the past century find endings so difficult, indeed, why the

difficulty of an ending itself becomes the central conflict

of the novel. Modern fiction must find ways to be self-

sustaining. Unlike Homer or the author of Genesis, modern

fiction appeals to its own authority. The impossibility to

articulate the simplest story, even the nature of telling a

story itself, becomes the conflict of the plot for a

substantial amount of modern novels and poems. Although two

world wars and the accumulation of atrocities that surround

them destroy a belief that history progresses toward an

achieved fulfillment (which will lead to the current post-

apocalyptic fixation), a progressive sense of history

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already begins to crumble between the late nineteenth and

early twentieth centuries. World War I is the event that

most traumatically ruptures literary history, but it is also

too frequently used as a convenient marker for the beginning

of literary modernism. This leads to a drastic misreading of

modernism in its relationship to the development of

modernity going back to the early sixteenth century. The

increasingly complex nature of narrative that must combine

necessity with gratuity results partly from the

disintegration of belief in a linear narrative in which the

human advances from barbarism to civilization. This

narrative of progress begins with the Protestant Revolution

and proceeds through the advancements of empirical reasoning

and secularism in the 17th and 18th centuries. History,

philosophy, biology, and eventually psychology in the 19th

century, however, evidence how the advancement of

civilization is concomitant to barbarity.

The Journey of Closure

The savagery behind civilization is certainly the main

point of Marlow’s impossible story that barely gets off the

ground in Heart of Darkness, a novel that predates 1914 by

fourteen years. It is no surprise that Kurtz, the monstrous

figure whom Marlow must search for initially came to Africa

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as “an emissary of pity, and science, and progress, and

devil knows what else.” Although Kurtz took the job managing

the post in the Central Station in the ivory trade

championing progress and enlightenment, he degenerates into

a savage who performs “unspeakable rites” and amends his

manuscript on the European mission to civilize Africa with

the terrifying phrase, “Exterminate the brutes!” Recently

there has been a growing interest in the relationship

between colonialism and apocalypse that has also been

evolving into an interest in the post-apocalyptic

imagination in relation to post-colonialism.

As an adventure story, Heart of Darkness deconstructs the

mythologies of human progress inherent in the adventure of

colonialism by using the plot convention of the journey, the

most prevalent motif in literature. Marlow’s fitful journey

by steamship up the Congo repeats the plot convention of

Huck and Jim’s journey by raft on the Mississippi. The river

motif returns in works, such as Hemingway’s “The Two Big-

Hearted River,” James Dickey’s Deliverance, and Cormac

McCarthy’s Sutree. Like the map of rivers running throughout

Africa that allures Marlow as a child, the river provides a

symbol of the serpentine movement of life from an origin to

a terminus while it also represents the possibility of a

return. PETER BROOKS ON THE RIVER = PLOT

Stories are rife with journeys. The foundational work

of literature in the West, Homer’s Odyssey, depicts a circular

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journey of departure and return in its movement from chaos

that results from a rupture —Paris kidnapping Helen of Troy—

and the restoration of order the return provides—Odysseus’s

homecoming in Ithaca. Joyce imposes Homer’s mythical

narrative over the haphazard wanderings of Stephen and

Leopold in their separate journeys out into Dublin and back

home again to create a modernist cyclical view in which all

of history occurs in a single day. Stephen’s rejection of

Leopold’s offer for lodging in the penultimate chapter,

however (a moment that always stirs deep sadness in me),

ruptures the reunion of Odysseus and Telemachus it mimics.

But the novel resolves the fragmentary chaos of modern

Dublin Joyce sutures together over seven hundred pages on

the most affirmative note in literary history, Molly Bloom’s

erotic and orgiastic “Yes.”

The convention of the journey never tires in

literature for the simple fact that the plot of a story must

move. Without movement there is no plot. Like a shark, a

story dies (or comes to an end) if the plot stops moving.

All of the medieval romances that constitute a few hundred

years of European and British literature center on tales of

the knight-errant. The plot of these stories are comprised

of events that test, challenge, and threaten the knight on

his quest for treasure, frequently the Holy Grail (which is

why it has become a euphemism for the unattainable goal),

and his return home as a stronger individual and, hence, the

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insurer of a strengthened kingdom. The ending reveals either

the knight’s success or failure at proving his Christian

virtue, protecting the virtue of his lady and of the

monarchy, and perpetuating the strength of his kingdom.

Gawain, who begins Sir Gawain and the Green Knight an untested

knight eager to show off for Guinevere as much as he feels

incumbent to save face for king Arthur, returns to Camelot a

seasoned knight because his pride has been humbled (if not

humiliated). The plot is concordantly eschatological. Gawain

wins salvation for Camelot because the triumph of England is

already realized in the slap-dashed history the narrator

opens with. More importantly, the plot begins with the

inflated ego of Camelot and ends with ego deflated. But in

its place Gawain attains strength more powerful than empty

pride. As a representative of England, Gawain achieves self-

knowledge of his own fallibility, which results in his

strength from wretchedness.

The knightly romances constitute a cohesive religious

and monarchial eschatology, which makes sense. The knight

serves the two institutions that dominate the medieval

world, Church and State. The salvation of one depends upon

the other; a kingdom is bound to the realized salvation of

the Church. Unlike the ancient world, the afterlife is at

the core of Christianity in which each person is unique in

his or her very human combination of greatness and

wretchedness: wretched because the human is depraved enough

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to crucify Christ, and great because Christ died for human

sin, making the human possible to fulfill the potential God

created him to be, and promising an eschatology already

realized in spite of wretchedness.

The knight, therefore, is not an individual on a quest

for self-knowledge as its own pursuit, a good in of itself.

He represents the providential plot of a whole kingdom. The

crucial difference is that the ancient world not only

isolates gods to locations—they are spatially limited—but

also makes them unbound to any moral system. Homer’s god-

like warriors journey and fight for glory as something

divine in its own right. The finality of death makes the

battle in the face of its inevitability all the more

glorious. Narrative in the Christian world, however,

spatially dislodges the divine. In the medieval world the

divine is no longer relegated within the city, behind the

walls, in a space or person who must be paid homage, but

splays out into the entire world. Everything in the world,

natural and manmade, and every event comprise manifest signs

from God since his presence is everywhere. This allows

medieval narrative to take on its highly allegorical nature

as everything in the world is invested with spiritual and

symbolic value. The physical world always embodying and

projecting the divine for the medieval world maintains its

narrative power all the way up into the novel, a form that

elevates the ordinary to allegorical significance, bestowing

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the diurnal with value that makes the lives of everyday

people the central subject of narrative.

As the Roman paradigm of one world bound together in a

single destiny crumbles and monarchism and then nationalism

rise, the journey motif transitions into the individual

quest for self-knowledge that induces and is induced by

self-consciousness. By the early 1500s, the Protestant

Revolution, with its emphasis upon the sovereignty of the

self—each person is his or her own priest, as Martin Luther

preaches—exposes the falsities of the Romance tradition. The

narrative conventions of the knight errant wear out. The

knight becomes the courtier, whose journeys narrow to

parochial interests and the search for personal and erotic

fulfillment in the renaissance, incorporating the complex

codes of courtly love into the sonnet tradition and drama.

The figure of the hero that begins as a knight, a prince,

and then a courtier devolves into the farcical figure, the

picaresque hero who becomes the archetypal protagonist of

the early novel. Don Quixote, the ludicrous sentimentalist

for bygone romances that led him to lunatic journeys that

never really get anywhere, at least in reality, catches his

mania for adventure from the influence of books. Two

centuries before the novel becomes the most popular genre

the motif begins of the person led astray by books, like ***

in Northanger Abbey. In Don Quixote’s ridiculous adventures

the teleology of the ancient epic form becomes humbled and

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rustic. The protagonist’s heroic search for truth ensues

over long prose narratives to register the increasingly

difficult path to truth, and which eventually become the

novel, a form that draws its figures down to our homely

level to represent who we are and even, ironically, stoops

to levels beneath us.

The novel continues the journey motif. As modernity

progresses the knight becomes an ordinary individual in

search of truth, which becomes increasingly contingent upon

self-knowledge wrapped up in a deepening self-consciousness.

Pilgrim, the everyday Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress; Gulliver,

the beguiled man of reason in Gulliver’s Travels; Tom Jones, the

adventuring rogue in Tom Jones; Crusoe, the self-reliant

capitalist in Robinson Crusoe; Pip, the poor orphan desirous of

aristocratic destiny in Great Expectations; Ahab, the figure

driven by obsession in Moby Dick; Huck, a young boy rebelling

against hypocritical antebellum morality in Huckleberry Finn;

Clarissa, a housewife struggling for self-affirmation in Mrs.

Dalloway; Leopold, a middle-aged advertising executive longing

for a son in Ulysses; the uprooted youth wandering America in

On the Road; Oedipa Mass, an amateur sleuth tasked to uncover

the conspiratorial mysteries of America in The Crying of Lot 49. A

teleology that deepens the desire to realize an increasingly

difficult ending into something more unconscious drives each

protagonist. The ends of the search for truth become

elusive, impossible. From Pilgrim’s Progress in which the hero

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searches for the Christian salvation already predestined to

The Crying of Lot 49 in which Oedipa searches through a

labyrinthine of meaning behind the impossibly complex

systems of signs in America that remain forever elusive, the

quest motif becomes the impossible search for truth.

But now we have a big irony that goes to the heart of

the necessary falsification of experience an ending imposes

on narrative. There is nothing more hackneyed than the metaphor of life is

a journey. It is a cliché, easily used to short circuit

interpretation. The journey metaphor connotes a life of

continuity and purpose. We are all travellers on our way to

a destination. The road trip continues to be a very popular

motif in literature in America where the pioneering dreams

of freedom, adventure, expansion, and life anew come to

fruition in the romance and speed of the highway. The road

trip motif allows a character to remain free from an origin

or destination. She is neither here nor there, but exists in

a suspended state of flux, an in-between space where the

self can explore and revel in the fragmentary transience of

fleeting towns and cities in ever widening and shifting

spaces. There is no obligation. A surplus of possibility

lies ahead, which is why the road trip is often Dionysian

and nihilistic. At the same time the purpose of the road

trip is to get somewhere, to discover something. In the end,

all road trip narratives boil down to the journey of self-

knowledge, even if the journey, like Oedipa’s quest for the

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mysteries of America, is a search for something seemingly

beyond the self. It is fitting that Oedipa’s name is a

playful feminization of the archetypal figure of tragic

self-knowledge. But the irony remains: the journey to self-

knowledge becomes as clichéd as the journey of life. The

hackneyed status of the journey metaphor is evident by the

ease with which a student can apply it to any piece of

literature. Since plot necessitates movement, a starting

point and an end, and since at least one voice must be

engaged in that movement (someone speaks), any story or poem

can become a life journey that results in self-knowledge.

The irony that a cliché envelops almost all elements of

narrative reveals the rigidity of plot. In its final

analysis, since plot involves the sequential arrangement of

elements to form the beginning and end, there is nothing

much new that plot can do since the earliest storytellers

than to portion out a segment of time in its narrow

paradigms familiar to readers. This is why so many authors

can write novels based upon a formula. An author can pour

the material of the story into a prefabricated plot. This

does not mean that the plot of a formulaic novel is not

interesting or creative. Many of them, in fact, are more

interesting than the plots of literature. It means that an

author has used the nature of plot as a fixed and

predestined form in ways that do not demand much

interpretation from the reader. There is little or no ironic

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distance between the level of expectation and its

fulfillment, which is why films adapted from pulp fiction

are usually more successful than film adaptations of

literature.

A useful way in which to understand the structure of

plot, in fact, is to read formulaic narratives, like

romances, detective stories, or screenplays. Screenwriters

work almost exclusively within the austere limitations of

plot. By watching films or reading screenplays, a student in

particular can learn a lot about the sedimentation of the

ways plot have provided meaning over centuries beneath which

a storehouse of myths exists. A screenwriter must fit her

material into a ruthlessly economic plot that is

recognizable and necessary for the millions of people who

attend movies both nationally and globally.

Modernism and Closure

Let’s return to Benjamin’s “angel of history.” It comes

in his final work Theses on the Philosophy of History, which he wrote

at a particular moment of crisis, 1939, on the cusp of World

War II. There is no doubt that his bitterness toward Marxism

results from Stalin’s 1939 non-aggression pact with Hitler.

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The Theses is a rejection of the past as a continuous history

of human progress. Although Marx replaces the Hegelian

progress of history with his dialectical materialism,

Benjamin criticizes him for retaining a belief in human

teleology. Marx’s Utopian vision is not that different from

a messianic / eschatological narrative. Both require a

destruction of the world, and each promises a more perfect

world to follow.

Pointing out the miniscule duration of human history in

contrast to the universe, Benjamin turns the human into a

farce. “The here-and-now, which is the model of messianic

time summarizes the entire history of humanity into a

monstrous abbreviation, coincides to a hair with the figure,

which the history of humanity makes in the universe.”

Although this prefigures the postmodern reduction of the

human into an absurd figure, like Vonnegut’s “wisp of

undifferentiated nothingness” whose history is a mere

“peephole” in the universe, such attacks on Enlightenment

notions of human progress and the perfection of mankind

predate his work. His critique is current to the crisis in

1939, but it is a belated response to the lag end of high

modernism.

The nineteenth century had already given birth to what

Paul Ricoeur calls “hermeneutics of suspicion,” an age that

questions and demythologizes assumptions inherited from

modernity. The masters are Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche,

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although he could have included Darwin. At the height of the

Enlightenment there already develops counter-Enlightenment

thinking, such as Vico’s departure from Cartesian models of

history or Voltaire’s ridicule of Spinoza after the Lisbon

earthquake. In the next century Nietzsche reduces the human

to a decentered subject who faces a terrifying and Dionysian

freedom after killing God. Spengler turns the linear

progression of history into a centripetal spiral that

implodes in on itself, like Yeats’ gyres of history swirling

out of control so that “the center cannot hold.”

Civilization does not progress toward perfection, but

reaches a point at which whatever brought it to its height

precipitates its decline. Writers become obsessed with

disintegration. Henry Adams proclaims the Age of the Dynamo

when ever-increasing speed accelerates toward entropy; the

human comes to worship the machine as opposed to the

aesthetics that once provided metaphysical permanence for a

bygone era represented by the Virgin. For Freud in Civilization

and its Discontents, the work of civilization requires the

expenditure of primordial energy in increasing acts of

barbarity, a theory proven by the horror of World War I. In

its millenarian optimism, the West never imagined the

slaughter of 1914 to 1918 could happen as British soldiers

were expected to be home by Christmas. Civilization for

Freud, like religion, is an illusion foisted on reality to

defend against a primal past and future annihilation.

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Augustine’s memory and anticipation that tear the self

asunder is tame compared to the speculative drama of Eros

and Thanatos that ends Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

World War I that laid waste to most of Europe confirms

the worst nightmares of late 19thC prognosticators, and

induces literary depictions of culture in a state of

terminal decadence. Eliot’s The Waste Land continues to have

such an impact today because of its apocalyptic tone. The

byzantine reference to literature, the poem reveals a

decadent post-war culture swallowing great works of the past

and spitting them out into mutated forms that the poet

sutures together, a culture in triage. But the poem does not

depict a catastrophic ending. Instead, culture devolves into

fragmentation and meaninglessness that shares, in many ways,

with the “uncreating light” that ends Alexander Pope’s The

Dunciad. The high tragedy of Othello turns into the

Shakespearean rag playing on a gramophone. Crowds of people

surging over London Bridge on their way to work superimpose

Dante’s image of the walking dead that inhabit the inferno.

The cacophony of motorcars congesting the roads becomes the

sound of Andrew Marvell’s destiny racing up behind us.

Abelard’s love for Eloise plays out as a seedy tryst between

a secretary and a pimply clerk that the mythical blind seer,

Tiresias, is relegated to witness over and over again.

The ending of Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” echoes the limp

apocalypse of The Waste Land in which the world ends “Not with a

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bang but a whimper.” In the poem, the alarm of an imminent

apocalypse comes from the bartender’s repeated warning,

“HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME.” Eliot’s early poems remain

central to literary experience because its perpetual

fragmentation foreshadows postmodern estrangement. The Waste

Land speaks to a world hungering to become whole again, to

connect, to gain closure, which accounts for the irresolute

ending in lines that combine nursery rhyme and prayer in the

haphazard juxtapositions of an avant-garde collage. The end

hints at the potential for healing as the Fisher King,

rendered impotent by the desiccated landscape, reflects upon

the morass of confusing experience: “These fragments I have

shored against my ruins.” The line stands out from the rest

that, despite the mournful tone, is affirmative in its

clarity. Despite the terminal decline of civilization,

consciousness imposes a kind of order. Eliot intimates hope,

albeit shattered, that literature can heal. The rain

promises to end the drought and heal the illness. The prayer

of “peace which passeth understanding,” intimates the

ordering effects of poetry.

Shortly after The Waste Land Eliot becomes a British

citizen, converts to Anglo-Catholicism, and subscribes to

Royalism. He comes to believe that religion offers ultimate

coherence while poetry and criticism serves this end.

Despite the horrors of World War II, the prevailing message

of the various pilgrimages in Four Quartets is the salvific

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power of religious investment in a national poetry. The

fragments of culture can be shored against the ruins of

civilization by returning to culture, religion, and nation.

Permanence is the answer. Tradition saves a dissipate

society increasingly indifferent toward reflection and

alienated from its historical situation. Eliot urges that

the public must resist the anarchy Matthew Arnold feared and

accommodate the intellectual elite. Poetry can save us if

only we surrender to higher ideologies. The argument for the

power of poetry to redeem time from its fragmentation and

unify consciousness seems to have worn out its welcome. It

is hardly a winning argument today. does not gain the

dominant discourse of postmodernism.1

Eliot’s work of the 1920s and 30s represents the

prevailing mood of the modernist apocalyptic imagination

while his later poems work against the grain of the growing

postmodern mentality. A metanarrative of eternal order,

whether one of secular humanism or Christianity, undergirds

the contingency of existence and supports the poet’s effort 1 Despite the aesthetic triumph of Four Quartets, The Waste

Land endures as the landmark poem of high modernism. Eliot may have dismissed his earlier work as mere “grousing,” but it is his earlier vision of destruction and alienation that persists. It seems unlikely that Four Quartets will take root in our consciousness the same way as The Waste Land. Redemptionfrom a catastrophic history provided by religious belief does not resonate as powerfully as Hurry Up Please It’s Time. Instead, Eliot’s later poetry makes him sound like a churchwarden.

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to recreate meaning in the world. The salvific power of art

is never more urgently necessary than it is for the

modernists. The speed of technology that thrilled and

terrified Henry Adams in 1903 fragments community from

nation, self from the world, and the self from the self, a

condition of epistemological alienation confirmed by the

Great War. But novelists and poets in the 1920s jump in to

reconcile these divorces, doing so, ironically, by divorcing

themselves from the previous century. The providential plots

of the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries that create a

seamless coherence to all the stray strands of narrative

treat temporality far too artificially and naïvely for the

modernists.

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Chapter Eleven

The Beforeness and Afterness of 1945

As industry and inventiveness progresses to make

modernism ever more self-consciously modern, the human

increasingly loses a sense of metaphysical permanence. Just

in the few years around 1900, Freud maps the unconscious as

a mysterious and dangerously determining realm while

Einstein’s Theory of Relativity makes space and time a lot

stranger than anyone thought. Everything enters a state of

experiment and improvisation, subjectivity and relativism.

Literature must keep up with the challenges to traditional

ways of seeing a world rapidly reforming around the demands

of the new perceiving consciousness of the self. Therefore,

the novel becomes a form where authors challenge the

apprehension of reality through impressionism, stream of

consciousness, and fragmentation.

World War I interrupts the modernist experiment. Within

a few years the war destroys ideals of European human

progress that had already been assaulted before the war, and

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exposes the barbarity behind civilization. There is nothing

that suggests permanence. The idyllic tradition of

Shakespeare and Milton that millions of British soldiers

volunteered to defend, as it does for Septimus Smith,

becomes a sham. Despite the rupture of unmitigated carnage

in history, however, the writer and artist of the post-war

period remains driven to find ways to form meaning. They may

have been the “lost generation,” dislocated by the shock of

the war, but there is probably no literary period in which

novelists, poets, and artists have such a “rage for order.”

Instead of an apocalyptic imagination that projects world-

ending disaster, the literature of this period seeks to

recreate meaning, to build the world in defiance of disaster.

Like the massive effort to rebuild physical space after war,

novelists and poets work to rebuild metaphysical space. So

much of the psychoanalysis that begins and becomes a more

acceptable science as a result of the war is driven toward

rebuilding the soldier’s traumatized self, shoring the

fragments against his ruins.

Peter Gay argues, “modernist fiction undermined

accepted criteria for literary verdicts—coherence,

chronology, closure, let alone reticence—and turned inward,

shockingly.” I am not sure how “shockingly” modernists

turned inward compared to the Germans in the early 1500s,

the Elizabethan and Jacobean drama of the late 1500s and

early 1600s, the prose and poetry of British, French and

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German romanticism in the early 1800s, including the

burgeoning fascination with lurid biography toward the end

of that century. The modernists have a rage for coherence

and closure, albeit from a different point of view. I think

a better way to put it is that modernist literature

emphasizes interiority as the ground of consciousness, despite

how fragmented it is, and reimagines the world mapped by the

complexities of this newly subject-centered space. The

modernist shift toward interiority coincides with a rapid

movement toward relativism (a term fraught with contention)

as a priori or metaphysical truths become inadequate to account

for the complexity of human experience. Given the betrayal

of faith in the external world, it would make sense that

artists turn to the operations of consciousness itself.

By the beginning of the 20thC, truth is already

loosened from its binds in the total coherence assumed

throughout previous centuries. The serial catastrophes that

ensue with World War I only confirm the impossibility of a

single, coherent order while exponentially eroding the

belief in innate human goodness and progress. There is a

misunderstanding that the great experimentation in the art

and literature of modernism begin after World War I. Post-

impressionism, cubism, stream-of-consciousness, imagism and

many other isms combine with the most rapid expansion of

modern technological invention in the fervent decades

preceding the war.

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What changes is that status of the modern artist. The

artistic and literary elite, who does not have much of an

influence upon mainstream culture, undertakes the

experimentation that is well underway before 1914. The

attack against utilitarian bathos begins roughly around the

time Baudelaire writes The Painter of Modern Life. **** The impetus

to separate from mass media continues with an elite group of

writers and artists who counter in particular the prosaic

utility of journalism and photographic replication.

Modernism is really a literary and artistic attempt to

wrench creative production out of the easy pleasure of

middle class practicality and function. The Armory Show in

1913 shocks Gilded Age sensibilities with its onslaught of

impressionism, post-impressionism, fauvism, and cubism—it is

one of the most incredible exhibits in history—but remains a

fringe novelty before the war like the equally creative

literature of the period. Mainstream culture does not

generally take these new approaches toward visual arts

seriously until the old Victorian world begins to fade. In

the 1920s, things reverse as, jazzed by the electricity of

modernity, the mainstream coopts modernism in the 1920s. In

fact it is an endlessly frustrating irony that modernism,

originally an attack on contemporary mainstream and middle

class values of industrialism, is coopted by the very

culture that artists and writers reject.

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The modern experimentation of the previous century may

not have become acceptable until the 1920s, but the series

of epistemological shifts in our understanding of the world

inherited from the nineteenth-century, like Darwin and

Nietzsche, inform the modernist sensibility before the war.

In particular, the human dominion over the world contributes

to the great flux of literary invention early in the

twentieth-century. We learn how to tame, harness and utilize

forces of nature and invent means by which to gain control

over the world that would have seemed, as Freud claims in

Civilization and its Discontents, like “an actual fulfillment of

every—or of almost every—fairy-tale wish.” He goes on,

All these assets he may lay claim to as his

cultural acquisition. Long ago he formed an ideal

conception of omnipotence and omniscience which he

embodied in his gods. To these gods he attributed

everything that seemed unattainable to his wishes,

or that was forbidden to him. One may say,

therefore, that these gods were cultural ideals.

To-day he has come very close to the attainment of

this ideal, he has almost become a god himself

(38).

And yet, those nations that are the pinnacle of

civilization slaughter each other in the battlefield with

the very technology that bestowed their godhood. Modernism

has always been fraught with such ambivalence. It is Janus

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faced. At one side are the incredible advancements of human

production in dominion over the world. On the other side are

the incredible acts of barbarity. World War I, in fact,

makes many artists skeptical of the grand experimentation

that had preceded the European bloodshed. Artists, like

Picasso, take a hiatus from cubism and return to a neo-

classical style. Many ask, is there something about the

experimental rejection of tradition that allowed for the

annihilation of two generations of Europeans on the

battlefield?

As we will see in Part II, there is a powerful post-war

return to religion, particularly Catholicism, which is

understated in literary history but every bit as influential

as the secular humanist tradition that dominates the

modernist canon. But this return to religion does not

nostalgically recuperate a bygone tradition, despite (and in

spite) of the Catholic Church’s doctrines that inculcated a

trenchant anti-modernity all the way until the 1960s.

Instead, a rich array of writers in the early and mid-

twentieth century reimagines religion in the contemporary

context that is fraught with ambivalence concerning belief.

G.K. Chesterton, T.S. Eliot, Hillarie Belloc, Graham Greene,

Evelyn Waugh, C.S. Lewis, J.R. Tolkien, Dorothy Sayers,

Muriel Spark, Walker Percy, Flannery O’Connor, to name a

few, form a powerful canon of modern literature that depicts

the struggle between belief and unbelief. They, in fact,

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make the question of belief the most central concern of the

modern era, particularly their representations of

eschatological and apocalyptic concerns that become more

complex as the century progresses.

I also disagree with Peter Gay’s characterization of

the effects of both wars on art in that “the world that

emerged after the peace treaties of 1918 and 1919 generated

few striking innovations in high culture. Much to the

contrary, the ending of the Second World War, which left the

map of European countries—except for that of Germany—largely

intact, confronted those who presumably cared about high

culture with gross moral failures and irrepressible horrors

to explain, expiate, or evade” (442). I am not sure how Gay

accounts for Eliot, Stevens, Joyce, Woolf, Hemingway, and

Faulkner, the glorious achievements of high modernism in the

1920s and 30s. Although World War II does result in literary

exhaustion reflected in poetry and fiction’s turgid progress

up until the 1960s and 70s, America and eventually Britain

do respond with new forms that revitalize “high culture.”

Narrative and lyric, despite events that change everything,

prove to be remarkably resilient and, as we will see in

post-9/11 fiction, oddly comfortable with returning to

traditional realism.

But what about that thorny term “postmodern” used to

describe this era and that we creep up to carefully? It is

too easy to say that the modernist poet attempts to cling to

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meaning she tries to recreate in a chaotic world while the

postmodernist rejects meaning after the horrors in 1945. It

seems to me that the work emerging after 1918 fulfills a

great deal of the experimentation beginning before the war,

while the ambivalence toward human nature that the war

creates deepens literature with a more complex rage for

order. The artist emerging from 1945, however, has a harder

task than the modernist emerging from 1918. 1945 poses much

larger challenges. Theodore Adorno’s famous and

misunderstood claim, “Poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”

challenges writers either to express the impossibility of

poetry or to rebel against it by continuing the modernist

rage for order. Adorno’s claim continues to haunt us because

he detects the overwhelming burden of afterness more urgently

felt beyond 1945 than in any other time in history. It is

this sense of a final afterness that makes our age so

trenchantly post-apocalyptic.

Never before has such a rapid series of cataclysmic

events culminating in the atomic bombs challenged the

artist’s vocation. Throughout history writing has been

driven to uncover the secrets of experience, to shed light

on or give meaning to the antimonies of life, even if the

truths that compel the quest end in the necessity of death,

like Ahab and the whale. But what secrets are left to plumb

after the discoveries of Auschwitz and before the very real

possibility of nuclear annihilation? Is it still possible to

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imagine, like Bottom’s “dream which hath no bottom,” that

vision provides ever deepening and unfathomable wonders? Or

does the bottom of that dream reveal a nullity?

Up until 1945, the depth of horror always serves as a

dangerous place of discovery, a threshold that the writer

dares to tread. Marlow pulls back from the abyss that Kurtz

plunges into, which leaves him with only an ambivalent

fragment of the story. He will never know what “the horror!”

is. The taboo has always been a source for the imagination.

There has always been another vision too dangerous to see,

another veil of darkness to uncover. Shakespeare takes the

audience to the depths of unfathomable desire in Iago or

Edmund, or reveals the potential of depravity by thrusting

Gloucester’s torture front-stage. But, as Hamlet says before

the poison kills him, there is so much more to say. Is there

something more to say in the ruined afterness of 1945? Can

narrative and lyric bend to a world that seems to have

uncovered all the horror possible and that had once remained

only the potential of human imagination? Are the only two

possibilities for inspiration a world of fantasy or a

crapulent world left behind in the ruins? In Slaughterhouse

Five, Billy Pilgrim can either live with the reality of

contemporary mid-western life that looks like bombed out

Dresden or he can escape to an imaginary Eden on

Tralfamadore in the role of Adam with Montana Wildhack his

Eve. He chooses the latter. In the final chapter, Vonnegut,

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the framed narrator, remerges from the fiction to reveal

that, despite the possibility of constructing alternate

worlds out of Kilgore Trout novels, the actual world

continues on to deliver shit. Vonnegut might express the

dilemma in a different context, but it shares Prufrock’s

dilemma in 1911 when “human voices wake us and we drown.”

Although literary studies uses the Holocaust and the

atomic bombs to divide postmodernism from modernism, just

exactly when postmodernism begins and how we define it is

even more beguiling than modernism. The term “postmodern,”

as many point out, is problematic alone, but signify the

apocalyptic anxieties that intensify in the second half of

the century. What does it mean to come after the contemporary?

Does not the literature we term postmodern shed light on its

attributes already inherent in modernism? Does postmodernism

not necessarily come after modernism but continue with its

program reconfigured to face the new realities of a terminal

era? Finnegan’s Wake is certainly more postmodern than many

works after 1945, whereas a great deal of postmodern poetry

returns to form as much as it departs from it, and not only

for ironic purposes.

It is more productive, I believe, to understand how

both movements (and both halves of the twentieth century)

work within and beyond each other. One necessitates the

other. Both periods of literature do not necessarily reject

the possibility of order beneath the chaos of the world or

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an order transcendent to a human level of comprehension.

They are both engaged in a rage for order. I know this is

antithetical to the postmodern claims of radical

indeterminacy. But even if postmodernism believes that

language is a series of metonymic markers forming a chain of

signification in a perpetually self-replicating surface

without depth, a belief in language remains nonetheless.

Something, not nothing, is articulated. A character in a

play by Beckett speaks even if he speaks of the

impossibility to speak. Postmodernism does not reject the

possibility that language does things, even if it is used to

communicate its own terminal inadequacy. Perhaps a belief in

the ultimate social and material construction of existence

replaces a spiritual dialectic. But the death of God and the

total dominance of Self only serve to form another

ideological construction; just because it rejects ideologies

does not unburden it of ideology.

This is the problem for me with the so-called New

Atheism of the past couple decades, primarily as led by

Christopher Hitchens, Richard Hawkins, Ian McEwan, and

Martin Amis, amongst others. In its absolute rejection of

God, Atheism becomes another absolutism burdened by its own

doctrines that are predicated on what it rejects. All

systems that support Atheism argue from what Atheism is not,

a sort of inverted negative theology. There is no middle

ground, no ambivalence. It is either total rejection or

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total affirmation. Either way, it amounts to fundamentalism,

one that refuses to acknowledge that its dependence upon

science is itself the adoption of a fundamental belief.

No poet of any worth has ever expressed a belief that

his or her work is the product of a social or material

construction. I have yet to read a poet’s own prose

concerning poetry that emphasizes the futility of language

or the impossibility of speaking beyond the self. I have yet

to shake hands with a social construction. It seems to me

that literary studies have grown exhausted with

deterministic notions that reality is bound by surface

replication. It remains, however, an uncertainty if a

renewed sense of value—whether we call it New Humanism, New

Ethics, a return to religion, or what have you—can become

important enough to resist the ethos of terminalism that

prevails in the world. We remain stuck in an afterness that is

more of a burden than an inspiration.

Modern and postmodern writers encounter a dual desire

seemingly at odds with itself. The poet wants to form an

aesthetic order out of experience at the same time as he or

she questions traditional aesthetic categories of

representation. Many modernists heed Ezra Pound’s call to

“make it new,” but it is impossible to amputate tradition.

Concerning T.S. Eliot, Frank Kermode says, “Tradition, a

word we especially associate with this modernist, is for him

the continuity of imperial deposits; hence, the importance

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in his thought of Virgil and Dante. He saw his age as a long

transition through which the elect must live, redeeming the

time” (112). Anthony Hecht, for instance, utilizes

traditional poetic form but questions the Western traditions

from which form evolves. He does not necessarily play form

ironically against content, but tries to save the best that

remains in the ruins of tradition. Hecht had witnessed the

horror of Buchenwald, which left him waking up screaming for

years. Trauma does not result for Hecht in what one expects,

a breaking of form for a confessional style of free verse,

but to shore fragments against his ruins in a modernist rage

for order.

As modernism protracts through serial catastrophe into

and beyond 1945, however, the acceleration of time’s

contraction into an urgent now makes a redeeming order lose

its battle against displacement into futurity. In the urge

to “make it new,” the modernist uses tradition to break from

it by selecting what remains of value, shoring fragments

against ruins. New artistic forms always carry with it

traces of what came before: it does not make much difference

if one wants to call the traces of the past the burden of

history, a canon, the touchstones, tradition, material

determinants, or the anxiety of influence. I am more

interested in the contemporary reader’s ability to translate

the tropes of the threshold of the end that inform our post-

apocalyptic tradition. Modern and postmodern work forces us

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to become cunning readers at inferring irony in their

complex stance toward not just form and content but also a

future inexorably coming and a past that is impossible to

keep repressed without the danger of allowing destructive

displacement to subsume the healing power of order.

In order to understand how a contemporary suspicion of

tradition replaces the modernist suspicion of futurity as it

converges to form the thick immediacy of the present

characteristic of our post-apocalyptic exhaustion, we need

to examine how the perception of time undergoes massive

changes over the past one hundred years, particularly the

nearly oppressive time-consciousness of modernist narrative

and lyric. In short, time is not the same as it was in the

nineteenth century. Time is not the same as it was even a

few decades ago. Temporal contraction and fragmentation has

made it so that a frightening paucity of one’s orientation

toward history has set in that contributes to terminal

malaise. The incredible array of choices characteristic of

secularism is partly to blame. This is countered, however,

by the irony that we live in a very religious time. However,

religions today tend to be either secularity in the disguise

of religiosity—devotion to an estranged, orphaned self—or

belief that preaches extreme apocalyptic ideologies—the rise

of radical fundamentalism—powerful as those beliefs might

be. Also partly to blame is the increasingly

compartmentalized world we live in that allows only a

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narrow, technical, and material experience of life, a

narrowness that has thoroughly penetrated higher education.

The possibility for a habitable future might depend on the

ways in which fictions can give a shape to time and,

conversely, the time we allow to give shape to fictions.

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Chapter Twelve

Modernist Time-Consciousness

The way we understand and experience time changes

radically in the first few decades of the 20thC. The changes

are so rapid we could call it a temporal revolution. This

revolution, like all upheavals, is disruptive and even

traumatizing in its effects that continue to deepen our

sense today of post-apocalyptic afterness.

Literature registers these changes in the perception of

time, particularly the thoroughly time-conscious work of the

early twentieth century. Time is not only the theme of

Modernist literature, but the poem and novel’s innovation

and experimentation, even the way it looks on the page,

embodies its own shifting perception of temporality. The

effect is that time rather than fate shapes the act of

narration and the voice of the lyric. An author who self-

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consciously rearranges narrative to make the resolution of

action achieve the illumination of experience replaces the

mimetic function by which nineteenth-century novels depict

action that moves in conflict driven consecution. Joyce’s

“epiphany” replaces the conventional “catastrophe” that

brings narrative action to resolution. A similar revolution

occurs in the lyric as poets and novelists share each

other’s craft. It is, in fact, the French Symbolists’

emphasis (brought to Anglophone modernism by Yeats, Pound,

and Eliot) on the power of the lyric to temporally suspend

experience that helps to draw the novel out of linear and

material sludge. Pound’s “Image” or concentrated “Vortex”

replaces romantic descriptiveness to capture intuitive or

intellectually layered abstractions from the moment rather

than a thematic whole. Eliot’s “fragmentation” and

“juxtaposition” replaces the logical and linear pace and

order of lines and stanzas to challenge closure. Whereas

traditional narrative and poetry works within paradigms of

linear progression, modernist works use temporal

fragmentation to form a complete picture unique to the world

of the story or poem. Fiction and poetry develop toward its

own self-realized time.

A great part of the temporal revolution of the

twentieth century results from rapid advancements in

technology that completely change society beginning in the

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late nineteenth century. The modern innovations of the

railway, photograph, motion picture, telephone, gramophone,

and radio radically reconfigure the way we perceive time.

By the early twentieth century the railway (including

trolleys and subways) transforms the entire makeup of

Europe, England, and America. It reshapes landscape,

contracts the space between people and regions, blurs the

lines between urban and rural, and contributes to the rapid

growth of cities. It uproots parochialism and increases

cosmopolitanism. For the first time one can exist in many

places at once. The railway, in short, alters how space

contains and measures time. The automobile and the highway

only accelerate this revolution by the middle of the

century. The automobile places control in the hands of the

individual, providing her the agency not only to shape

destiny, but also literally to drive to that destiny.

Immediacy thickens the more that the century progresses to

create the postmodern and contemporary density of the

present, a presentness of the present, which is the theme of

this chapter.

The railway’s fast and fluid movement between spaces

changes the temporal context of space from the nineteenth to

the twentieth century. One place is no longer isolated from

another. The space that a town, a village, a home occupies

is no longer relegated by time. London connects easily to

Cambridge, New York to Fairfield. As a result, the identity

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of each place becomes dissociated from its unique context.

As the self grows increasingly transient, so do the places

the self inhabits. More radically, the railway sweeps away

local time as England and America institute standardized

time to conform to the new world of train schedules and

regional interconnectivity. Therefore, the railway

contributes to the ways in which time measures and regulates

work and exchange. Capitalism can grow more quickly when

everyone is on the same temporal page! Originally measured

for religious purposes, such as a monk’s liturgical day,

time now thoroughly regulates capital, from work schedules

to the cost of time to accomplish a job.

The railway is a central feature in modernist

literature as both a romanticized instrument and a

disorienting disruption. In Woolf’s The Waves, Louis meditates

on the experience of flux during a train ride.

Now I hang suspended without attachments. We are

nowhere. We are passing through England in a

train. England slips by the window and always

changing from hill to wood, from rivers and

willows to towns again. And I have no firm ground

to which I go (50).

The movement between time and space is fluid and dynamic for

Louis, which makes the railway apropos for representing both

the experience of maturation and one era transitioning to

another. Adolescence can feel like a time in which one has

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“no firm ground to which I go” just as this new modern world

can quickly antiquate the past. The present is left

unfamiliar. The train ride embodies all of these experiences

in its rapid movement from one place to another, reducing

the world to an ever-changing blur from the window.

The quote from Woolf registers alienated modernity, the

sense of disconnection that intensifies after the war. In

“The Passenger,” Kafka’s protagonist reflects on the

alienation produced by the transitory nature of the railway.

“I am standing on the platform of the tram and am entirely

uncertain as to my place in this world, this town, my

family.” In Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” a man

pesters his mistress with a roundabout discussion over her

imminent abortion as they wait in a train depot in the

middle of nowhere in Spain. The transitory setting heightens

the horrible disposability of the relationship and the

pregnancy. Their luggage foreshadows the ease of moving on.

Eventually, of course, another train will easily allow the

man to move on for good.

The exhilarating disorientation of technology, such as

the railway, and the shifting space of modernism as it

invades the traditional order of family and community

accounts for the gloominess inherent in so much of its

literature. In A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh’s most depressing

comedy, Brenda is able to balance her marriage and her

extramarital affair because of the ease with which the train

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transports her between her family estate in the country,

Hetton Abbey, and her one room flat in London. Commuter

affairs become a new phenomenon. She is also able to

maintain her affair because of the telephone, which figures

dominantly in this 1935 novel. ***Quote***The telephone

shows the extent to which technology invades social

relationships in a new world of speed and change that

Brenda’s husband, Tony Last, the last guard of old world

tradition and permanence, (hence, his surname) cannot

navigate.

Along with the railway, rapid advancements in

communication deepen the “newness” of modernism and

contribute to the radical changes in the perception of time.

The telephone, gramophone, cinema, and radio are fixtures of

modern experience by the time Waugh writes A Handful of Dust.

But the old world stubbornly lingers. Hetton Abbey does not

have telephones and still depends on telegraph. One either

tries to catch up or remains, like Tony, hopelessly

relegated to the decay of the past. This accounts for the

disorienting superimposition of the new and the old in the

novel. The busy noise of the builders Brenda hires to

modernize a wing in the dour nineteenth-century setting

grows more frenzied as they apply sheepskin and chromium

plating to the dark, Victorian paneling. For Tony the

modernizers, such as Ms. Beaver (her name indicative of her

busy job scavenging old homes to make room for high rise

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apartments), invade like barbarians breeching the wall of

the city. Technology is also deadly. During a foxhunt, a

motorcycle backfires in its attempt to secure right of way

on the country road, making the horse that the Last’s little

boy rides kick out, sending him to his death beneath its

hooves.

Champions of a former way of life bemoan the ugliness

of modernism in many of Waugh’s novels, like Charles Ryder

in Brideshead Revisited, who makes a living off of painting

portraits of estates doomed for destruction that he can sell

to the former owners. New technologies turn the idealism of

aesthetics into materialism, the process Baudelaire feared

as a result of newsprint as early as the 1840s. The rapid

means by which technologies produce the increasing

homogeneity of cultural production to the masses compel

these first modernist responses. Modernism, in many ways, is

initially reactionary in its fear of the middle class

utilization of art. For defenders of “high art,” mass media

in the late nineteenth century, particularly journalism and

tabloids, produce a society apathetic to aesthetic

permanence. Late nineteenth-century aesthetes, such as

Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, promote art for art’s sake in

the belief that art exists for no other purpose than its own

beauty. It is an attempt to wrench art from the homogeneity

of mass cultural production and bestow literature with its

own time not contingent upon the speed of commercial forms.

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There is a clear connection between aestheticism and the New

Criticism that evolves in post-war America with its emphasis

on the ontological status of the poem as an autotelic object

isolated from all other contingent concerns. The poem, in a

sense, poses for the student’s interpretation.

Imagism, one of the first movements to announce the

arrival of modernism, thanks to Ezra Pound’s endless energy,

affirms newness by exhorting the reader to focus on the now,

the moment abstracted from the homogeneity of time. The

tenets of Imagism that urge ascetic form to isolate a single

moment or experience with as little language as possible

clearly counters mass media excess at the same time as it

rejects the bloated romanticism of late Victorian poetry

(Tennyson, Swinburne, etc.) For Pound, an image is “that

which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an

instant of time” and that is the “result of long

contemplation.” His most famous Imagist poem renders the

intuitive stillness of immediate vision, ironically, in the

context of a busy subway station.

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

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The two lines juxtapose disparate images, one on a busy

metro platform, the other a close-up of petals on a branch

in the rain. Both lines superimpose time and place to

capture separate scenes fusing into one intuitive

experience. The epigrammatic style Pound derives from

Japanese Haiku illustrates language much in the same way as

the Chinese ideogram pictorially presents phrases with one

character. Pound craftily edits the poem into tighter

contraction by replacing the expected like that ends the first

line with a semicolon. The immediate experience of metaphor

replaces simile. The use of like or as would interrupt the

total experience by making its linguistic operation too

transparent. The final effect is an immediate vision. Since

the poem has no context of place other than its title, it

demands the reader to focus on the phenomenology of

experience itself.

We do not generally associate the faces of commuters

jockeying for space on a platform with blossoms in the rain.

One could argue that faces in a crowd blurred from the

window resemble dewy flowers. Pound conveys the impression

that a visual moment presses on consciousness, an inexact

experience sculpted with exact language. An object

associates with something else that is completely different

but no less important in the streams and eddies of the mind.

The poem enacts the moment of vision captured amongst the

many currents of moments in a daydream.

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The word “apparition,” however, complicates the poem.

It connotes something haunting about the faces. The ghostly

crowd becomes an image of presence and absence as they

dither on a margin of being here and not here. It is a

presence in, but not of, the world. The crowd inhabits a

threshold between one place and another. As in Kafka’s

passenger waiting on the platform, the crowd and the words

in the poem are here and not here, neither coming nor going.

The first line is paradoxically frozen in transit until it

dissolves, like montage, the movement from one frame of film

to the next as the petals on the wet branch crystallize into

view. The metro denoted as physical transportation

transforms into poetic vision connoted as psychic

transportation in one moment of retention. The ghostlike

faces become the afterimages of the daydream. They are the

impression left behind, the delay between seeing and

contemplating, the moment and its afterimage. In the end,

the poem represents the immediacy of a memory as it forms an

epiphany.

Subways are screeching dynamos. In fact, the train, the

machine, the sublime industrial destruction of the modern

world becomes the dominant image of Vorticism, a movement

that develops only a year later and that Pound himself

adopts to depict a concentrated energy of language. It is

characteristic of modernist immutability that the classical

stillness of Imagism can give birth to and coexist with its

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antithesis. “In a Station of the Metro” is a resoundingly

quiet poem, like a still life, that uses the noise, speed,

and congestion of the metro for its context. Pound’s epic

poem written over decades, Cantos, is a busy, mind-numbing

vortex of language, but each “canto” offers stilled moments,

parts that can be read extracted from and then reinserted in

the whole.

Pound argues that one should not confuse Imagism with

“picture,” but should see Imagist poetry as a way of

depicting the experience of a mood, a moment, an idea, the

“thingness” of things in their essence. But the emphasis

upon the picture is prevalent nonetheless. When we read

Imagist poems, we think in terms of images. The isolation of

an image in poetry is made possible by the ways in which

photography in the nineteenth century changes mimesis.

Vorticism destroys the stillness or permanence associated

with the past by depicting the onrush of the future, but it

does so by creating depictions of chaos frozen into a whole

that can be utilized for purposes abstracted from their

original context.

In its ability to vividly capture reality, photography

singlehandedly destroys mimetic art in the nineteenth

century (while allowing art to take more adventurous

excursions into representation). Further, the ubiquity of

photography, as Walter Benjamin argues, abstracts the image

from its source and replicates it for any use. Consider how

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the high-minded doctrines of Imagism in 1913 resemble

advertising only fifty years later. We do not need the name

of the restaurant when the golden letter M can provide an

intuitive association to everything we desire from it. The

commercial power of the image to speak to nearly everyone on

the entire globe is no match for the Imagist’s aspirations.

Imagism is a mere heartbeat away from Marshall McLuhan’s

doctrine, “the medium is the message.” Andy Warhol’s Pop Art

of the 1950s and 60s turns the flattened space of visual

replication, the perpetual immediacy of advertising, into

high art.

Some artists and philosophers welcome the power of

communication to sweep away the old world in apocalyptic

destruction. The whole spirit of Dada is destruction. They

desire to eradicate traditional values placed upon art as a

way to reject the failures of the past. The playful anarchy

of Marcel Duchamp’s work forces us to question the ways art

inhabits space, like his urinal installation. Does an object

change when it is placed in a rarefied context? Can

anything, therefore, become a work of art? These works are

seemingly repellent, designed to appall a sense of decorum.

At the same time, however, Duchamp is not doing anything

more provocative than the intellectual games of poets. He

puts Wallace Stevens’ thought-experiment in “Anecdote of a

Jar” into action. The urinal could very well be an example

of the jar placed on a hill in Tennessee. William Carlos

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Williams responds to Dada by turning poems themselves into

found or readymade art. The infamous “The Red Wheelbarrow”

reads like a Polaroid snapshot and “This is Just to Say” a

husband’s note to his wife taped to the refrigerator. The

drive to create art by obliterating art, as in Maleavich’s

White Square on a White Background, or at least to create

art that is artless, might have a nihilistic strain, but it

maintains a covenant between word and world. All of the

modernists ask epistemological questions in various

different ways. Reality is a given. For the modernists what

is at stake is its relationship to art.

Modernists diverge on approaches toward the

representation of reality, the thingness of things perceived

in time. They generally represent temporality, even in the

instant of an image, as occurring in vast psychic, mythic,

and historic space. William Carlos Williams, however,

bemoans Eliot’s The Wasteland for dropping an atomic bomb on

literature. In the context of Williams’ own poetic

predilections, he is right. The busy innovations that

accelerate modernism through and beyond the war maintain

strong and numerous adherents that becomes literary

hegemony, thanks to Eliot’s criticism, well into the middle

of the century. Williams’ emphasis on the prosaic and plain

stuff of reality, the depiction of things as things sans

Wallace Stevens’ intellectual mediations or Eliot’s imposing

temporal orders, takes a backseat. The more lyrical and

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aesthetic strain of what is called “high modernism”

dominates from 1922 to the early 1950s. But Williams’

reference to “atomic bomb” puts his complaint into another

retrospective context. The post-1945 period of literature

develops beneath the adumbrations of a mushroom cloud. The

fictional possibilities of time in the 1920s and 30s become

nearly obliterated by the actual annihilation of time in the

1940s. The postmodernists in many ways draw from the fund of

modernist discovery of rich temporalities at the same time

as they are repelled by its obsession with the past.

Williams’ own style will come to influence a post-war

generation of writers who reject the past as they discover a

kinship with the other overlooked modernist, D.H. Lawrence,

and his desire to risk apocalypse.

In terms of what I am calling the temporal revolution

as it transforms into apocalyptic vision, the most important

foundational figures in my estimate are Joseph Conrad and

Ford Maddox Ford.

To understand how Conrad and Ford forever complicate

the temporality of narrative, we have to assess the

assumption or pact of transparency between an author and his

story up until roughly 1900. It is fairly commonsense that

all narratives require an enunciating narrator. But this

truism belies a far more complex relationship between an

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author and the story, the storyteller and the narrative

voice. The novelist before 1900 generally keeps this

slippery relationship hidden from the reader in order to

create the semblance of realism. Part of the “novelty” of

the novel as it first develops in the 18thC is its realness

bolstered by the novelist’s transparent voice. The goal of a

novel is to induce in the reader a willing suspension of

disbelief. Today, however, we are far more suspicious of the

author’s authority, so to speak, and for good reasons. The

enunciating narrator should never be confused with the

author. This is a dreadful mistake students often make when

they read a literary work that plays with the ironic

distance between author and narrator, like Lolita or “A Modest

Proposal.” A gap always exists between an author and the

narrative voice that widens or contracts to varying degrees

and in different narrative forms. Ironic distance exists

even in autobiography, a form that would seem to offer the

most direct contact between author and reader. But a

personal pronoun in an autobiography is always an authorial

construction. The “I” of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

should not be confused with the author, Benjamin Franklin,

who creates a very distinct storytelling persona in his

marvelous work.

The traditional realist novel labors to obscure traces

of a constituting voice and to maintain a determinate link

between the author and the enunciating voice of the

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narrative. The purest narrative form for the nineteenth

century novelist is a story in which there is little gap

between the author and the narrative. The author wields

absolute authority over narrative. The narrator of a novel,

in effect, matches the authorial control of the novelist.

Most readers up until modernism believe that this is the

natural way that stories are narrated. The Victorian reader,

for instance, assumes the novelist is a trustworthy citizen

who speaks in his or her earnest, authentic voice. Such

authorial control is ultimately a convention, however, one

that reflects nineteenth-century values. The novelist, like

the human, is the center of himself in a world that

progresses toward increasing rationality. The omniscient or

authorial narrator, almost like a divine creator, can unfold

a world of clear moral teleology.

By adopting a sort of alter ego in Marlow to serve as a

storyteller, Conrad creates a new narrative voice and

technique that challenges the authorial omniscience and

linear teleology of plot in the nineteenth-century novel.

Gerard Genette calls the means by which Conrad and others

employ a narrator the “narrative instance.” In Heart of

Darkness, Conrad uses Marlow’s discourse to stage the scene of

a story narrating itself. By making the fabricating work of

the narrator fully audible, Conrad can disengage the

temporal organization of fiction from sequential time that

follows causally linked events. Freed from the traditional

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realist constraint of mimicking serial time, Conrad instead

follows the indeterminate patterns of memory and speech.

The motion picture might be the most radical modernist

invention while it is also a new technology that poses the

greatest threat to literature. Walter Benjamin embraces the

potential for political change the temporal and spatial

destructiveness of cinema provides. In “The Age of

Mechanical Reproduction,” he argues that photography and

cinema allows art to become usable for any context,

particularly in its ability to invade the passivity of a

burgeois culture. “Evidently a different nature opens itself

to the camera than opens to the naked eye—if only because an

unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space

consciously explored by man.” The shift from conscious to

unconscious in the cinema offers the political potential for

technology to incite revolution. “The film is an infernal

machine,” Benjamin says concerning *** “Once it is ignited

and set in motion, it revolves with an enormous dynamism. It

cannot pause. It cannot apologize. It cannot reflect

anything. It cannot wait for you to understand it. It cannot

explain itself. It simply ripens to its inevitable

explosion. This explosion we have to prepare, like

anarchists, with the utmost ingenuity and malice.” His

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description celebrates cinema’s nearly apocalyptic

destruction. The means toward that end might rob the

filmgoer of agency, but at the same time it invites an

unconscious impulse for renewal to sweep up the human into

the inevitable change modernity surges toward. Art and

anarchy walk hand in hand toward freedom. Benjamin’s

equation of film and anarchy foreshadows Don DeLillo’s

argument that terrorism is the last and purest artistic act.

Between the beginning and end of the twentieth century,

then, technology ushers in apocalyptic intimations in its

explosive formation of new worlds that is both redemptive

and destructive.

Rupture and disruption become new characteristics of

upheaval associated with modern time. There is a general

consensus that around roughly 1800 the West becomes

conscious of living in “new times,” a sense of present

urgency that reaches a crescendo with the self-conscious

recognition that the modern has arrived characteristic of

twentieth-century modernism. The present becomes thick with

immediacy and distinction by 1800 in ways it had not been

experienced before. The urgency of the present perpetuates

and deepens the inherent sense that our time is the critical

one arriving always at the end of a series of crises, a

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sense of urgency that accelerates the post-apocalyptic ethos

of today. This new sense of the immediate around 1800 gives

birth to zeitgeist, or “spirit of the age,” a term that is used

to describe “new times” so often it grows hackneyed. There

is no doubt that the congestion of events that close the

eighteenth century with the French Revolution contributes to

the sense of time’s immediacy. For the first time the West

lives through experiences that prove that the world can

literally change overnight. History can be made in an

instant.

For the first time there is also a growing sense that

historical processes are immanent within the individual as

opposed to operating exclusively beyond the self, like

ancient Greek fate. The nineteenth-century novel carries the

weight of greatness because its plot is grounded in a

tension between individual autonomy and fate. It is a

tension between the old world constructed around a tragic

mythos and a new world founded upon the comic concern with

the present. The Victorian, Transcendentalist, French

realist, or epic Russian novels represent the height of the

genre because they depict highly individualized characters

that still, nonetheless, act out in a world that drives them

toward fate in the formula of ancient tragedy. The world of

these novels is comic in its depiction of a meticulous

present and tragic in its dependence upon providential

patterns of closure. Despite the tidy endings, these novels

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feel so important because their familiar literary patterns

call up myths of heroism and suffering. The controlled

pessimism of the period perhaps reaches a peak with Thomas

Hardy at the same time as Henry James contests tragic

paradigms to focus on a new authorial and perceiving

consciousness.

The other aspect that gives these mid to late

nineteenth-century novels such power is that they address

social and psychological realities before the social

sciences come of age in the 20thC. The slow birth of social

sciences in the 19thC keeps psychological concerns tied to

the neat paradigms of tragic mythos. It makes it possible

for theorists, like Nancy Armstrong or Judith Butler, to

argue that the novel between the 18th and 19th Cs contributes

to the formation of middle class domesticity and gender:

life imitates art. The novel’s highly crafted plots offer

social science for the masses. Despite how fiction falsifies

actual experience—realism is really just another form of

literary decorum—novels serve as models of human action

brought to completion, allowing for ethical reflection on

the human condition.

In the wake of Darwin’s theories of natural selection,

realism adjusts its paradigms to incorporate the new vision

of biological fatalism in the unbearably bleak world of the

Naturalist novel. Naturalism remains powerful well into the

20thC, as in Hemingway’s existential world where life and

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death duke it out with ruthless economy made more

indeterminate by Freud. But a new lyricism, such as

symbolism inherited from the French, brings the ordinary and

the unbearable to a beautiful time-consciousness in his

novels as well as the novels of Proust, Joyce, Woolf,

Faulkner, et al. But since psychology remains the province

of fiction in the nineteenth century, the elements of old

tragedy prevail. Plot continues to repeat its trajectory

toward a final or violent catastrophe that results in the

stasis and completion of conclusive action, “all passion

spent,” in Milton’s words. The self-consciousness of time as

something personally perceived while lyrically controlled

has yet to enter the novel of this high and rarefied period

in the nineteenth century.

Most people experience history as a force outside of

them that drives them as opposed to a force that can be

driven. A majority of people do not consider themselves

historical beings or agents for change. A sense of one’s

time and space in history has grown far more detached and

isolated. There is, for instance, very little in media that

gives anyone a wider context of history. Everything caters

to sequential crisis. In general the public is apathetic,

comfortable to remain playthings of history. In fact, for

philosophers and theorists like Zizek or Frederic Jameson,

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the unconscious is formed by the forgotten trauma of

revolution that never happened as opposed to familial or

primal psychic wounds. In other words, we repress the trauma

of our political failure to change the world, and this

repression has made us inert. Zizek in particular bemoans

the failure of the left to enact change. With his in-your-

face philosophy, he believes that heads need to be cracked,

that the establishment must be swept away with a sort of

world destruction. At the same time he wonders if the world

itself has already come to an end and we don’t know it,

leaving us in the ruins. For Jameson, it is the

impossibility of revolution in the past two hundred years

that exerts its pressure on the unconscious and which

accounts for the greatness of the novel before the world

wars. The nineteenth-century novel enacts the energy of

revolution the people fail to engage.

But revolutions, like the Protestant and French

upheavals, are only possible when the masses get caught up

in a force and counterforce that propels them. A revolution

sweeps up humans in its destructive vortex that widens to

engulf everything. It takes on a life of its own that moves

toward and settles into its inevitable end. It is one great

hurricane that changes everything in its path. At the same

time a revolution requires individuals self-consciously

taking control of history. Revolution is not possible

without the self-consciousness of individuality that ushers

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in modernity. It is made up of the many individuals who, in

all of their different identities, become one

undifferentiated mass. The circle that creates the parts-

whole dynamic is no more vicious than in revolution.

Autonomy and self-surrender working in a mutual tension

drives revolution toward its sweeping destruction and

reform. It is the reason that most revolutions end in

totalitarianism and dictatorship. People must give up

freedom in order to gain the freedom they desire. Once the

Dionysian swirl of revolution attenuates, the members who

lead and orchestrate its force must turn self-surrender into

law.

There is a salient connection between revolution and

comedy. As it evolves from high Greek drama, comedy

throughout the ages is preoccupied with subverting and

renovating establishment. The concerns of comedy are always

current, which is why a majority of comic novels quickly

become period pieces. Comedy does not carry the burden of a

past curse; death does not loom as an inevitable enemy. The

concern of comedy is immediate happiness. For comedy, the

enemy is any legalism—laws, ethical codes, societal

prohibitions, parochial prejudices, social stratification—

that stands between a younger generation and their desires

for a better world. Comedy seeks to break laws, to destroy

the established order so as to rejuvenate and celebrate a

new order. The law breaking can be slight or it can be

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sweeping in its inevitable trajectory to a new and happy

ending. But it almost always involves a battle between the

old and the new even if the expulsion of traditional figures

who stand in the way is terribly uncomfortable, like **** in

As You Like It. Tradition is always antithetical to comedy. The

father’s right in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to arrange his

daughter’s marriage to a man she does not love conspires

with the law the Duke must uphold. Either she must conform

to patriarchy and relinquish the man she loves, or face

exile in a nunnery. The foibles in this play are purely

hilarious and innocent, and the laws evaporate with the same

ease as the magically induced dreams. It is not always as

easy. In The Merchant of Venice, Portia twists the law to expose

Shylock, and renders his Jewish usury impotent while forcing

him to reject his religion as punishment. It is one of the

most vexed and uncomfortable expulsions of the villain from

the stage.

One of the great achievements of the novel is that its

loose structure combined with the intensification of

character opens comedy to the deepened complications of

tragedy. In fact, a pure comedy in the novel today rarely

achieves literary status. Most comic novels disappear since

its conventions do not maintain interpretive interest in a

world far more suspicious of the falsification comedy

requires. There are rare but wonderful moments in the

twentieth century, however, when a comic novel retains most

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of its conventional features and remains of literary

interest. In Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, the picaresque Jim

Dixon, the post-war figure of the new middle class academic,

must overcome an entire aristocratic tradition in the

university system in order to win the girl of his dreams

from their clutches. Dixon’s antics that accelerate as the

novel progresses increasingly expose the old order’s

hypocrisy until the novel ends when Dixon rejects it, wins

the girl, and gains acceptance into a new social order. Amis

invests a lot of literary craftsmanship in the novel partly

because his motivation is political. The novel celebrates

the advancement of the post-war middle class in its

wholesale renovation of the still powerful but rapidly

fading landed gentry in England. It might not be a manifesto

to call the working class to arms, but Amis cleverly couches

social subversion in its traditional comic setting. The

ruling class, at least in the narrow world of the academy

Amis depicts, can never free itself of such ridicule that

relegates them to the stereotypical roles of a comedy. It is

the great political effect of comedy to reduce villainous

forces to farce, defusing the potential harm the folly of

certain figures can wreck on the world. Tina Fey’s spot-on

satire does more to empty Sarah Palin of her political power

than endless panels of pundits.

The motif of cranky authority figures, the

representatives of a moribund establishment, threatening the

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joys of youth repeats and multiplies in fiction and movies

until today. Despite the narrow conventions of comedy whose

frequent usage of the motif empties it of meaning—you can

find them in every comic movie—they never tire. Television

banks on the endless variety of comic situations whose

conventions and plots remain rigid and formulaic. Ever since

ancient Greek comedy, the comic plot today resolves when a

new and youthful order exposes the hypocrisy or general

ridiculousness of an older and crotchety order. The new

order expels the old to establish a society that celebrates

a renewed cohesion.

But comedy also contributes to the more tragic strains

of post-apocalypse that grip the contemporary world. So much

of the countercultural revolutions in the late 1960s follow

the patterns of comedy in its tableaux of the new generation

pitted against the establishment. In fact, it is interesting

how, looking back on the 1960s, the actual war between youth

and age, child and parent, looks like dramatic roles,

countercultural situations readymade for theater. Notice how

by the 1980s history of the 1960s begins to posture

comically for our entertainment. The late capitalist fatigue

with which Jameson characterizes the 1990s witnesses the

1960s repackaged in television shows, movies, and

documentaries. The depictions always tend to capture the

spirit of the age, its heights and its tragedies, as an

anomalous and quirky period. There never is a transition

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from the intensity of the 1960s and now, although numerous

documentaries like to argue for the moment when the 1960s

officially came to an end, like the violence at Altamont, in

order to provide that vexed decade closure. Unlike narrative

closure, of course, life continues on into the failed ideals

and shit that follows from 1970 until now.

Mad Men is such a remarkable television program

because, despite its slow, patient, and meticulous

construction of the ten years between 1959 and 1969, the

show is really about us. Although it relies on many

entrenched comic conventions, such as the increasingly

vestigial role of figures from a bygone era, each episode, I

argue, reveals the subtle but immense cultural shifts (month

by month changes that we have never experienced since)

occurring in a steady march toward nihilism. It is not that

9/11 is coming, although the opening tableaux of Don Draper

in sillouhette falling from a skyscraper adumbrates the

Falling Man, but that 1970 is coming. My feeling is that the

show senses, perhaps unconsciously, that at some point

during the winter between 1969 and 1970, something

transcendent dies in America. I cannot quite pinpoint what

this something is, and I am not alone in the feeling. I have

had numerous conversations with people on the topic. Mad Men

creeps toward this disenchantment, for lack of a better

word, hesitantly intuiting that a certain mentality for

renovation in America went dormant in 1970. The ability to

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think or entertain the possibility of discourse that can

speak beyond itself and induce self-transcendence dies and

is replaced by inertia. You can literally hear the

transcendence empty out of music as the decade ends and that

serves as such an urgent function during the period. Perhaps

exhaustion with history sets in. There are certainly plenty

of more events in the proceeding decades—the revolution in

computer and information technology is still around the

corner—but we become somehow unhinged from history.

One of the reasons why the movie, The Graduate, continues

to resonate is how it draws upon all comic conventions, but

ends with dissolution. A desultory mood that runs throughout

the movie continues into the final credits, despite Ben and

Elaine’s escape from the old order. As “Sounds of Silence”

plays and the bus drives them off into the proverbial

sunset, we know that there is no society into which they

will reintegrate that will embrace them except the one that

they rejected, the one that they will inevitably inhabit. It

is, of course, the great irony that cultural and artistic

revolts during modernism end up absorbed into the mainstream

whose villainous force serves as such a creative catalyst.

The same members of the youth revolutions in the 1960s are

now the masters of business. Some of the wealthiest men on

the planet were once countercultural figures. And the music

that serves as the symbol and weapon of revolt becomes

thoroughly mainstreamed.

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The subversive power of comedy wears out. It seems as

though an anti-establishment movement cannot arise in

America without carrying the baggage of 1968. Revolts

always end up looking like people playing roles that had

already been acted out to an inevitable failure. Rebellion

in America is now a worn out trope. It is an overplayed

convention. One can more easily get the satisfaction of

revolt now by watching it played out in movies. Or, more

commonly, the youth can act out revolution in the safe and

detached confines of video games. You do not have to muddy

your hands by waging a full-scale renovation of the

establishment when you can wreck such destruction repeatedly

everyday from a computer screen. It remains to be seen if

the Occupy Wall Street movement, closely aligned with the

power of social media that generated the Arab Spring, can

regain the urge for renovation lost in 2011. My feeling,

however, is that most people would much rather occupy

virtual space than they would Wall Street. Perhaps the next

revolutionary movement will be one, heralded by figures like

Edward Snowden, which seeks to undermine the establishment’s

digital tyranny.

Revolutions do not end in stasis. Unlike the ending of

comedy that celebrates a new integration, the post-

revolutionary society must reclaim order from mayhem by

violently enforcing self-surrender to the whole. We probably

would not want to see the various and painful ways in which

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newly married couples of a comedy must negotiate compromises

to their freedom after the happy ending. A new political

order usually enforces self-surrender with explicit or

covert forms of persecution. America is not free from such

persecutions, even though the War of Independence was not

really a revolution. No doubt we represent the most

successful upheaval in recent history—it did not result in

Napoleon or Stalin—but it was not a process aligned with

apocalyptic fantasies that completely change a civilization

from within. Ours was a colonial war occurring in the midst

of numerous other European disputes. Not to sound heretical

to American exceptionalism (we certainly are one of the

great experiments in history), but there is not much of a

difference between parliamentarian monarchy and presidential

republicanism. Most of the ideas of democracy championed by

the founding fathers were already being championed by

England. Our foundational documents refine and simplify the

democratic ideologies already debated for two centuries in

Great Britain, particularly Scotland. The Declaration of

Independence, despite its wonderfully cogent elegance, is a

distillation of basic Age of Reason tenets. In other words,

we did not rebel against British politics and their way of

life. We rebelled against colonial status. But America,

under the belief in its revolutionary origins that reach

back to the Puritan establishment of a New Jerusalem on

earth, continues its persecutions designed to maintain self-

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surrender to a conflicted ideology that preaches freedom as

an abstraction but demands conformity always fraught (for

better and worse) with ambiguity.

Revolutions imagine that they will end, like comedy, in

Utopia. The Utopia is a literary genre that has a long and

very important history not just for literature but also for

politics and nationalism in general. Nightmare always lies

right beneath the surface of any Utopia today, however,

particularly coming after the totalitarianism that

revolutionary energies ignite. The romanticist

disillusionment with the French Revolution is one of the

first periods when apocalyptic energy, the outward and

actual renovation of the world, goes inward. The dreams of

creating a new world radically shift to the desire to change

the self. We have grown more suspicious today of anything

that takes on the semblance of a perfect state. Whenever a

setting in a movie resembles Eden, we immediately know it

does so forebodingly.

The current genre of Dystopia prevails. Dystopias revel

in post-apocalyptic excrement, the refuse left behind by

failed dreams. In Dystopia, the destruction requisite for a

desired future in New Jerusalem ends in shit. Karl Marx

imagines that Utopia will evolve when we reject Judeo-

Christian eschatology and conflict ends between the classes.

It is a dream of Godless freedom perpetuating endlessly on

earth as opposed to an afterlife that promises an eternal

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equality. History in Utopia, for Marx, comes to an end but

human life continues. Like a narrative, history requires

conflict. So when labor no longer requires a division of

classes, the harmony of Eden will be restored on earth. As

complicated as his philosophy reads, the Marxian narrative

is a romance of the future. Romances of the future, no

matter how convincingly narrated, are no more real than

dreams of an afterlife, which is perhaps why Benjamin

becomes so thoroughly disenchanted with Marx right before

his death. The dreams of communism turn into the nightmares

of Stalin and his pact with Hitler. Further, it is difficult

to imagine the benefit of living in a world without story or

conflict.

It is no surprise that the new (and barely

investigated) genre of the last part of the century is the

romance of the future. At the same time as we have nowhere

else to settle, what we have settled turns to shit, which is

why science fiction and fantasy are such popular genres. It

is why Billy Pilgrim flees for his thought experiment in

Tralfamadore. But I get ahead of myself.

Lived time from 1800 on becomes less an experience of

continuum and more a rupture, an endless sense of transition

in which the new and the unexpected continually happen. This

acceleration of time built upon transition and disruption

radicalizes by the post-war years of the 1920s to produce

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the most densely time-conscious works of literature in

history. The Great War is the biggest rupture. The

perception of peace that follows is not experienced as a

return to pre-war years (although there is even up until

today a nostalgic myth about a pre-war pastoralism evidenced

in Philip Larkin’s poem), but a passage into another

strangeness that results from the ability by which five

years can literally overturn the world.

Brian McHale famously distinguishes writing between the

first and second half of the twentieth century as

epistemological and ontological. After World War I, writers still

asked the epistemological questions of the world: What is

truth? Who am I? What is the self? What is the meaning of

things? The war ruptured the way in which modernists saw the

world and the self in that world, and the new forms they

produced reflect that rupture with the past. But the

questions they ask remain the same and literature continues

to search for meaning in the belief that it is inherent in a

poem. A contract between the human and language, so to

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speak, remains unbroken: words still signify reality. Not

only can language create meaning, language can recreate

meaning that has been broken. For the modernists, there was

a lot of blame to pass around for the decline of

civilization, but no one ever believed language betrayed

humanity as they did after World War II.

After close reading and deconstruction exhausts itself

by the 1980s and the 90s, the disenchantment with language

spurs on attempts at re-enchanting literary interpretation.

Many turn away from close and formal analyses of text and

find empowerment within the fragmentation of meaning, such

as new historicism, identity politics, multiculturalism, and

post-colonialism. Some turn to a new humanism or other modes

of recovering a lost aesthetic permanence, like religion and

literature. Although literary theory is pronounced dead,

numerous movements have sprouted in its wake, such as

cognitive studies, gender studies, trauma theory, queer

theory, disability studies, and the aforementioned movements

that continue, particularly postcolonial studies.

However, a new and prevalent post-apocalyptic tone

bleeds over to literary studies from postmodern philosophy

in the 1990s that is markedly different from the apocalyptic

imagination of the first half of the twentieth century. The

term postmodern has always been fraught with the irony that

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the movement breeds. What does it mean to come after the

modern, after the now? How do you follow from the now? What

does it mean to come after the contemporary? Of course,

postmodern means coming after modernism as a movement, but

its practitioners are always in on the irony that spills

into absurdity as movements evolve out of postmodern

exhaustion, such as post-postmodern, or meta-modern, or even

post-meta-modern.

The post-apocalyptic, however, takes its cue from

Benjamin’s attitude toward culture, his “angel of history.”

He argues that the catastrophe has always already happened, and we live in

its ruins. After World War II with the revelation of the

concentration camps and the atomic bombs, the last half of

the twentieth century becomes more saliently aware of coming

after catastrophe than any other time. World War II incepts

the current preoccupation with unimaginable atrocity and

annihilation that provides the material for post-apocalyptic

representation. The end of the world that we imagine as the

whole scale destruction of cityscapes did happen. Images of

decimated population centers, like Berlin, Munich, London,

Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki prove that we have already

witnessed the horrors that we imagine the apocalypse to look

like. Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald have already enacted the

inferno at the end of the line. Samuel Beckett’s Endgame or

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road would not be possible without

visions of world destruction supplied by actual

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annihilation. Disaster movies about the end of the world

enact something we have already seen.

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CHAPTER 10

From Apocalypse to Post-Apocalypse;

From Tragedy to Trauma

Catastrophe and Disbelief

Catastrophe unveils brute reality while defying belief,

conflicting the boundary between fiction and actuality.

Narratives of the Holocaust, 9/11, child abuse, natural

disasters are not hypothetical experiences, but they share

an unusual bond with belief that constitutes the “as if” of

fiction, generating paradoxes that nag at the heart of

trauma theory. First, catastrophe is more unbelievable than

fiction in its defiance of expectation. Second, the element

of surprise and its magnitude makes catastrophe associated

to the aesthetic experience of the sublime. We use the same

terms to describe catastrophe as we do the sublime:

terrifying, obscure, inexplicable, unimaginable,

unspeakable, unbelievable. And finally, as disturbing as

trauma and testimony to the effects of traumatic experience

might be, we are continually drawn to its representations.

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What does it mean that, like tragedy, catastrophe gives

pleasure?

Traumatic testimony, like fiction, forces us to believe

the unbelievable. In a great paradox, traumatic events defy

belief whereas we automatically believe in fiction.

Catastrophe is not an experience one chooses. One cannot

say, I do not want a catastrophe. One cannot say, I do not

want trauma. And when we do fall haplessly into trauma or

catastrophe, we are more apt to deny it rather than confront

and assent to the experience. There is nothing in fiction to

deny, no matter how outrageous an author’s fantasy. And

literature does not deny a person’s freewill. One can choose

not to accept a novelist or poet’s world; one can choose

what one wants to read; one can stop reading a novel or a

poem. As much as one can choose literature, one cannot deny

literature.

Despite its incomprehensibility, catastrophe depends

upon believability, which is why testimony to trauma remains

so difficult. The witness or victim of trauma must convince

an audience that the unbelievable is not fiction. Thousands

of witnesses to shooting squads and concentration camps in

the late 1930s and early 1940s could not convince the allies

that they were real. We expect fiction and poetry to defy

our expectations and to twist reality. Even though

unimaginable catastrophe happens everyday, we do not expect

life to be willfully ironic. There is, in a sense, decorum

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we demand from life that we do not require from imaginative

literature. We expect literature to be neurotic, even

psychotic. But we demand coherence from life, and despite

the constant ways in which contingency undermines the sense

we make out of the world, we continue to expect life to have

inviolable meaning.

Thousands of priests over the decades have told their

victims of abuse, “no one will believe you.” And when many

of the early and courageous clergy abuse victims came

forward in the 1980s and told their stories, the Church, the

press, the authorities, and even their family did not

believe them. Before the 1990s there was a certain unspoken

code amongst both journalists and policemen that topics such

as clergy abuse were taboo; it was best to keep such horror

under wraps. Even today there remains an entrenched decorum

that censors the visibility of PTSD victims of war or the

abuse of children. Even as more testimony to clergy abuse

came out, peaking in the late 1990s along with a slew of

scholarship on the topic, the atrocity barely made a dent

upon our consciousness until 9/11 allowed the Boston scandal

of 2002 to transform into a catastrophe. The unbelievable

spectacle of the terrorist attacks allowed for the

believability of systematic clergy abuse.

Testimony to trauma requires from witnesses and readers a “willing

suspension of disbelief” over real events. That is a difficult irony

to wrap one’s mind around. So many victims of trauma remain

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silent about their experiences because they do not have the

vocabulary and the authorial craft to shape events into a

believable narrative. As Sir Philip Sidney argued, poets

never purport to tell the truth, so they cannot be accused

of lying, allowing the reader a space in which reflexively

to suspend disbelief. The representation of trauma, however,

purports to signify truth concerning experience that can defy

belief. How ironic that we have faith in fiction whereas we

have such disbelief in life! Victims of trauma struggle to

suspend disbelief while, at the same time, they resist that

suspension, struggling to transfer the raw reality of

catastrophe into expressive form. It is much easier to

contend with fiction than it is to contend with the brute

material of the Real.

Although we assume that the victim or witness of trauma

has a moral obligation to tell the truth, what happens when

that truth defies the reality that we construct out of the

world? What happens, in other words, when truth is indeed

stranger than fiction? Writing about trauma and catastrophe

forces an author to work hard toward making horror true

while a reader must work-toward a willing suspension of

disbelief. A witness or reader of trauma must contend with

truths that subvert and defy assumptions of benign coherence

in the world. Paradoxically it is more difficult to believe

the actual experiences of catastrophe than it is to believe

the fantasies of fiction. Fiction, in other words, can

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appear more real than actual experience, which is why not

only catastrophe and fiction share an intimate bond, but

also why trauma is frequently more effective when the

experience is placed within a fictional narrative frame.

Trauma and Tropes

Catastrophe shocks us into a stance of unbelief, a

“state of shock,” because we never imagine such an

experience could happen. Taken by surprise, stricken by

terror, the trauma that results from catastrophic experience

feels phantasmagoric. But we are always conscious of the

potential for catastrophe. The world in fact offers us

enough evidence of catastrophe on a daily basis to break the

illusion that the world is underpinned by a familiar and

predictable coherence. We may even desire catastrophe deep

within our unconscious, probably more often than not. We are

not shocked by the events of a catastrophe; we are shocked

because the catastrophe that we imagined could happen, that

we know does happen, and that we may unconsciously desire to

happen, actually does. The fantasy becomes reality.

Catastrophe constitutes the worst experiences that we can

imagine and that actually do occur coming true.

Our attempt to represent catastrophe becomes,

ironically, our attempt to return the experience to fantasy.

Articulating or writing about catastrophe may affirm the

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experience, but it does so by recovering a hypothetical

frame so that we can recreate it into something over which

we can willingly suspend disbelief. I am not arguing that

the way toward working-through trauma is to lie. I am

arguing that the way we represent trauma, even when it takes

the form of direct testimony, becomes framed by the same

dynamics of fiction.

We trope traumatic experience in the same way that an

author tropes language: to maintain tension, to refigure

language to signify experience, to perpetuate plot and

maintain conflict, and ultimately to ensure that the

experience remains fiction. To the extent that trauma

defamiliarizes the world and sets us at a distance from our

self and the experience—we can only contend with trauma by

distancing ourselves from the catastrophe that instigates it

—the representation or articulation of trauma shares in the

tropes by which we understand poetry. Although confronting

and working-through trauma and catastrophe means to confront

raw reality, traumatic experience paradoxically results in

unreality.

The transformation of words into meaning when they are

“troped,” distressed, twisted or perverted from their

familiar usage is central to the relationship between trauma

and fiction. Aristotle defines metaphor as the process of

“giving the thing a name that belongs to something else.”

The poet evades literal statement by twisting language. She

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carries or crosses words from a familiar context to an

unfamiliar one in order to generate possibilities for

signification. Whereas Aristotle focuses upon metaphor in

terms of resemblance, modern interpretations of metaphor

explore how difference operates in the formation of

resemblance. Metaphor creates meaning through resemblance,

but by associating terms radically different from each

other. To the extent that metaphor creates resemblance

through difference in unexpected ways that at the same time

form the fabric of the way in which we see, experience and

understand the world, irony plays a crucial role in

energizing metaphorical expression.

Irony, in its broad function to present a deliberate

antinomy between two levels of meaning, creates contrast

that allows metaphor to form resemblance through difference.

By dissociating language from its normal usage as a means to

create associations, irony circumscribes metaphor. Metaphor,

the master-comparative trope, depends upon irony, the master-

contrasting trope to create analogical meaning between

dissociative realms. The interplay between metaphor and

irony in poetry generates analogical difference within

similarity, similarity within difference. The comparison

between one linguistic realm and another in the

representation of experience depends upon the ironic contrast

between those realms held up by the poet through

association. In short, metaphor walks hand in hand with

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irony by defying our expectations of what language

signifies.

Trauma vexes the tension between irony and metaphor.

The recollection and articulation of trauma ultimately

transforms into a figuration of the experience. The victim

or the witness to trauma must trope the experience in the

attempt to articulate the scene of catastrophe. Traumatic

experience brings us to the closest contact we have with the

Real in Lacanian terms because catastrophe forces us to

confront the terror of annihilation. According to Lacan, the

Real is the field of brute existence that language attempts

to control. All action and reference relate to the Real, but

we can only manage the Real through signifying practices. It

is as impossible to signify the Real as it is to articulate

trauma because the Real and the traumatic are one and the

same. Just as the poet cannot abide direct or literal

statement, the witness of trauma must find ways in which to

twist catastrophe into form.

Poetry and trauma converge upon the struggle for a

voice to articulate absence. Poets and witnesses to trauma

cry out for affirmation. But that cry transforms into

distorted and tropic language. Ironically, the only way for

one to understand trauma is to misunderstand the experience.

Language becomes most challenged by the linguistic lacuna of

trauma. If, according to Lacan’s dictum, “the unconscious

is structured like a language,” then words in their function

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to signify the absent object they stand for intensifies the

struggle of a witness of catastrophe to testify beyond the

limits of signification.

Since traumatic experience stresses the threshold of

that which one can emotionally cope and intellectually

comprehend, which I have been calling, borrowing from Karl

Jaspers, limit-situations, its articulation ultimately

involves willful misreading, evasion or resistance. Directly

confronting and articulating traumatic experience is as

anathema to its testimony as literalism is to the poet’s

expression. We have, therefore, a problem for

interpretation. Is there a unique poetics of trauma separate

from literature? Or does all literature engage in the same

tension between irony and metaphor as trauma, including the

inherent suspension of disbelief that struggles with our

desire to disbelieve that depend upon the deep structures of

wishes and fantasies? To push the questions even further,

does all literature evolve from trauma?

.

The Shocking Ending

How often people pray these days? In what forms do

their prayers take? Do people who do not believe in God

pray? What does it mean to pray if God is dead? Is it still

prayer, or is it meditation? Is there any difference between

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the supplications an atheist makes to himself late at night

from the prayer of the devout to God?

Formal prayers, like “The Lord’s Prayer” or “Hail

Mary,” end with “Amen,” which is roughly translated as “Let

it be.” An even rougher translation might be “leave it

alone” or “move on.” “Let it be” gestures toward a deep

silence. It is like a prompt to assume a contemplative mode.

For me, the silence after “amen” is terrifying because

of the nothingness it might signify. “Amen” gestures toward

reverential silence that dwells with divine presence. But it

also might gesture to the terrified silence that dwells in

nothingness.

I assume that most people pray the way I do, however,

which is a long rambling dialogue in my head late at night

or early in the morning in language of fragmented yearning,

unknowingness, and a certain amount of bargaining. If this

is the case, then prayer is like automatic writing, a sort

of quasi-religious free association. It teeters precariously

between psychoanalysis and psychobabble. Free-associative

prayer amounts to non-closure in a double sense. There is no

form to enclose the prayer since the space in which the

language struggles to articulate is as endless as the desire

that compels the prayer. Added to this is the gamble I make

with presence that compels me to invest in the time to pray.

When praying I hope that I am not speaking to myself but

engaging in a discourse that speaks beyond the self. Belief

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is fraught with ambivalence that compels fiction and poetry.

Does language refer to and embody the world, or does

language refer only to itself? We are not as terrified that

prayer will be unanswered as we are of the potential

nothingness we might be addressing.

Literature resists nothingness. So much of the fullness

literary closure provides wagers in presence. Modern and

postmodern endings grow more difficult in fiction and poetry

because of the disenchantment that empties the contemporary

world of depth. Simulacra, as I have suggested, flattens

image and language into information streams that, in its

infinite replication, drain trauma of meaning. If, as

Baudrillard and Zizek insist, simulation does not refer to

any reality because the simulation is reality, then

everything is immanent with value that can be forever

replicated. Life’s traumas can become mere information. The

result is a valueless world of pure surface in which there

is no transcendence. The imagination speaks to itself.

Everything, then, like my prayers, comprises

undifferentiated fragmentation.

I resist the notion of disenchantment with every

interpretive fiber of my poor self. And, ironically, I

refuse such postmodern illusions because of the hopelessness

of prayer.

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The original ending of the Gospel of Mark is as

disturbing as it is mysterious. The women “went out and fled

from [Christ’s] tomb; for trembling and astonishment had

come upon them and they said nothing to anyone, for they

were afraid” (16:8). It reads like a non-ending. Even though

we know the story ends with Christ’s resurrection, Mark’s

original non-ending still has the ability to unsettle. It

defies expectations.

The abrupt ending of the women fleeing Christ’s empty

tomb in terror hardly conforms to the message of the Good

News, which is why most versions of the Bible add Christ’s

resurrection to Mark’s gospel. The amended ending has the

closure of a divine comedy. But since we know how the

original ends, the extended version seems to falsify the

visceral experience of the earlier text. The extended

version lays bare the authorial impulse to balance

contingency with coherence in narrative. If narrative

coherence is not forthcoming, we impose order, even if it

means, as in the case of Mark, rewriting the original.

In a beautiful reading of the ending of Mark’s gospel,

Serene Jones interprets the terrified women in the context

of trauma.

Their silence is the fractured speech of violence as it

lives in their bodies and psyches . . . their inability

to speak parallels the experience of trauma survivors

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for whom speech, memory, and agency have been undone by

violence.

She suggests that the irresolute ending serves a purpose.

We resist giving Mark a cohesive ending but instead use

his non-ending to remind us that, in a world filled

with vast and unresolved traumas, Jesus comes to us

anyway, in the midst of our faltering speech, our

shattered memories, and our frayed sense of agency.

This is truly what grace is, in its most radical form:

not the reassuring ending of an orderly story, but the

incredible insistence on love amid fragmented,

unraveled human lives.

Mark leaves the question of Christ’s resurrection a matter

of the reader’s faith, her openness to God’s grace. The

resurrection insures a realized eschatology that shapes

history whose events move toward its fulfillment. The women

might flee the tomb in terror, but we, reading from the end

of scripture, from outside or about the text, occupy a

vantage point of knowingness. The promise of salvation has

and is always fulfilled, but a realized eschatology does not

negate suffering. Mark’s ending offers a space for the

reader to dwell in the terror of uncertainty. Knowing the

story’s ending in Easter does not assure consolation.

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Despite the triumph of Sunday, we struggle with a fragmented

life in the middle of experience. As Jones suggests, the

ending of Mark is perhaps intentionally abrupt. It ends with

the terrified women as a way to evoke the gesture of shock

as opposed to the language. In effect, the end acts like a

prompt for the reader to enact her own performance of

terror.

The abrupt ending of Mark’s gospel indicates the period

of waiting between Easter and Apocalypse for which there is

no narrative closure. It is a period held in suspension,

even, as Mark’s non-ending suggests, an abyss. In the

Christian narrative, the apocalypse, of course, will be

accompanied by the Christ’s return, the second coming, which

will be both awesome and terrible. We have no idea when

Christ will return. He is trenchantly ambiguous about time,

sometimes claiming that the final days are now, other times

claiming that he has no idea when it will come. In his

parables, however, Christ frequently emphasizes that he will

return when we least expect it, like a thief in the night,

or the master who could return at any time, so the servant

must always keep his home prepared. It will be a surprise,

an abrupt but final interruption. Augustine, therefore,

urges preparedness. One must always be in a state of

readiness for the apocalypse. Since it is impossible to know

when it will arrive, we cannot treat it as an event we can

plan around. It must be planned for. It falls outside of the

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diurnal progress of things we anticipate. The only way in

which we can make temporal sense of the apocalypse,

Augustine suggests, is to make its anticipation immanently

present within our lives. One’s consciousness must fix upon

the inevitability of death. As Hamlet claims, “The readiness

is all.” The ending of Mark’s gospel seems to stress the

element that makes narrative most painful and pleasurable:

suspense. But it is unfulfilled suspense, a suspense that

keeps the reader suspended.

The awe we experience in the face of catastrophe

results from a momentary debilitation of cognition. We

cannot comprehend the sight before our eyes. Shock is like

numinous experience, holy and harrowing, a sensation of

dread and awe. Something wholly other consumes us.

Catastrophe that marks the ending of tragedy oscillates

between ecstatic and horrifying surrender.

Bystanders entranced by the terrifying vision of

catastrophe often occur near the end of a tragic or

traumatic narrative. Before the tragedy allows distance and

dispassion to alleviate horrific experience into the refined

state of catharsis, an ending suspends the audience, however

momentarily, in a state of unmitigated fear. For Aristotle,

catharsis tames the trauma. Aristotle, of course, left

catharsis vague, but the term has been modernized to mean a

healthy process of releasing emotions. Catharsis alleviates

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terror, which means that, as a refining force, it represses

the visceral experience that instigates it.

Toward the end of Oedipus Rex the Chorus stands aghast

before the horrific sight Oedipus, who has blinded himself.

Before the falling action alleviates the terror, they are

unable to believe the sight before their eyes. They do not

yet have the space and time to contemplate the experience

disinterestedly. In this moment we glimpse the experience of

horror before interpretation intervenes.

Gratuitous acts of violence in ancient Greek theater

occurred offstage, reported by a messenger after the fact,

creating a delayed response. It cushions the audience from

direct contact with horror. The messenger uses sensational

rhetoric, a ghastly blow-by-blow account of Jocasta’s

suicide and Oedipus’s self-mutilation. The audience can

listen in rapt horror at the messenger’s detailed account,

spared the shock of seeing the violence directly until

“Oedipus, blinded, is led in.” The Chorus, representing our

shock, sings about the inability to articulate.

Dreadful indeed for men to see.

Never have my own eyes

Looked on a sight so full of fear.

Oedipus!

What madness came upon you, what daemon

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Leaped on your life with heavier

Punishment that a mortal man can bear?

No: I can not even

Look upon you, poor ruined one.

And I would speak, question, ponder,

If I were able. No.

You make me shudder.

( )

“I would speak, question, ponder if I were able”

encapsulates the visual motif of characters traumatized by

catastrophe. Remove the words from the mouths of the Chorus

and we are left with the image of silent bystanders

“shuddering.”

The messenger, a single witness to the horror, cannot

serve as the witness until the group interprets the

experience. Mere information does not provide closure to the

catastrophe just as a chronicle cannot impress the magnitude

of historical events. But collective witnessing devolves

into mere sensation unless the group, the Chorus,

interpolates catastrophe with interpretation.

Creon spares Oedipus from the mob, arguing that his

body has ironically become a sacred and untouchable object,

a “holy thing.” The unspeakable depth of horror into which

Oedipus descends has also made him set apart, sacred,

untouchable. The play ends with seemingly inexplicable

catastrophe that has been interpreted nonetheless. Despite

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the horrific spectacle, Oedipus accepts his criminality and

expunges himself from the community. For the moment,

leadership under Creon promises a new kingdom will rise from

the ruins of catastrophe. Indeed, the classic movement of

tragedy is in motion as the ending, although drenched in

tragic waste, intimates the restoration of order.

But the play also ends with Creon urging Oedipus’s

exile with a suspicious amount of expediency: he seems to

desire the power that he so emphatically denied earlier in

the play. The alacrity with which Creon confronts the crisis

mirrors Oedipus’s handling of the plague at the beginning of

the play. A deepening dramatic irony, therefore, frames the

beginning and the end of the play, which foreshadows the

hubristic cycle that will repeat in the next play. It is not

eschatology that provides closure in Sophocles’ cosmos, even

though the plot of the play might seem inexorably linear in

its path toward a realized destiny. In the ancient world, an

end does not assume a triumph over death and the promise of

new life. Instead it is a fatalistic and morbid vision of

death as final. The new kingdom the ending promises

foreshadows a cyclical return to the hubris of human action

that had fated its destruction. Order succumbs to

destruction as catastrophe, the final moment, clears the way

for order to return in another cycle toward destruction.

From Apocalypse to Tragedy: King Lear

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What if bystanders remain silenced by catastrophe at

the end of a play? What if we are left with just a state of

shock bereft of the interpretive reflection that falling

action can provide?

This is what happens in Shakespeare’s King Lear. Audiences

had been familiar with versions of the ancient tale that end

with Cordelia taking the throne and Lear living out his old

age in retirement. But Shakespeare gives his play an

unexpectedly tragic ending. Just after Lear finds joy in

his reunion with Cordelia and Edgar triumphs over his evil

brother Edmund to restore Lear to the throne, Cordelia’s

stay of execution arrives too late and Lear dies from

despair. It was an audacious move. It was too shocking for

audiences, so performances of the play from 1681 to 1838

followed Nahum Tate’s revised version in which Cordelia’s

French army regains the kingdom, Cordelia survives to marry

Edgar, and King Lear is spared a death from despair. Tate

essentially turns King Lear into comedy. Redemption might be

achieved after many detours into abysmal suffering, but it

becomes a comedy nonetheless, ending with justice

prevailing, social order restored, and the worthy man and

woman marrying.

Samuel Johnson could not bear Shakespeare’s ending, and

gave Tate’s version his critical blessing. “Cordelia, from

the time of Tate,” Johnson writes, “has always retired with

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victory and felicity. And, if my sensations could add

anything to the general suffrage, I might relate that I was

many years ago so shocked by Cordelia's death, that I know

not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of

the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor.”

Perhaps the ending of King Lear traumatized him. Terrified of

madness, Johnson was certainly disturbed by Lear’s descent

into insanity. But the ending also disturbed his moral

sensibility. Tragedy, for Johnson, must give meaning to

evil. The ending of tragedy should parcel out justice

accordingly. Closure, therefore, provides moral meaning for

Johnson. Shakespeare shocks the audience for purely

sensational reasons. There is no reason to kill Cordelia

just as there is no reason to bring Lear to such depths of

despair throughout the play only to drop him into a further

abyss at the very moment when he has so painfully learned

his lesson. It was too traumatic for him to imagine

nihilism.

It was not until the early twentieth century that King

Lear, its original ending restored, gained the highest

critical reverence. The nihilism that disturbed Johnson

resonated with modern critics and audiences. A rapid history

of carnage from World War I to the Holocaust and the atomic

bombs compelled audiences to identify with the play’s

inexplicable horror that mocks moral justice in a world

unaccommodating of a divine order.

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Only three characters, like the tattered remnants of a

Greek chorus, remain at the end of King Lear. Instead of the

lyrical disquisition upon nothingness that transitions the

falling action of Oedipus Rex, King Lear leaves the survivors

with literally nothing to say. The sight of Lear’s death as

he clutches his senselessly executed daughter leaves them in

a state of shock. No one, not even Edgar, has any

disinterested interpretation to alleviate the horror.

Further, no messenger mediates between the audience and the

violence. Lear is the messenger. Like the unbearable scene in

which Regan and Cornwall gouge out Gloucester’s eyes that

Shakespeare shoves in front of the audience (Jacques Barzun

argues this scene suggests Shakespeare barbarity), Lear

holds Cordelia in his arms fully disclosing the horror

before us. He drapes his daughter over his lap in a tableau

of the pieta as he desperately tries to convince himself that

she might come back to life. The hope for resurrection that

haunts Shakespeare’s Christian world stands in brutal

contrast to the pre-Christian setting of the play in which

death is final. This unexpected catastrophe is so awful one

feels compelled to find some kind of meaningful hope in it.

Harold Goddard, one of the most humane readers of

Shakespeare, argued that the play is about resurrection: Lear

dies of joy, not despair, when he sees the feather he holds

before Cordelia’s lips twitch. Even the best critics are

allowed to project their desires into Shakespeare.

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The play, however, does not intimate such a hopeful

ending. Kent and Edgar’s open-ended questions when they see

Lear and Cordelia reflect a more vexing aspect of Christian

eschatology:

KENT Is this the promised end?

EDGAR Or image of that horror?

(5.3.237-38).

Edgar, as always, has his finger on the pulse of the

play. Lear’s death brings this particular cycle of

catastrophe to an end without promising to end further

conflict. It does not unveil the ultimate ending to the

world. An “image of that horror,” the apocalypse remains

deferred, appearing only as figurations of its possibility.

It may be the ending to this harsh world, but life continues

inexorably toward an unknown apocalypse. Indeed, the ending

is bleaker if one knows the background to the ancient story

of Lear. Edgar’s future as the new king does not promise the

Wheel of Fortune to turn favorably—an antiquated motif the

play frequently employs only to emphasize its uselessness—

but will send England to further dissolution. Tasked with

ruling a harsh kingdom, Edgar will have to fend off England

from an invasion of wolves that ultimately tear him to

pieces.

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Frank Kermode uses King Lear as an example of how

apocalyptic belief shifts to tragic sensibility in the early

modern era. “Tragedy,” Kermode writes, “is a successor of

apocalypse” in its notion of an endless world. Up until the

renaissance the apocalypse signified a definitive occurrence

biblically promised and always imminent. Most ancient

Christians interpreted scripture as an urgent warning that

the world was going to end very soon, even within their own

generation. In fact, most people believed—many continue to

do so—that Christ’s message was predominantly apocalyptic.

Since Christ seemed urgent about an imminent end, the

ancient Church awaited the ultimate destruction and the

second coming as though it would happen at any moment. The

Roman destruction of the temple at Jerusalem led many Jews

to believe that the world had ended. The terrible event was

probably a powerful influence behind Mark’s gospel.

When the end did not come—when catastrophe remained an

“image of that horror”—the apocalypse became a perpetually

deferred event. Each era reads the signs of the coming end

that never arrives. The deferral of the apocalypse grows

into a felt sense that history comprises an endless series

of catastrophes. Since the renaissance, endings become

transitions into perpetuated crisis as a belief in the

actual ultimate end erodes. Instead of an ultimate end,

catastrophe produces apocalyptic intimations further into

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the future. Edgar stands before a deracinated world that

continues on, nonetheless, to protract irresolute crises.

Tragedy, for Kermode, assumes figurations of apocalypse

—death, judgment, heaven, hell—but “the world goes forward

in the hands of exhausted survivors.” The end is no longer a

literal and transcendent matter, but “a matter of

immanence.” For Kermode belief in apocalypse was contingent

upon the existence of the aevum, a realm outside of time

inhabited by angels that contrasts successiveness.

Transcendence gives contingency meaning. The

demythologization of the aevum, the loss of eternity as a

condition that makes finitude meaningful, forces the human

to fill the space the angels left behind with new fictions

of the end. Not only does death become a more personal

concern, one could argue that the loss of the actual end of

the world allows self-consciousness to develop. Hamlet and

Macbeth’s self-consciousness of death, Kermode argues,

reflects the modern human condition mired in the interim

flux of protracted crisis.

What can the bystanders say at the end of the play?

Would it do justice to the nothingness at the heart of the

tragic vision if Edgar interpolated the experience with

commentary? After Albany leaves to dispatch the dead and

Kent departs to kill himself, Edgar faces a future that

comes to him drained of meaning. Annihilation has preceded

the end, and Edgar seems to stand at the last moment of the

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play in a post-apocalyptic world. There is no literary

figure more alone than Edgar, even in a play by Samuel

Beckett, and the final four lines emphasize his emptiness.

The weight of this sad time we must obey;

Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.

The oldest hath borne the most; we that are young

Shall never see so much nor live so long.

(5.3. 329 – 332)

The quatrain echoes his father’s words in Act 1, “We have

seen the best of our time,” as Edgar feebly tries to give

them refigured meaning. It is about all the play has to

offer for falling action, mere window-dressing for the

prevailing silence. At most, it sounds like a whimper in a

world stunned into terrified silence. There is literally

nothing more to say.

Edgar’s inability to end the play with the

reflectiveness he had cultivated in the play’s middle leaves

us in a suspended state of irresolution. But it also leaves

us terrified. Edgar’s evolving wisdom was always consoling

in the middle of the play, despite how strangely he goes

about achieving it, because he is the only character who

stands outside of the action. He functions as the play’s

repository for mourning. It would be impossible for us to

bear the extremity of emotions each character inflicts on us

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without Edgar’s odd combination of empathy and

disinterestedness toward suffering. In his endless

roleplaying, he copes with trauma through performance.

His stance of aesthetic curiosity distances him enough from

his own pain that he can cope with it in a space of artistic

freedom.

In these moments when Edgar breaks from the exhausting

roles he plays so that he can inspect the unraveling kingdom

anonymously, he reflects on experience. Although his brief

soliloquies and asides do not have the emotional breadth of

Lear’s mad poetry or Edmund’s calculated

intellectualizations, they offer clearing spaces for the

audience to see coherence in chaos that is unavailable to

the other characters. At one critical point Edgar achieves

tragic wisdom that goes to the heart of what makes the play

terrifying: his realization that as long as we are convinced

things cannot get any worse, they do. The point comes in Act

IV when Edgar seems almost ecstatic in his belief that he

has reached the bottom of the tragic arc of experience.

To be worst,

The lowest and most dejected thing of fortune,

Stands still in esperance, lives not in fear.

The lamentable change is from the best;

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The worst returns to laughter. Welcome, then,

Thou insubstantial air that I embrace!

The wretch that thou hast blown unto the worst

Owes nothing to thy blasts.

(4.1. 1 – 8)

He has every reason to identify with the tragic victim of

circumstances beyond his control. Banished by his father

whose posse hunts him down after Edmund’s betrayal, and

assuming the disguise of the homeless madman, Tom o’Bedlam,

the lowliest figure in society, Edgar’s reference to “the

worst” shows how tragedy can level the playing field. The

madman and the Fool can share the same patch of straw as the

King. Disaster opens space for a possible restoration of

anything because it has stripped away the “superfluity” that

differentiates people, leaving everyone a “bare forked

animal.” The space that “the worst” opens offers apocalyptic

disclosure. Catastrophe unveils truths, breaking open space

from where Edgar can achieve transformations and provoke

transformation in others.

Seemingly on cue, however, Edgar’s blinded father

enters the scene to interrupt his soliloquy with his howls

of pain. Gloucester’s tragic fall, obviously recalling

Oedipus’s, is a fresh catastrophe that undermines Edgar’s

belief that he is acting out a part to its regenerative end.

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O gods! Who is ‘t can say, “I am at the worst”?

I am worse that e’er I was

. . .

And worse I may be yet. The worst is not

So long as we can say, “This is the worst.”

(Emphasis mine 4.1 23 -28)

Edgar does not witness the ultimate end, but reaches

instead a threshold of disclosure. Thomas Pynchon repeats

the same edge of imminent disclosure at the ending of The

Crying of Lot 49 as does Cormac McCarthy in the vexed and quasi-

religious voice that ends The Road. It is not consoling that

this is not the literal end, whether it is Shakespeare,

Pynchon or McCarthy. In the absolute tragedy of the Lear-

world, it is better not to be born at all; and if one

exists, the “promised end” is, in Hamlet’s words, “a

consummation devoutly to be wished.” Conflict will continue;

the torture of this Lear-world will go on like Edgar’s dark

philosophy that “the worst” always gets outdone by further

crises. As soon as we can say, “this is the end,” we know

another end awaits us.

Tragedy and Trauma

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The foundational notion of psychotherapy is that

talking things out allows a healthy catharsis. Freud called

the emotional purging the “talking cure.” There might be

many different approaches toward psychotherapy, but the

common wisdom everyone shares is that you need to talk about

your problems. We all know that this activity is as

imperative toward mental health as brushing your teeth is to

oral hygiene. If you keep your feelings inside, the problems

bottling them up could turn into a crisis.

It is hard to believe that there was once a time not

too long ago when this was not a shared wisdom. After World

War I a soldier was considered effeminate or loathsome if he

divulged his tortured feelings. One might think we have come

a long way, and we have, but disclosing feelings still

remains rife with the threat of abjection. Most people feel

ashamed of emotions. There are more times than not when one

would rather get a root canal than confess one’s feelings.

Whatever secret emotions one harbors, they remain safe

tucked away inside even when they are growing mental tumors.

Verbalizing problems might allow for catharsis, but words

have a way of making feelings real, and reality, as we all

know, is a bitch.

Everyone has experienced the unburdening effect of

talking out a problem with a friend, spilling the beans, so

to speak, about how one really feels, and the physically

racking experience it entails. Words are not mechanical, and

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when they are used to confess personal problems they can be

accompanied by physical pain. It is interesting that

unburdening hidden feelings with a loved one is often

accompanied by guilt even when your emotional confession

does not have an iota of criminality. It is almost instinct

when hiding your twisted expression or your tears with your

hands to say, “I’m sorry.” We might have come a long way

since the days before Freud inaugurated the new era of

psychology, but something shameful or even criminal about

emotions remains. We still associate mental health with

filth and abjection.

The cathartic release that getting closure promises to

transform trauma into the consolatory shape of fiction. It

assumes that there is an inherent narrative structure to

trauma. If stories reflect the narrative structures

existing already in lived experience, then cathartic closure

can refigure the many strands of the seemingly meaningless

plot of trauma into a storied whole available for

interpretation.

In psychotherapy one expends emotion in order to gain

mental equilibrium similar to the tensions narrative

conflict generates and that an ending discharges. Tragedy

resolves when the climactic turn in the play allows the

stray strands of the plot to form a meaningful whole.

Psychotherapy adopts the literary convention of catastrophe,

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closure, and catharsis to describe the process of overcoming

trauma: working-through conflict in order to achieve the

cathartic release of closure, or working-beyond trauma.

These cathartic structures in psychotherapy and

literature also share in the Christian narrative of

suffering, redemption, and salvation. Redemption narratives

depicting a sweeping vision of creation, fall, and

restoration that span Hebrew and Christian scriptures inform

the structure of narrative throughout literature up until

today. Trauma narratives, such as the contemporary memoir,

are dependent upon a predictable but varying narrative

structure of lost innocence, inexorable suffering, and hard-

earned redemption. Likewise, psychotherapy, traditionally

anathema to religion, draws upon narratives of redemption

from suffering in the victim’s drive to “gain closure.”

Tragedy follows similar narrative patterns of suffering and

redemption, but closes in death or exile. Since tragedy

depicts, as Aristotle claims, an action that is complete,

the plot provides closure to the contingent meaninglessness

tragedy depicts. Part of the redemptive nature of catharsis

derives from the ways in which tragedy contains terror in an

aesthetic frame. By decimating worlds, tragedy can intimate

potential renewal. In a Christian world, adumbrations of

renewal emphasize the individual’s confrontation with a

personal eschatology. The ending in tragedy does not present

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the promised end, but, as Edgar says near the end of King

Lear, an “image of that horror.”

Although the allure of the passion story leads to the

catharsis of resurrection, the totalizing eschatological

message of Christianity often elides the endurance of

suffering. Mark’s gospel, as we saw, had to be amended to

make it conform to a consoling coherence. The raw terror,

the sense of God’s abandonment, could not be left to the

imagination. Despite the promised end, the terror remains.

As I have argued, the closure that creates a literary

work’s form is a trope that functions, like apocalypse, to

rupture and reveal at the same time as it conceals our

unconscious desire for conflict. Narrative endings form

critical boundary-situations. An ending intimates a space

from beyond an endpoint that Christianity associates with

transcendence, psychology associates with emotional

empowerment, and criticism associates with the promise for

interpretation. The narrative conventions of redemption that

both psychotherapy and religion share open up a much-needed

dialogue between trauma and religion. If tragedy succeeds

apocalypse, as Kermode claims, then I would argue that

trauma succeeds tragedy.

There two different ways of looking at tragedy: tragedy

as form—the literary genre governed by conventions as

opposed to ideas—or tragedy as sensibility—a disposition toward

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life, an encompassing worldview of isolation. Over the past

century the word tragedy has wandered from its strictly

generic definition of an aesthetic form to signify a much

wider range of experience that has more to do with sensibility.

Particularly in response to catastrophe in the past century,

the word gains new and powerful currency. Tragedy no longer

privileges events based strictly upon magnitude. The

Holocaust, hurricane Katrina, 9/11, a lost job, a red shirt

inadvertently left in a white wash can all be described as

tragic. As Terry Eagleton quips, tragedy has come to mean

“very sad.” In fact, tragic sensibility has come to mean

something closer to, and even synonymous with, trauma.

A term once relegated to an aesthetic category, tragedy

now encompasses an indeterminate sensibility that reflects a

deepening awareness of the inherent drama in disaster. The

cinematic unfolding of events like 9/11 and hurricane

Katrina testifies to a new paradigm by which we witness

traumatic experience. We are increasingly enraptured by the

immediacy of catastrophe that we witness from mediated

sources, between the actual and the virtual. Whereas trauma

was once relegated to the direct contact between catastrophe

and its survivor, media allows us all now to bear witness to

catastrophic events. Trauma has become fairly democratic

business. We can all stake a claim, to varying degrees, in

survival.

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The semantic drift of “tragedy” reflects an evolving

disposition to describe actuality in a dramatic context.

Since the renaissance, the association of despair with sin

personalizes tragedy. In ancient drama the tragic figure is

an agent for the plot, making for little self-consciousness.

Early modern tragedy, as we have seen with Shakespeare,

depicts the tragic figure as an individual very preoccupied

with agency. This preoccupation makes him, at the same time,

much more self-conscious of helplessness. The transformation

of tragedy into an existential concern deepens with

secularity that eventually reaches Freud’s anatomy of

unconscious confliction that makes us all, to an extent, the

isolated figures of tragedy. The tragic hero is no longer

the privileged role of a single, powerful figure. Like Willy

Lowman in Death of a Salesman, we all become figures for whom

“attention must be paid.”

In the Christian era tragedy depicts, as Reinhold

Niebhur argues, “incongruity” between the self and God. But

eschatology means that so much more is at stake for him than

exile or death. Unlike classical drama that urges the

protagonist’s division between the self and the world that

Schiller emphasizes, early modern tragedy evolves in the

shadow of the crucifixion and resurrection. Suffering in the

world serves as a preamble to salvation. Tragedy carries the

weight of eschatology absent from classical tragedy. Rather

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than intimating hope, Christian tragedy is haunted by the

promise of salvation.

It has been commonplace in criticism to show how

tragedy is incompatible with Christianity. George Steiner

argues that the hope of salvation contaminates the

irredeemable despair required of tragedy. Tragedy is a

purely theistic genre for Steiner, “that form of art which

requires the intolerable burden of God’s presence.”

Therefore, a secularized world is inhospitable to tragedy

that requires the felt presence of God. Steiner’s

uncompromising absolutism has generally prevailed in

arguments concerning tragedy. “Christianity is dramatic,”

Sylvan Barnet argues, “but it is not tragic, for Christian

teleology robs death of its sting” (202). Charles Glicksberg

writes, “Christianity completely reverses the tragic

formula: out of failure ‘success’ is born, out of death

comes the bliss of everlasting life in eternity.

Christianity demands the acceptance of suffering and death

as the price of salvation, whereas the tragic vision retains

the anguish of uncertainty, the piercing pain of doubt, the

dread and fear and despair” (14). Arguing that the felix culpa

annuls tragedy, Karl Jasper says, “The chance of being saved

destroys the tragic sense of being trapped without a chance

of escape. Therefore no genuinely Christian tragedy can

exist” (13). In Beyond Tragedy Reinhold Niebhur concludes:

“The cross is not tragic, but the resolution of tragedy”

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(155). Salvation compensates for suffering, making tragedy

incongruous with Christian futurity.

There is a new openness, however, toward the Christian

experience of tragedy in the past decade. The theologian,

Graham Ward, recently criticized Steiner’s view as a

“suppressionist understanding of resurrection, such that all

the darkness and pain of the crucifixion is erased and

rendered epiphenomenal; not only erased but justified. The

eschatological obliterates all memories and experiences of

the apocalyptic.” Ward’s argument against Steiner’s

absolutism comes in defense of Terry Eagleton’s study of

tragedy, Sweet Violence (2004), a book that marked for many his

surprising religious turn. Eagleton argues: “Jesus’

crucifixion is genuinely tragic . . . The destitute

condition of humanity, if it was to be fully restored, had

to be lived all the way through, pressed to the extreme

limit of a descent into the hell of meaninglessness and

desolation, rather than disavowed, patched up or short-

circuited.” Christ’s death is not a “conjuring trick,” a

devise for “rising again in glory.” It is “only by accepting

the worst for what it is, not as a convenient springboard to

leap beyond it, can one surpass it. Jesus is left only with

a forlorn faith in what he called Father, despite the fact

that He abandoned him.” Tragedy can become a source of

renewed life, opening grace from the groundlessness of

existence. “The unfathomableness of God’s grace,” Eagleton

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writes, “constitutes the tragic possibilities of

Christianity.” Although Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and

Easter Sunday form the beginning, middle, and end that close

with Christ’s triumph over death, comic absolutism effaces

the tragic disjuncture at the heart of the Paschal mystery.

The promise of resurrection risks not only a denial of

death, but also the refusal to affirm life.

Eagleton, Ward and others who pull away from Steiner’s

absolutist vision open tragedy up to religion in ways that

can contribute to trauma theory. Opening tragedy to

religious discourse in the context of trauma theory allows

for an understanding of how suffering problematizes the

Christian metanarrative of consolation that permeates all

literature and thought in the West.

The Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar

articulates a relationship between religion and suffering in

Mysterium Paschale. In this remarkable work, Balthasar elevates

Christ’s harrowing of hell on Holy Saturday to a more

pronounced position in the Easter narrative. The forlorn

middle position of Holy Saturday when God abandons Christ,

Balthasar argues, is central to the Christian experience.

The suspended period of suffering endures like the middling

position between the past and the future of trauma victims.

The promise of resurrection cannot cancel out suffering,

Balthasar argues, because Christianity emphasizes God’s

self-emptying and abandonment. “Christ’s redemption of

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humankind had its decisive completion,” Balthasar writes,

“not, strictly speaking, with the Incarnation or in the

continuity of his mortal life, but in the hiatus of death”

(13). The “second death” that comprises Holy Saturday is the

“realization of all Godlessness” “the taking on of all the

sins of the world” in the “descent into Hell” (52, 51, 53).

All things are restored in the end only because God’s

suffering represents the ultimate tragedy of Godlessness.

In Spirit and Trauma: a Theology of Remaining, Shelly Rambo

argues that Balthasar’s emphasis on Holy Saturday offers a

theological articulation of trauma. Like Christ’s descent

into Hell, “death haunts life” for the trauma victim. Trauma

theory should witness “the ongoing experience of death in

life” (3). Trauma frustrates the hope of future salvation.

Instead, haunted by events they cannot comprehend, victims

remain suspended in an eternal present where suffering

endures. In its emphasis upon the totalizing coherence

between origin and apocalypse, theology tends to

misunderstand how suffering endures within a fragmented

middle ground of experience. “The push to move beyond the

event to a new and pure place, is not just a misconception

about traumatic survival,” Rambo writes, “it is a dangerous

move that threatens to elide the realities of traumatic

suffering” (4). In other words, Rambo criticizes both

religion and psychology for their emphasis upon “graining

closure.” She calls for a theology that moves away from

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beginnings and endings, or life and death, in order to focus

in on “middles” and “remaining.”

I claim that trauma returns theologians to our

primary claims about death and life, particularly

as they are narrated in the events of cross and

resurrection. Trauma disrupts this narrative,

turning our attention to a more mixed terrain of

remaining, one that I identify as the “middle”

(5).

Rambo’s “middle” space remains a perplexingly

“untheologized site of survival.” Trauma is a condition in

which experience remains caught in the middle where life and

death superimpose. A narrative ending, I argue, like the

closure gained from traumatic experience, opens a space that

is simultaneously past and future. An ending becomes a

trope, a retrograde middle to a plot in which the white

space of the page that follows—and the white space that

surrounds the text—forms the unconscious of the text, a plot

that, as Prospero says, is “rounded by a little sleep.”

Six months after the outbreak of World War I, Freud

concludes his strange essay, “Thoughts on War and Death”

(1915) with aphoristic sounding words: “If you desire peace,

prepare for war . . . If you would endure life, be prepared

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for death.” Freud’s essay certainly doesn’t have a consoling

ending! As the human becomes more murderous in the work

required to maintain civilization, it becomes,

paradoxically, easier to deny death. For Freud, our “dread

of death” makes it so that “our unconscious does not believe

in its own death; it behaves as if immortal.”

Our own death is indeed unimaginable, and whenever

we make the attempt to imagine it we can perceive

that we really survive as spectators. Hence the

psychoanalytic school could venture on the

assertion that at bottom no one believes in his

own death, or to put the same thing in another

way, in the unconscious every one of us is

convinced of his own immortality (223).

Our unconscious belief in immortality results from the

fragmentation of finitude. Paul Ricoeur calls the despairing

position in the middle, the pathetique of misery. Our own life-

narrative remains incomplete because our total time on earth

is longer than our conscious experience of it. We are

conscious only of the middle of life. Since we do not

register our own birth or death, we require others to

narrate its story, but we despair over our inability to

experience the self as a totality. We are only aware of the

parts that make up the whole of the self. For Freud, one

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cannot represent one’s own death unless it appears in a

fantasy, which means that the sublimating power of fiction

emerges as an anxious defense against the threat of death.

It is inevitable result of all this that we should

seek in the world of fiction, of general

literature and of the theater compensation for the

impoverishment of life. There we still find people

who know how to die, who are even capable of

killing someone else . . . which makes it possible

for us to reconcile ourselves with death—namely,

that behind all the vicissitudes of life we

preserve our existence intact . . . In the realm

of fiction we discover that the plurality of lives

for which we crave. We die in the person of a

given hero, yet we survive him, and are ready to

die again with the next hero just as safely (225).

The parallel between mortality and the human compulsion

to make fictions preoccupies the modern investigation of

narrative. Frank Kermode, as we have seen, argues that the

fragmentary experience of finitude and the terror of death

compel the consoling paradigms of closure in fiction.

Fiction offers us ultimate beginnings and endings

unavailable to us in our forlorn position stuck in “the

middest.” The coherence an ending offers to the beginning

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and middle bestows fiction with birth and death in

miniature. When we read fiction we become spectators to life

as a whole. The ending transforms the imagined world of

fiction into a sort-of micro-eschaton that organizes

experience into a meaningful teleology unavailable to us in

life.

Kermode examines our crisis-oriented condition from a

Christian perspective of stable and transcendent origins and

endings. An ending brings meaning to fiction that is not

only consolatory but providential. The author, like God,

designs the totality of a work and determines all its

outcomes, which makes narrative bare an uncanny resemblance

to predestination.

Kermode’s paradigm for narrative coherence is the

union of the Old and New Testament into one book that begins

with Genesis and ends with Apocalypse. The mass of material

of the Old Testament typologically forms a seamless

determination of events in the New. For Kermode, our

personalized vision of death as it evolves in the wake of

demythologized apocalypse immensely affects narrative

closure. As the apocalypse transforms into the individual

preoccupation with mortality indicative of tragedy, we are

forced to reinvent paradigms of closure to account for

finitude. Consequently, the endings of fiction in the past

century become more difficult and irresolute as closure fits

less within an actual biblical apocalypse. Endings

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increasingly struggle with the naïveté inherent in

totalizing contingent experience as closure crumbles into

transitions from one crisis to the next.

Creation and Apocalypse no longer accord with lived

experience. Literary closure, therefore, must adjust to a

Christian cosmology that can no longer accommodate

contingency. But narrative must continue to balance the

artifice of an ending with the haphazardness of life.

Instead of plot’s teleology that propels narrative toward

ultimate endings, modern fiction depicts the end-directed

movement of narrative as the crossing to another crisis.

Fiction continues to allow for the illusion of “closure”; an

ending must satisfy in some way. But in modern texts,

closure accounts for the excess of experience by taking the

form of irresolution, disjuncture, gaps, and fissures. As

increasingly incomprehensible events congest the modern

world, narratives attempt to reflect the resulting trauma by

rupturing narrative consecution in its inexorable progress

to an end. The flashback, for instance, becomes more

symptomatic of trauma than it is a narrative convention.

Narrative depicts the impossibility to gain closure from

incomprehensible experience. There is always more conflict

than a plot can resolve, a surplus that cannot be closed.

The excess of meaning that reaches the limits of cognition

and problematizes narrative coherence is the focus of trauma

theory.

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In many respects, Kermode’s argument in The Sense of an

Ending that the end-directed nature of fiction provides

consolation is too simple. It reflects the discharge of

pleasurable energy in a cathartic model of therapy that

Freud eventually revised in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The

conflict resolution of fiction Kermode focuses on is akin to

the pleasure principle that, Freud argues, operates “in the

service of a function whose business is to free the mental

apparatus entirely from excitation” (62). Gaining closure

veils a more tragic condition concerning the impossibility

to cope that Freud’s writing points to and that has

affinities with Balthasar’s emphasis upon the forlornness of

Holy Saturday.

Since psychoanalysis interprets the indeterminate space

of the unconscious, the narrative it generates is

conceivably interminable. There is nothing to preclude a

psychotherapeutic narrative from ending because the

unconscious has no stable temporal ground. Whereas theology

explains our condition in terms of an original catastrophe,

for Freud the human is thrown at birth into a perpetual

battleground of instincts. We cannot govern the dark realm

of the unconscious that governs us. Further, at birth the

human is helpless, entirely dependent upon others. Religion

evolves out of this helplessness. Like children we surrender

to forces greater than us. Freud remarked to Jung in 1910,

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“the ultimate basis of man’s need for religion is infantile

helplessness” (PMB 189). Since we require a parent to care

for us, Freud argues, “a personal God is, psychologically,

nothing other than an exalted father” (Freud, 1910:123). In

The Future of an Illusion, Freud argues that God is a taskmaster-

father who protects us even as He terrifies us. Religion,

therefore, is “born from man’s need to make his helplessness

tolerable and built up from the material of memories of

helplessness of his own childhood and the childhood of the

human race” (18).

The same power Kermode claims that fiction possesses to

console us functions for Freud in religion. Religion and art

traffics in illusions. Further, both religion and art evolve

from the need to form substitutions for lost childhood

gratification. Although religion and art share similar

illusions, Freud reserves deeper contempt for religion.

Poetry might be harmless enough for Freud (an ambivalence

toward poets and artists that befuddled Lionel Trilling),

but religion is a dangerous cultural neurosis that everyone

conforms to. The consolation endings in fiction provide

turns into totalizing providential design in religion and

God becomes the transcendent Author. “Everything that

happens in this world,” Freud writes, “is an expression of

the intentions of an intelligence superior to us, which in

the end, though its ways and byways are difficult to follow,

orders everything for the best” (19). Religion transforms

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the comforting teleology of fiction into the governing

principle of eschatology. We cling to a pervasive hope for

an afterlife that Freud describes in terms similar to a

nineteenth-century novel. “In the end all good is rewarded

and all evil punished, if not actually in this form of life

then in the latter existences that begin after death. In

this way all the terrors, the sufferings, and the hardships

of life are destined to be obliterated” (PMB 189). Whereas

one can willingly suspend disbelief when reading fiction,

religion blurs those lines. Unlike art, religion pervades

life with an illusion by which we live. Further, belief in

the afterlife denies death. If death is merely the prelude

to immortality, then the human will continue to deny his or

her own mortality, a denial that accounts for the

destructiveness of the battlefields in 1915.

For Freud, the eschatological promise of religion

short-circuits interpretation. But the end-directed nature

of life he examines resembles eschatology nonetheless. The

central statement in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, “The aim of all life is

death,” appears like a truism. Eventually we are all going to

die. Yet Freud’s wording, “the aim of all life,” implies

teleology. It is not just that we are going to die. Death is

our goal. And if death is our goal, it is also our desire.

Freud comes to this disturbing realization by examining

the recurring nightmares of soldiers concerning the physical

trauma of war. The repetition of these dreams compels

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Freud’s stunning realization that dreams do not constitute

wish fulfillment as he had previously imagined. Why does the

mind urge people to repeat pain from the past? Certainly

dreaming about the physical trauma of war does not fulfill

an unconscious wish. To illustrate how the repetition

compulsion of soldiers’ nightmares allows them to make sense

of experience, Freud famously analyzes a game he observes

his little grandchild playing. The boy throws a spool of

string out of his crib, announcing “fort!” (gone), and then

pulls it back in crying “da!” (here). The game does not tire

for the boy. He repeats it to Freud’s curiosity.

Freud concludes that the boy creates the game as a

means to cope with his mother’s daily departures. He

abreacts painful experience by throwing the object out of

his crib (mom is gone!) and reeling it in (mom is back!).

The game’s repetition sublimates the pain of her loss into

creative activity, allowing him to master trauma. The boy’s

ability to cope with loss by compulsively repeating his

mother’s coming and going sheds light on the soldiers’

recurring dreams. The game turns trauma into a miniature

plot that the boy performs. He owns his little drama, and,

unlike his mother’s departures, he can control it by

repeating at whim. The repeated semblance of pain binds the

boy’s traumatic energy into a manageable unit. While it may

be unpleasant, the activity of working-through trauma

ultimately reduces excitation, which is pleasurable. The

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pleasure derives from the ability to turn pain into

something artistic. At the same time, paradoxically, the

reduction of excitation requires the expenditure of energy.

(BUT soldiers can’t CONTROL their nightmares = the need for

artistic energy)

In Sigmund Freud, Richard Wollheim argues that Freud

resurrects his early belief that “the mind acts as though it

could altogether eliminate tension, as though, in other

words, it could reduce itself to a state of extinction”

(211). Whereas the cathartic model of Freud’s early work

reduces everything to the equivalence between the rise of

tension that results in unpleasure, and the expenditure of

tension that results in pleasure, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle,

the mind compulsively works over “some original impression,

so as to master it, so as at a later stage to get pleasure

from it.” There is “in repetition a trend that really is

‘beyond,’ i.e., inconsistent with, the pleasure principle.”

By combining his new insight with his hypothesis that “all

repetition is a form of discharge,” Freud theorizes that the

compulsion to repeat “can be seen as the effort to restore a

state that is both historically primitive and also marked by

the total draining of energy, i.e., death” (Emphasis mine

211 – 212). Working-through trauma results not only in the

equilibrium of toxic emotion, but constitutes the search for

something beyond our traumatic state that combines life and

death.

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Lionel Trilling is one of the first literary critics to

see that Beyond the Pleasure Principle’s “relevance to literature is

inescapable.” For Trilling, Freud’s work is “one which

stands besides Aristotle’s notion of catharsis, in part to

supplement, in part to modify it.” Freud’s theory of

traumatic neurosis suggests for Trilling “what might be

called the mithridactic function, by which tragedy is used

as the homeopathic administration of pain to insure

ourselves to the greater pain which life will force upon us”

(54, 55-56). Freud himself points out how his exploration

into traumatic neuroses is relevant to literature at the end

of Chapter II in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, but the commentary

arrives like an afterthought. The therapeutic relevance of

fiction gains great attention from narrative theorists in

the 1980s, however, who begin to loosen up narrative

formalism with psychoanalytic criticism. In Reading for the Plot,

Peter Brooks uses Beyond the Pleasure Principle as a template for

narrative in his argument that plot is “best conceived as an

activity, a structuring operation” that, driven by the

unconscious, reveals a “passion for meaning.” Like a human

life, a narrative must reach an ending on its own terms,

delaying the end until it finds suitable closure.

Circumventing a direct route to the end, a plot builds

conflict that makes the ending all the more cathartic or

pleasurable. At the same time, an ending, like death, is

agonizing: the structure of a narrative draws a beginning

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and middle to an ending in a struggle that shadows the

unconscious war between Eros and Thanatos. “Narratives,”

says Brooks, “lay bare the nature of narration as a form of

human desire: the need to tell as a primary human drive that

seeks to seduce and subjugate the listener, to implicate him

in the thrust of desire that can never quite speak its name—

never can quite come to the point—but that insists on

speaking over and over again its movement towards the name.”

Desire and death propel narratives toward an ending on

its own terms, which parallel the human drive to return to

an earlier state of things. Paradoxically, this drive for

inertia results in the increasing expenditure of energy. We

work hard in our desire to return to an inert state. The

paradox resembles Augustine’s belief that a symptom of our

fallen state is our ever-agitated efforts to still time. The

energy we expend to reconcile past and future into the

stillness of eternity increases. “What impels us forward,”

Eagleton says of Freud, “perversely, is an instinct to

travel backward to Eden” (248). If the boy’s game of fort/da

constitutes a plot in miniature, then a short story, a novel

or a play extends the same dynamic between pain and pleasure

into a more complex sequence of repetitions and delays that

“bind” experiences into a structure to master them in

anticipation of cathartic release. A narrative must come to

an end, but it does so by delaying the end in order to reach

it on its own terms.

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In Why Does Tragedy Give Pleasure, A.D. Nutall argues that

Freud revolutionizes our idea of the pleasure tragedy

generates because he was more open to its mysterious nature

than Aristotle who “showed how tragic pleasure is possible

but not exactly why it happens in a given case.” For Nutall,

“Freud believed in a quasi-physiological cathexes of psychic

force—in psychic quanta—requiring periodic discharge” (39 –

40). He eschews the darker realms of the unconscious,

however, by concluding his study with formalism.

Tragedy, unlike fairground rides, operates not

only at the level of arousal but also at the level

of conclusion or closure. It is the special

pleasure—the oikeia hedone—that we feel when all is

done, when we have followed the sequence to its

terrible end and understood, that sill needs to be

explained (104).

Although Nuttall claims that he does not want “to set aside

as irrelevant the pleasure of arousal,” he believes that the

“irresponsible pleasure of arousal is joined with bonds of

iron to the responsibilities of probable knowledge and

intellectual assent.” In other words, by giving tragic

energy closure, the play becomes an aesthetic object

available for contemplation. Tragic representation is

terrifying but safe. Nuttall’s genealogy of tragic pleasure

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that begins with Aristotle returns to Aristotle. We might

experience catharsis, but a tragic play assures our

experience will be disinterested.

Nuttall misses an opportunity to explore the difference

between the representation of terror and it actuality, and

the pleasure we derive from both. As Nietzsche was aware,

humans do gain pleasure from actual suffering. Obviously

there is a difference between literally witnessing

catastrophe and watching a play (or a movie). Zizek argued

that our desire to watch replays of the second play hitting

the Twin Towers in the terrorist attacks was tantamount to

the titillation of a snuff film. It was probably hardly the

case for those in the middle of the experience. For Edmund

Burke, an experience that literally threatens our life

cannot be sublime. Although we can feel terror standing at

the edge of an ocean or at the summit of a mountain, the

sublime is primarily an aesthetic category. The same applies

to Aristotle’s argument that one gains pleasure from

contemplating depictions of death as opposed to confronting

actual death, which merely repulses us.

The distinction between actuality and art goes to the

heart of Freud’s distinction between anxiety and terror.

Tragedy allows us to experience terror by heightening

pleasurable discharge because we are already anxiously

prepared to be shocked. In our willing suspension of

disbelief, we respond to the appearance of terror. Tragedy

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turns terror into a trope. We can manage, therefore, the

pity and fear a tragic work invites us to experience.

Aristotle claims that drama does not mirror the world as it

is, but creates a world as it could be. Therefore, truth in

literature must be an embodied truth. Since literature is

hypothetical, poetry “can body forth the possible and the

probable,” Nuttall says, “and this we can properly enjoy”

(102). Tragedy allows us to rehearse for actual catastrophe

by vicariously experiencing it. Echoing Trilling, Nuttall

says that tragedy is “an exercise in understanding in

advance the real horrors we may meet and the psychic

violence they may cause” (104).

Tragedy vexes an audience into a heightened emotional

state by the appearance of terror. This cannot be

overstated. We are terrified by a fiction. The success of a

tragedy reflects the balance between contingency and closure

and ending provides: we believe in a fiction while recognizing

its artifice. In fact, the more tension a tragic work can

produce between actuality and artifice, the more successful

it is. Drama allows us aesthetic distance in which to

“properly” experience terror. The pleasure we gain from

tragedy derives from our exposure to experience that does

cannot actually threaten us. Since the mind cannot confront

the possibility of death directly, tragedy allows us the

possibility of surviving. We gain pleasure because we

experience the semblance of survival. The catharsis or the

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psychic discharge tragedy produces functions as a substitute

for terror that both rehearses and tropes death.

Anticipation is paradoxical in that we must be anxious in

order to work-through trauma. Anxiety defensively guards

against experience in the future that one was not prepared

for in the past. Freud makes a crucial distinction between

anxiety, fear and fright.

‘Anxiety’ describes a particular state of

expecting danger or preparing for it, even though

it ma be an unknown one. ‘Fear’ requires a

definite object of which to be afraid. ‘Fright,’

however, is the name we give to the state a person

gets into when he has run into danger without

being prepared for it; it emphasizes the factor of

surprise. I do not believe that anxiety can

produce a traumatic neurosis. There is something

about anxiety that protects its subject against

fright and so against fright neurosis. (11).

Trauma is the result of the inability to receive an event

caused by fright (Schreck) because it exceeds comprehension.

Traumatic neurosis, claims Freud, “is created by the lack of any

preparedness for anxiety” (emphasis mine 31). Repetition

compulsion in the form of dreams or verbal representation

prepares for the delayed over-excitation of trauma. Trauma

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entails “endeavoring to master the stimulus retrospectively,

by developing the anxiety whose omission was the cause of the

traumatic neurosis” (emphasis mine 609). This temporal delay

in registering trauma accounts for its peculiar double

structure: trauma involves a subsequent event that triggers

the initial one into cognition, forcing us to confront it.

In Unclaimed Experience, the foundational text of trauma

theory, Cathy Caruth focuses on the temporal structure of

belatedness in trauma as a way to theorize about literary

representation. She draws from Freud’s notion of temporal

paradox to argue that trauma is not necessarily caused by a

“breach in the mind” of stimulation too overwhelming for

consciousness, but by “the lack of preparedness to take in

stimulation that comes too quickly.” Therefore, trauma

consists “solely in the structure of its experience or recognition:

the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the

time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the

one who experiences it” (4-5). Therefore, the

incomprehensibility of history can only be represented on a

literary level.

The inception of trauma theory in the early 1990s for

Caruth addresses a crisis in representation as much as it

explores trauma. Unclaimed Experience attempts to rectify the

frequent charge that deconstruction leads to political and

ethical paralysis. Trauma allows deconstruction to balance

formal practices of interpretation within the actual

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contingencies of the world. Deconstructive thinkers do not

deny reference, but rethink reference apart from traditional

understanding. By using the temporal paradox of trauma, the

return in a second event of what was not known in the first,

Caruth conceives of experience in the ways it escapes or

resists comprehension. Writing gives expression to what

cannot be fully known. Literary criticism must track that

which escapes interpretation. For Shelly Rambo, Caruth opens

up theological possibilities of a “double telling” between a

story of the unbearable nature of an event and the

unbearable nature of its survival.

Caruth’s emphasis on incomprehensibility, however,

threatens to elevate trauma to a sublime category. Casting

trauma into an unspeakable realm shares in the same

sublimity of the sacred. Caruth’s theory poses a dilemma:

traumatic experience defies representation, so attempts to

articulate it results in an affront to understanding. Such a

sublime nature to trauma threatens to close off the

possibility of meaning. Dominick LaCapra argues, “Caruth . .

. seems dangerously close to conflating absence (of absolute

foundation and total meaning or knowledge) with loss and

even sacralizing or making sublime, the compulsive acting-

out of a traumatic past” (History 121). Susana Onega and Jean-

Michael Guteau describe the sublime of trauma as the

“failure of faculties” concerning traumatic experience,

claiming, “trauma would, thus, be compatible with a

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conjectural mode that would throw us subjects, in our

capacity as readers and critics, into a complex ethical

state of a disquieted ‘negative capability’” (19).

Ironically, this penchant for the sublime shares in the same

absolutism of tragedy championed by George Steiner, but

which occludes the possibility for confronting the

actualities of suffering. It seems to me a dead end for

trauma theory if it succumbs to the same emphasis on

absolute categories of the ineffable as theology.

In “Narrating Pain: The Power of Catharsis,” Richard

Kearney explores the ways in which narrative retelling can

provide cathartic release for sufferers of trauma. Since

pity and fear, according to Aristotle, arise from the

dramatic imitation of certain actions in order to provide

for their outlet, the “recounting of plot, fiction or

spectacle permits us to repeat the past forward so to speak.”

Such creative repetition “allows for a certain kind of

pleasure or release. In the play of narrative re-creation we

are invited to revisit our lives—through actions and

personas of others—so as to live them otherwise. We discover

a way to give a future to the past” (Paragraph 51). He offers

the possibility for a positive effect of using tragic

conventions in the representation of traumatic experience.

Unbearable events, such as genocide, might become elevated

to a sublime category or reduced to melodramatic

representation, but he urges how narrative catharsis “is a

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way of making absent things present in a unique balancing of

compassion and dispassion, of identification and

contemplation, or particular emotion and universal

understanding.” Such a balance can “proffer some measure of

healing” (63). It is possible, then, to confront the

actuality of suffering without succumbing to the total

numbness of trauma that leads to unknowingness, and to

impose order over traumatic experience with narrative

structure without eliding the endurance of pain. If

actuality does not balance with narrative convention,

Kearney seems to suggest, it is impossible for life to

endure beyond the paralyzing effects of trauma. Redemption

from trauma is possible without whitewashing the power of

the past.

In “Mourning and Melancholy,” Freud defines the process

of working through mourning as “remembering, repeating,

working through.” The disturbing aspect of his essay is that

the work of mourning never brings redemption from suffering.

In fact, the work of mourning creates an illusion of healing

we impose upon the inchoate material of experience so that

life can appear meaningful. The state of melancholy might be

reached when an author allows mourning to transform into

something both chronic and oddly pleasurable. Likewise, our

desire to work-beyond trauma requires us to produce

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conflict. This seems, of course, antithetical to common

sense. It suggests that we work-through mourning only so that

we can never relinquish our fixation upon the lost object.

Ironically, if the result of working-through mourning is to

release our emotional investment in the lost object, we end

up mourning the loss of that very object we have expended so

much energy to forget. The wounds that repetition compulsion

afflicts are, in fact, often traumatic in of themselves. We

have come to equate catharsis with purging: expending

emotional force brings closure to a tragedy with sublime

language. The result of catharsis, however, is never the

elimination of emotion. Poetry that tempers tragic outcomes

only masks conflicting energies that draw plot to its close.

In the same way that ancient Greek tragedy exacerbates

violent emotions as a means to purge them, we compulsively

represent trauma in order to perpetuate conflict under the

assumption that we are working-beyond trauma in similar acts

of catharsis.

The sense of coming-after dogs both literature and

witness. 2 By the time one registers the magnitude of

2 Harold Bloom opens his study of Wallace Stevens, The Poems of Our Climate, with an apothegm concerning poetic creation, “Everything that can be broken should be broken,” that he extends into “a triple rhythm: It must be broken; It must not bear having been broken; It must seem to have been mended.” According to Bloom, poetry evolves from a struggle with belatedness. The strong poet destroys influential precursors by willfully misreading them, breaking the ways in which they imagine theworld appears. But the poet cannot abide the space he has

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catastrophe, the traumatic event loses its immediacy. Trauma

of the past becomes realized by a secondary event that

recalls the initial catastrophe. One registers trauma in an

entirely new context as its expression takes on a form

estranged from the source. Memory allows us to recreate

time’s passage into something more meaningful than

consecution. While the past invades the present, we attempt

broken, so he reinvents the world in order for it to “seem tohave been mended.” The key term here is “seem.” Modern poets struggle not necessarily with how to represent reality, but how to reimagine appearances. How does a poet represent reality other poets have already reimagined? The modern poetmust discover new ways in which to trope an already figural reality.

For Bloom an original catastrophe “is indeed already the condition of language, the condition of the ruins of time.” Poems are “catastrophe creations,” originating from aflawed creator. Poets trope a world that prior poets have already figuratively transformed. Crisis, therefore, is implicit in the very act of writing. To break prior poetic appearances in order to create new ones, the poet makes “a crossing,” which is “a process of disjunction, a leaping of the gap between one kind of figurative thinking and another”(Climate 1 – 2).

Whereas Bloom’s tripartite scheme in 1980 forms a niftycoherence, our apocalyptic millennium problematizes the dialectic of brokenness and mending. The interpretation of narrative closure must extend the ellipsis in Bloom’s “catastrophe creations” or Kermode’s miniature apocalypse of“tick-tock” and “tock-tick.” Endings break what appears to be mended by perpetuating brokenness.Like Bloom’s poet who traverses terrain already explored by previous poets, the representation of catastrophe is always belated.

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to impose an order upon life. This retrospective compulsion

measures our anxiety.

Working-through trauma perpetuates conflict in the

expenditure of energy required to gain closure. It generates

anxiety to compensate for the lack of preparedness we had

experienced when events caught us off-guard. By perpetuating

the conflict catastrophe instigates in displaced forms, we

repeat trauma with a difference. Repetition compulsion does not

replicate the past, but distorts the nature of trauma into a

new form, the work of art. We suffer instead from a

representation compulsion, a desire to work-beyond trauma by

constructing fictions.

Narrative repeats catastrophe temporally refigured by

its retrograde force into a particular form. Plot requires

conflict that must increase in order to reach the stillness

of closure, but closure, at the same time, conceals energy

it cannot circumscribe. The conventional necessity of an

ending cannot contain time whose haphazardness it must keep

in balance. The ineluctable end-directedness of narrative

surrenders always to the death drive it must resist. But

there is no zero-point that punctuates the end. All endings

imply an ellipsis. The white space that follows the final

words is a repository for all possibilities in excess of

cognition. This repository into which the final words of a

narrative trail transforms into the unconscious of the text.

Within the gulf that opens from the close of narrative grows

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the conflict of the next crisis; it is a crossing into the

conflict of further writing.

The paradoxical relationship between contingency and

the necessity for closure conflicts a narrative’s

relationship to actuality. Despite the assumption that one

must cope with trauma by directly stating it, literalism is

the death of narrative. No matter how closely it mirrors

reality, narrative is figural. As I have been arguing, both

the closure and the ending of a text is a trope. The choice

an author makes in what to select and how to shape material

into a narrative is the work of figuration. Form, too, is a

trope. To trope means to distort. An author or witness must

transform catastrophe into its appearance. This area of

trauma theory has not explored enough. It is common

knowledge that one must confront reality in order to gain

psychological healing. But representing trauma, even at the

level of recounting, is a figural exercise. It is never a

direct statement. We must not forget that the entire basis

of Freud’s theories about dreams involved the patient’s

dream-work, the story the patient constructs out of the

dream that can never recover the actual dream itself. The

sublimation of trauma into expressive form, therefore,

breaks its own illusion of closure. Writing always returns

to the conflict of writing. The ending of a narrative

maintains the illusion that fiction, unlike psychotherapy,

is not interminable.

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Narrative crosses the experience or testimony of trauma

into a metonym of the experience that as a whole would be

too totalizing to cognitively withstand. Since literature

transforms terror into the appearance of terror, authors

must always discover ways in which to break appearances that

have grown inadequate to contain shifting realities. The

appearance of terror that represents prior catastrophe

becomes something new, detached from the source, wandering

and errant. In its compulsion to survive it meanders away

from its source into the threat of oblivion. The surplus

writing produces out of a narrative ending marks transitory

starting points that float in the indeterminate space of

working-through. The white space of closure becomes a

timeless demarcation of a threshold-situation.

Closure entails the desire to move beyond experience.

Ultimately, beyond is a trope for apocalypse in the

assumption that an ending discloses meaning. Closure entails

disclosure. A narrative ending is analogous to death, but it

is not actual death. The repository into which the surplus

of writing signifies demythologizes the apocalyptic

symbolization accorded to endings. The movement of narrative

that requires conflict, such as unexpectedness, plot twists,

surprises, destroys metaphorical coherence with the

subversive energy of irony. Irony insures the survival of

fiction by undermining literal or direct statement. If we

equate closure with metaphor, something that unifies the

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indeterminacies of text to create the semblance of

transcendent meaning, working-through the journey to that

cohesion remains metonymic, caught on the rails of

signification in its desire for fullness. Narrative is

pleasurable for this very reason. It offers the appearance of

closure while conflict keeps the reader entranced by the

unexpected. We know narrative will end, we desire to reach

that end, but we are most drawn along by desire when the

narrative moves toward that ending in unexpected ways.

Although we expect an ending to bestow meaning upon the

whole, the interpretation an ending demands defies

literature to give us equations of meaning. We do not seek

in literature equivalents or direct statement. Irony assures

that the consummate meaning for which metaphor seeks will

always break the whole into associational parts that keeps

closure deferred. Instead of equations of meaning,

literature yields a sense of meaning. We always associate

what a text is about to a semblance of how and what meaning

means. Narrative endings contribute to the metonymic rail of

all endings that stretch literature across the verbal

surplus of endless discursive space.

The rhythm, remembering, working-through, working-beyond is

analogous to the temporal structure of past, present and future

and the fictional structure of beginning, middle, and end.

Working-through entails the conscious effort to remember and

all of the figural distortions that occur as we turn memory

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into form and meaning. The goal to work-beyond memories of

conflict, to get closure, comes with the conundrum: it also

entails the effort to forget, and more than often what an

author excludes from a work is conscious or unconscious

forgetfulness.

Working-through is our continually conscious state.

From the moment we are born we are engaged in acts of

working-through. For many philosophers, such as Nietzsche,

Heidegger, and Sartre, we are always working-through the

very fact that we were born at all. We live in the middle of

working-through: remembering the source of trauma in the

past—even when it is the buried, unconscious and primordial

pain of separation that occurs at the moment of birth—while

working-beyond that past to prepare for the future. Working-

beyond, the desired result of getting closure, is a trope. The

catharsis of closure, whether it entails clarification,

emotional purging, or forgetting, is a figuration of

transcendence, the something or the non-thing that lies

beyond.

These tropes, however, also problematize the

transcendence associated with “beyond.” We link the word

“beyond” with death, release, heaven, eternity. Endings

cannot contain threshold-situations because they bleed over

into the unknowable. Closure as a self-consciously created

world, an ontological world, leaves ghostly traces of

beginnings and endings, such as genesis and apocalypse.

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These traces of closure, as Frank Kermode argues, offer

consolation in fictional endings. But they are paradigms for

making sense of life that continually wear out. The working-

beyond of closure must produce another trope of closure

because endings are never ultimate. Transcendent categories

conceal perpetuated conflict, a surplus of writing that

moves all endings into an amorphous, transitional category

that I call the repository of mourning.

In the transfer of one charged scene of trauma to

another the work of mourning transforms the future not into

the expenditure of experience, but into a repository for the

excess of trauma that the transfer over time creates. Our

experience of catharsis from trauma superimposes other

traumas that the original trauma generates just as writing

reaches endings that conceal the surplus of more writing the

energy of belatedness cannot contain and that is always, at

the same time, in a state of being written.

The repository for mourning is the white space of the

page that greets the ending of a text, but which also

surrounds the text where we displace, sublimate, project or

interject loss and the threat of mortality. This space is

almost a Dionysian erasure of differentiation. The

repository is not fixed but moves mourning by conjuring from

obliteration another form. From the text frozen within and

organizing the blank of a page’s space another conflict

secretly arises that seeks closure that the ending of this

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particularly text cannot achieve. The repository of mourning

destroys closure. It forms as a mechanism to discharge the

energy we expend over loss or lack so that we can economize

reserves of energy in preparation for further conflict.

CHAPTER 11

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Modernism and Postmodernism: from Eschatology

to Apocalypse

Christianity equates the divine with concealment. The

holy and the sacred are always hidden, veiled like the host

behind the curtain of the tabernacle, concealed as if

protected from transgression. Violating divine secrets is

tantamount to an act of sacrilege. As Kant indicates, the

sublime is tantamount to the prohibition against making

representations of God.

Since poetry is encoded by figurative language, it

relates to the sacred. There is the pervasive sense that

meaning hides within a poem like a secret. The secret and

the sacred are inextricably linked. The Latin word rcanum

means “secret,” conveying a root relationship between

secrecy and sacredness. Secrecy, something concealed and set

apart, imbues literary interpretation with a strain of

religiosity. Unlocking the secrets of a text becomes an

inherently clerical task as much as it is a dangerous one.

Literary interpretation is religiously haunted just as that

which remains secret or concealed retains traces of holy

terror.

There is an interesting emphasis upon secrets in the

Gospel of Mark. Christ makes beguiling secret pacts with his

disciples designed to keep truth veiled. But secrecy cannot

remain since revelation requires an ultimate unveiling of

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truth. This is an ironic crux: salvation and the new kingdom

is already fully realized but revelation has not yet come;

the presence of God is both here and now while, at the same

time, yet to arrive. Revelation is always in the future. The

parables Christ uses to deliver his message exhort

vigilance, to wait for the kingdom to come. Believing does

not entail seeing. Faith is a trusting vigilance for the

kyregma that remains in abeyance.

We assume that Christ utilizes parables to convey

difficult concepts in folksy allegories that make a single

moral point. This is a refined way in which to understand

his parables that are more disturbing than we like to think.

Yet Christ is not a literary critic anatomizing generic

form. He tells his disciples that he uses parables to confuse

everyone.

To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of

God, but for those outside, everything comes in

parables, in order that

‘they may indeed look, but not

perceive,

And may indeed listen, but not

understand;

So that they may not turn again and be

forgiven.’

(Mark 4:10-12)

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While he confuses the general public, Christ will explain

everything to his disciples, his insiders, in private. He

wants to limit “the secret of the kingdom of heaven” to a

select circle and exclude everyone else from his set. It is

like a secret pact. Ironically his disciples do not

comprehend his private explanations either. The sacred

secrets Christ reveals only confuse the disciples, making

even Christ frustrated. As witnesses to the Word of God, it

does not seem as though the disciples are up to the task of

testimony.3

In The Genesis of Secrecy, Frank Kermode turns Mark 4:10-12

into a meditation on the relationship between biblical and

literary interpretation. He uses Christ’s secret pact as an

example of the critic’s labor of decoding texts. The parable

forms an analogy for Kermode to academia: there are certain

people who are “insiders” to the professor’s clerical work

while the rest remain “outsiders,” excluded from the meaning

of literature. Christ’s arbitrary decision about who has

3 At the same time as Christ tells his disciples that only aselect few have access to the secrets, Christ confesses to them uncertainty over his messianic status. On his journey with his disciples to Caesarea Phiippi, he asks them, “Who do people say that I am?” When Peter gives several answers, Christ persists, “But who do you say I am?” When Peter answers, “You are the Messiah,” Christ anxiously orders them“not to tell anyone about him.” Once again, he forms a secret pact. Doubly ironic, Christ wants to keep secrets while his own identity remains a secret to himself.

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access to his secrets keeps outsiders dismayed and

frustrated. That which remains “concealed” or “secret,” like

the meaning of a poem, becomes imbued with divinity at the

same time as, like literary texts, Christ’s message is set

aside, accessible only to those granted the knowledge.

Kermode concludes that Mark’s Gospel is analogous to the

irreducible mystery of the world. As we attempt to

understand the Gospel and come to grips with the world, “our

sole hope and pleasure is in the perception of a momentary

radiance, before the door of disappointment is finally shut

on us.” In other words, texts pose problems for interpretation

toward which we create a sense of meaning as opposed to

equations of meaning. Texts remain always open for

disclosure.

Kermode’s argument in Genesis of Secrecy is not without

problems. Since he treats Christ’s secret pact with his

disciples abstracted from its apocalyptic mode, Kermode

misses the central facet of futurity inherent in Marcan

theology. Revelation to the few concealed from the many is a

common motif in Jewish apocalyptic literature. A great deal

of apocalyptic literature involves secrets concealed from

many and open only to the chosen. It is odd that Kermode

treats Christ’s secret pacts with his disciples detached

from apocalypse since eschatological coherence is his area

of expertise. He fails to place Christ’s message in the

larger context of the crucifixion when the Roman centurion

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recognizes the messiah after Christ cries out in doubt to

God at the moment before his death. Revelation remains a

secret in the present that must wait for a time of

fulfillment—the kairos—when truth is unveiled.

In “Mark 4:10 and Marcan Epistemology,” Joel Marcus

points out that Kermode confuses a gnostic tradition with an

apocalyptic tradition. Whereas Christianity recognizes God

as arriving from the mystery of the future, Marcus claims,

“In gnostic epistemology, however, the real revelatory

moment is at creation, and revelation in the present means

recapturing the original revelation. In apocalyptic

literature, on the other hand, the real revelatory moment is

at the eschaton, and until the eschaton the knowledge of

even the elect can only be imperfect” (560 – 561). Mark

4:21-22 stresses that there is nothing concealed that will

not be revealed in an apocalyptic age to come. Referring to

Christ’s message as part of “a Penultimate Age,” Marcus

insists that Christ inhabits a space occurring before the

fullness of revelation that his time on earth summons. There

are no secrets to be revealed about the past because

ultimate truth has not yet arrived. “The time of Jesus’

ministry on earth is a penultimate time, during which the

disciples comprehend something but do not have the full

picture” (568).

This is the maddening nature of apocalyptic knowledge

inherent in parables. The truth, the secrets revealed, is

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here and now. Christ is the messiah, but he might not know

this until the moment of his death upon the cross. The full

unveiling awaits a future when death promises the redemption

and fulfillment of time into eternity. To the extent that

divine secrets will not be revealed until a final unveiling

upon death, Kermode is right. We are all outsiders to both

Mark’s gospel. In Christian eschatology, however, salvation

and resurrection are here and now, but we still must wait

while we are in this world for the pleroma of life

everlasting. We exist in the circle from where we cannot see

its full circumference, inhabiting only a part of the whole.

Christ’s irony, therefore, is that we are in fact within the

circle he forms with his disciples, waiting for the truth

that remains to arrive from the future. To have faith

entails surrendering to the future that always comes and yet

always remains a mystery.

That we “comprehend something but do not have the full

picture” also informs the activity of literary

interpretation. Apocalypse haunts Jacques Derrida starting

in the 1980s and up until his death. After writing Specters of

Marx, Derrida locates presence in the “not yet,” in a time-to-

come. Derrida’s work seems to search for the something else, a

surplus that remains unaccountable by more parasitic

practices of deconstruction and for which we do not have a

full picture because this thing, this something, comes from the

deferral of meaning not yet realized. For Ernst Bloch Utopia

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does not mean “no place” but a place defined by what is “yet

to be.” Apocalypse is a presence paradoxically because of

its promise to be so. For Derrida this future that is yet to

be present, and therefore does not have presence, becomes

the only possibility for a metaphysical presence.

No matter how far we take deconstruction, and no matter

how far theory pushes its own practice into a mode of

imaginative writing the displaces fiction, the issue of

presence remains vexed. We can neither affirm nor deny

belief; and we cannot erase presence that refuses to

disappear under the oftentimes more powerful allure of

absence or erasure.

We are now in a position to look back upon the past

century to recognize the sublime level of unknowingness so

powerfully characteristic of its literature. It is, of

course, a Christian virtue to eschew pride and to be

conscious of the extent to which one is unknowing.

Something here about romanticism

Whereas the Romantic poets personalize biblical

apocalypse, the modernists interiorize end-time into the

unconscious and recast it into various forms of post-

apocalypse. Unknowingness takes on a far more ironic tone in

the literature of the past century. Poets assume a stance of

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unknowingness aware of a truth that eludes them or a secret

too difficult to verbalize.

The twenty and twenty-first centuries reveal a

prevalence of voices in poetry and fiction that speak to

surviving a nightmare world when everything suggests they

should not have. Before the late nineteenth century, poets

try to reconcile experience with transcendence in a sort-of

trust that coherence underlies the contingency and

mutability of life. Twentieth-century literature, however,

tends to occupy an ironic stance of hapless unknowingness in

a cosmos that is as brutal and uncanny as it is indifferent

to the desire for poetic redemption. Whereas literature

until the nineteenth-century assumed an author or a poet has

the ability to understand the world—“Whatever is, is right,”

Pope concludes—twentieth-century writers occupy a rhetorical

stance of unknowingness. Whatever is, is indefinable,

unavailable for interpretation. W.B. Yeats’ “The Second

Coming” mirrors a pattern that repeats in a lot of

literature that confronts the inexplicable: catastrophe

undermines the coherence one expects from the world; one

anticipates the coherence of a Christian metanarrative to

come to the rescue; but instead one comes to realize that

all one knows is how much one does not know; one attempts,

then, to work-beyond the trauma of unknowingness by

reconfiguring one’s epistemological grounding. And finally,

in postmodern literature, one attempts to work-beyond crisis

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by creating an alter mundus, another possible world, a new

ontology.

The speaker in twentieth-century fiction discovers

that his or her assumptions about the world become destroyed

by its inexplicability. There is no equanimity between self

and nature, self and cosmos. Characters search for a home,

physical and spiritual, but find themselves stuck in a world

without maps to guide them. Or, in the case of Marlow in

Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the map is filled with blanks and

the journey ahead is serpentine, an arabesque.

Written at the very end of the nineteenth century,

Heart of Darkness continues to haunt us. It remains at the

center of the modernist canon because it prefigures

postmodern nihilism so well that it feels like it is about

our world. At the same time it remains rooted in the

nineteenth-century and the Victorian desire for order and

progress that modernism inherits in its ravaged forms. Heart

of Darkness emerges from a Victorian era of millennial hope

indicative of imperialism, a time for which we have no

living memory but that persists into our own capitalist

fever that transforms history into nightmare and from which

we wish, like Stephen Daedalus, to awaken.

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The novel is not about statement but the impossibility

of statement. Belgium and Leopold II’s atrocities are there,

but they become part of the parabolic mode of Marlow’s

impossible quest for knowledge. It is all about an

aesthetic-of-the-unknowing as Conrad packages the nature of

parable and apocalyptic knowledge into a complex

transmission of stories.

The title of the novel suggests Marlow’s inward draw

toward a center. The nature of inner / outer is reflected in

the narrator’s description of Marlow’s technique for telling

a story.

The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the

whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a

cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his

propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him

the meaning of an episode was not inside like a

kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which

brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze,

in the likeness of one of those misty halos that

sometimes are made visible by the spectral

illumination of moonshine.

**In the parabolic and ultimately apocalyptic nature of the

novel, the meaning of the story is something one circles

toward from the outside while the center can never be

reached. The inside, the “kernel,” is the site of meaning

that is also the site of annihilation. Meaning only arrives

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at the end of life that one must evade in order to survive

if one must be a storyteller in the first place. The Heart of

Darkness is an allegory about Marlow’s survival from trauma

that he must put into words, but the meaning of his

experience fails him. The gap between the literal and the

figural become irreconcilable except as an allegory of the

ways in which we try to explain the structure of that gap

itself.

As Marlow’s journey to rescue the elusive Kurtz takes

him into the center of Africa it also takes him to the abyss

of humanity represented by the injustice of the ivory trade.

The primitivism that surrounds him conjures kinship between

the human and brute forces Freud argues we must repress to

maintain civilization.

It was unearthly, and the men were—No, they were

not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of

it—the suspicion of their not being inhuman. It

would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped,

and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled

you was just the thought of their humanity—like

yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this

wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly

enough; but if you were man enough you would admit

to yourself that there was in you just the trace

of a response to the terrible frankness of that

noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in

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it which you—you so remote from the night of first

ages—could comprehend. And why not?

Encountering soulless imperial administrators, the “hollow

men,” Marlow transforms humanity into the “savages” he

discovers on his journey to the Inner Post. Although he

feels an uncanny kinship with the natives, Marlow admits, as

he often does, that his perceptions of reality are greatly

limited. He does not “know” and yearns for an oracle,

imagining Kurtz, who the hollow men disdain, will reveal

truths that only his position in the jungle “beyond”

everyone else physically and emotionally can provide. In the

end Marlow must admit his failure to embrace nihilism, only

halfheartedly affirming the darkness, which leaves him in a

state of ambivalence. To jump over the edge of the abyss

would mean death; pulling back means the unknowingness of

survivorship. The novel places one in the agonizing position

between annihilation and survival, the middling space where

suffering endures.

Everything in the novel hovers with ambivalent

antinomies.

Marlow is torn between revealing “the horror,” and

perpetuating the myth of Kurtz’s magnificence. Repression

wins, but not without the shock of its return. Kurtz’s

pamphlet concerning the Westernizing of natives with which

he entrusts Marlow in the hope for a heroic legacy has the

words “Exterminate all the brutes” scribbled at the end.

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Marlow gives the manuscript to Kurtz’s cousin, who is eager

to perpetuate the spurious story of the great man, but

reluctantly rips out the scribbled addendum, revising the

story of the upright British man who, removed from

“civilization,” rises to brute power and enslaves the

natives who worship him and find him vast amounts of ivory.

Until he tells the story to his “disciples” on the Nellie,

Marlow is inclined to maintain the secret.

Kurtz’s unequivocal submission to desire and

destruction juxtaposed to Marlow’s ambivalence, the need to

maintain propriety, make Marlow admire the man.

I was within a hair’s-breadth of the last

opportunity for pronouncement, and I found with

humiliation that probably I would have nothing to

say. This is the reason why I affirm that Kurtz

was a remarkable man. He had something to say. He

said it . . . He summed up—he had judged. ‘The

horror!’ He was a remarkable man.

His admiration reads like aesthetic appreciation

uncomfortably disinterested in response to a creature like

Kurtz. But that is the whole point of the novel’s

equivocation. Marlow’s moral judgment goes to the

obscurantism that troubles many readers of the novel. It is

not the horrific journey up the Congo and the atrocities of

the ivory trade that traumatizes Marlow. There is nothing

obscure about the consequences of unbridled imperialism that

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litter the winding river. He is traumatized by his own

ambivalence. Such equivocation frustrates our current and

political desire for literature of statement. We have grown

uncomfortable with gaps between the figural and the literal.

The reader with social ideals wishes Marlow would arrive at

plain old political outrage. Although he expresses outrage

at the “hollow men” on the journey upriver, his ambiguity

smacks of imperial apathy. It is an affront to most reader’s

need for socio-political redemption that, despite Kurtz’s

“unspeakable acts” and his desire to “exterminate all the

brutes,” Marlow believes his final words, “the horror,”

represent moral triumph. For the reader hungering for

liberal humanism juxtaposed to colonial absolutism, Marlow’s

responses come across as inhumane. If Marlow could somehow

evince even a glimmer of conversion to liberal humanism,

however, it would pervade the novel with coherence a reader

wishes to impose upon the novel. The gap between the figural

and the literal would narrow, and the novel would lose its

timelessness. It would become statement. The novel is all

about ambiguity made more obscure by Marlow’s radical

ambivalence. There is no direction for one to move that does

not come without occupying the position of a totalizing

ideology, which is why Marlow dithers on the boarders

between truths and lies, speech and silence, hesitation and

submission. This is a world in which to survive means to

equivocate, but equivocation occludes the truth. Instead of

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joining Kurtz in nihilistic resignation, Marlow, like the

speaker in “The Second Coming,” revels in a nearly

impossible impressionism, turning the ambivalent middling

space between the Christian extremes of life and death as

the vital ground to wage artistic battle.

Ambivalence torments Marlow, and, like the mariner of

Coleridge’s poem, he must unburden the story he covets as a

secret. His story is really a confession: whereas Kurtz

submits to the ultimate nihilism that lurks beneath the

veneer of civilization, Marlow can only witness the darkness

and pull back from its abysmal center. “True,” Marlow says,

“he made that last stride, had stepped over the edge, while

I had been permitted to draw back my hesitating foot.”

Marlow admits that the abyss seduces him but, unlike Kurtz,

he has survived because, “hesitating,” he refused to enter.

He relinquishes access to the secret he believes rests

within the center or the heart into which Kurtz plunges.

And perhaps in this is the whole difference;

perhaps all the wisdom, and all the truth, and all

the sincerity, are just compressed into that

inappreciable moment of time in which we step over

the threshold of the invisible.

The secret Marlow has been coveting since his odyssey

is not necessarily Kurtz’s barbarity, but his own moral

judgment in response to Kurtz’s affirmation of nihilism. His

story to his shipmates constitutes a confession in the form

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of testimony to what he has bourn witness. His final act of

revision before he confesses on the Nellie is the famous lie

to Kurtz’s Intended (despite the fact that Marlow believes

that there is nothing worse in the world than a lie),

telling her that Kurtz’s last words were her name.

Ultimately Marlow feels like a failure because he could not

commit the consummately nihilistic act of destroying the

Intended’s perfectly arranged world of Edwardian mannerisms

by shoving the truth of the “horror” in her face: her

townhouse, parlor, grand piano (the keys made of ivory, of

course), and her ridiculous appellation, “Intended.” “But I

couldn’t,” Marlow confesses in the final words of his story.

“I could not tell her. It would have been too dark—too

altogether dark.” There’s an awkward let down to his final

words to the shipmates. They sound like a flimsy and

melodramatic conclusion to his experience. They sound like

aesthetic failure. Repressing the instinct to destroy the

Intended just as he must repress his desire to join Kurtz in

the darkness and destroy himself, he perpetuates the myth of

Kurtz—and the myth of a civilized West—to protect the

Intended’s belief that an ultimate and essentially good

coherence underwrites the world. “Of course your future

husband’s last words in the tragic ending to his heroic life

would be your name!” he seems to exclaim to her. We never

learn her name because she is metonymic of Kurtz’s

possessions—“My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river.”

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In protecting the Intended from the truth, Marlow ultimately

protects himself from the traumatic realization of his own

destructive instinct that signifies the thin veil between

civilization and destruction.

Conrad’s genius in this novel is not necessarily the

impressionistic technique of the writing, which can be

overbearingly obscure and melodramatic. One cannot help but

admit that Conrad lays on the opaque adjectives rather

thickly. The genius is the oblique narrative technique by

which the story transmits from narrator to narrator in the

manner of a parable. Marlow does not directly tell us the

story. The “I” of the novel is not Marlow’s but an unnamed

first person narrator who lurks on the sidelines of Marlow’s

audience. He lingers like an anonymous bystander who must

nonetheless bear testimony to the trauma that Marlow

recounts. In the common definition of a witness, he stands

in for the person to whom experience directly relates in

order to give testimony; but he is so anonymous that we

forget that it is essentially his story, his testimony. Its

transformation (or should we call it transference?) from oral

to verbal testimony attests to the narrator’s need to

confess its mystery. He stands in as witness as though

summoned to transmit a story, prodded on by some unconscious

need to make Marlow’s dream-like account solid. Turning the

novel into a second person’s account of another’s story

deepens the impressionistic obscurity, but it also contains

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and controls the impressionism into form, a framed

narrative, a drama about bearing witness and recording

evidence. When the narrator relinquishes the narrative to

Marlow he sets his story aside in quotation marks in order

to create a semblance of authenticity. The narrator

functions as Marlow’s interlocutor, associated with the

reader who must approximate a sense of meaning from Marlow’s

stuttering narrative. To deepen the inflections of parable,

we become the third person in the story as the witness,

three times removed from the traumatic events. Plato would

have had a heart attack! Ultimately the novel becomes a

parable about parables, a meta-parable, about the

difficulties inherent in transmitting a story whose subject

is inexplicable. Like Christ of the Gospel of Mark, there

are insiders to the secret who do not understand what is

revealed, and the rest of us are the poor and frustrated

outsiders.

The framed narrative with its succession of

storytellers makes The Heart of Darkness read like Christ’s

ironic secret pact with his disciples. There is a group of

“disciples,” the shipmates on the Nellie, who circle around

Marlow who promises to reveal the secrets to the parable

that remain inscrutable. And, as several interruptions in

his story testify, the “disciples” seem at times unable to

comprehend Marlow’s story, echoing the reader’s own outrage

at its obscurantism. The source of Marlow’s trauma grows

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increasingly sublime and veiled in the secrecy of

apocalyptic knowledge that “sits in the middle and knows” as

the story passes down from Kurtz to Marlow, from Marlow to

the Intended, from Marlow to the unnamed narrator amongst

the crew of the Nellie, and from the unnamed narrator to us,

the reader. Marlow’s narrative might move into the center,

the Inner Post, the heart of darkness, but it spirals out

from that circumscribed center into an ever-widening circle

of interlocutors. The novel, therefore, becomes a meditation

upon witnessing, giving testimony, and the claims to truth

of testimony. The question that nags at the center of the

novel is the same one that nags at the center of trauma: how

much closer does one get to the heart of trauma by repeating

the story? Or does the return to disturbing experience

perpetuate its conflict into other forms as repetition

compulsion propels difference instead of identity? Does

trauma gravitate toward the pole of the real or does it

remain centrifugally figural? Each retelling of a traumatic

story does not replicate the story, but transforms it into a

disseminated narrative relinquished to a web of expanding

interlocutors and expanding meaning.

In his narration of the events to his crewmates, Marlow

must recreate the absent Kurtz who never becomes a

determinate presence for us. Kurtz is all mythical surface,

all figural. He forms an annihilating depth ironically

because he remains so shallow and opaque. This is because

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Kurtz, like Yeats’ rough beast, is a dream manifestation, a

composite of all that is alluring and repulsive to Marlow

about the world he finds himself mired in ambivalently and

toward which he wants some kind of redemption. Marlow’s

retelling of the story resembles a patient’s attempt at

recounting a dream. It is no surprise that Marlow repeatedly

refers to his experience to his shipmates in terms of the

sublime experience of a dream.

Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It

seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream—making

a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can

convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of

absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor

of struggling revolt, the notion of being captured

by the incredible which is the very essence of

dreams.

Marlow’s irritation echoes Christ’s frustration with his

disciples. “Having eyes, do you not see? And having ears, do

you not hear? And do you not remember?”

In order to redeem himself from lying, Marlow must

return to the repressed experience and repeat the trauma. He

must return to the dream and attempt to put “the dream-

sensation” into words. Recounting the journey to his

shipmates, however, Marlow comes to realize the

impossibility to tell a story when you cannot make it refer

to a coherent world, so he continually falls back upon the

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futile effort to make the “dream-sensation” real that

results in exhausted muttering about nihilism that

constitutes the unformed space between the figural. “Droll

thing life is—that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic

for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some

knowledge of yourself—that comes too late—a crop of

unextinguishable regrets.” Marlow stumbles to find the

language to express the trauma of his experience, but the

more he speaks, the more that the centripetal force of aporia

draws him into the resigned language of unknowingness. In

his desperate attempt to make his audience “see” Kurtz, we

realize that Kurtz himself is the least defined figure in

the story because he remains a source of Marlow’s dreams,

slouching towards England waiting to be born.

Like any witness giving testimony to trauma, Marlow

misses the mark. Revising his story about Kurtz during the

year after his return from Africa, Marlow is very aware of

and uncomfortable with the fact that his revisions turn his

testimony into fiction. Marlow is a storyteller who cannot

abide a lie. A “spinner of yarns,” he is nonetheless

disgusted by the fabrication that goes into telling tales. A

great part of the work he must do in order to work-beyond

his trauma is to accept the fictional frame in which he must

place experience, but he resents doing so. Just as he had

failed to tell the truth to Kurtz’s Intended, he fails to

articulate the truth to his shipmates. He must compensate

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for his inability to articulate experience and to redeem

himself from his lie by aestheticizing his experience. He

must trope the experience. As a result, like anyone giving

testimony to trauma, he must protect himself from the truth

of the horror he does not understand by insuring that it

remains a story. Whereas Kurtz implodes within the abyss of

his selfhood with his eyes fixed on horror, Marlow is forced

to interminably repeat his story because he survives.

Theory encounters the same centripetal and centrifugal

forces that direct meaning in the examples of Yeats and

Conrad. As the world seems to fall apart, we attempt to

circle back into the text, return to the scenes of trauma,

retell the story. We are compelled to get the story of

catastrophe right, but the verbal expression of experience

inevitably turns testimony into figuration. And if tropes

are rhetorical means by which to defamliarize language,

verbal expression of experience inevitably gets the story

wrong. We reinterpret and reimagine a world that seems to

grow increasingly catastrophic by working-towards the source

of how we have reached the place we are in now, hoping to

work-beyond our particular predicament. Critical theory,

which evolved out of an attempt to contend with lost

absolutes, the slow death of God, and to transform the chaos

of a war-ridden world in the twentieth-century by

recapitulating Enlightenment rationalism and Kantian

disinterestedness, confronts our contemporary traumas. But

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theory also reflects our postmodern state of shock at a

world emptied of transcendence and, having lost the task to

complete the mourning over decentered logos, continues to

deny its necessary failure. Theory, in its efforts to change

a world ready for revolution, failed, and instead

perpetuated its desire to substitute aesthetics by trying

hysterically to escape its displaced theology.

The trauma theorist and the religion and literature

theorist is a Marlow figure. He or she is caught in the

ambivalent space between affirming metaphysical presence—the

hope for stable epistemology—and affirming absence and the

rhetorical fabric (or yarn) we spin to create a plural

ontology to hold us above the abyss—the traumatic

realization of a revolution that never happened—or to use

Amy Hungerford’s term for postmodern belief, to discover

“belief in the meaningless.” He or she pokes into the

sublime darkness of existence and serves as a witness to

catastrophe, hoping for something beyond that which language

desperately attempts to signify. As in Heart of Darkness, the

source of trauma, like revelation from a series of parables,

arrives from a succession of transmitted stories. Most

trauma theorists, like the critic who becomes mired in

literary theodicies, discover that catastrophe remains

inexplicable, its excesses transforming it into sublime

obscurantism of Heart of Darkness. Therefore the only way in

which to understand and express “the horror” is to assume

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Marlow’s stance and to trope the experience, or, like the

unnamed narrator, misread the story and turn trauma into

fiction. Either way, each voice attempts to find a “fiction

that will suffice,” to use Wallace Stevens’ term.

Theory is ultimately a failure, but it’s a necessary

fiction that suffices as much as it is a necessary failure

that must keep repeating its failures nonetheless. Just as

Freud made offhand admissions that poetry understood the

psyche better than science, a theory of trauma must

ultimately yield to its fictions. This is not necessarily

good news if we want to arrive at an empiricist (or even a

rationalist) understanding of the psychic and spiritual

wounds that afflict us and do so in an increasing manner.

Although Marlow sounds continually weary and resigned to the

unknowingness of experience, he stumbles on in his attempt

to make his shipmates “see.” What the unnamed narrator sees

as a witness is merely an extension of the encroaching

darkness that Marlow expresses, occluding a clear vision of

the trauma Marlow attempts to convey.

The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds,

and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost

ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast

sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense

darkness.

The unnamed narrator becomes an enfeebled metonym of

Marlow’s obscurantism.

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The Heart of Darkness is a novel about repetition

compulsion, but Marlow’s story is repetition with a

difference. The novel ends with the narrator who must pick

up where Marlow left off by retelling a story Marlow got

wrong the first time. Marlow does not get it right the

second time. It is unlikely that the unnamed narrator will

get it right either, judging from the way he mimics Marlow’s

despairing vision of the ineffable. Further, it grows

apparent that we, the final recipients of the transmitted

story, will fail to understand the heart of darkness unless

we want to enter Kurtz’s abyss—and there are plenty of ways

our imagination could conjure to do so! Trauma theory and

religion and literature must recognize that our examination

of disturbing and inexplicable experience always entails

revision and misprision, a projection of our own desires

that conflict with truth unless we want to become a mortal

victim as opposed to a crippled survivor. Keep in mind that

Marlow never sees the natives he encounters as unique or

equal people, but as extensions of his own recognition of a

primitive nature within himself. (As I suggested, it is

ludicrous for us to expect from this fiction that he would

do otherwise.) In the vein of Marlow’s impressionism,

everything is metonymic. Likewise, he can only see Kurtz as

the primal instinct for destruction, a pure manifestation of

the Id that makes Marlow feel like a failure since he cannot

submit to it with Kurtz’s completeness. Kurtz is all self-

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realizing metaphor. He has troped himself into his own

oblivion.

Ultimately the goal of literary interpretation in a

religious vein—or any vein for that matter—is not to reach

equations of meaning, but to reach a sense of meaning. And Conrad’s

impressionism is a perfect interpretive battleground to

experience the impossibility to equate the figural and the

literal. Kurtz’s consummate nihilism, the annihilating realm

of the Real, equals death. Testimony to trauma can only

approximate the experience, which is why trauma and

catastrophe finds a fitting home in fiction just as I have

been arguing it dwells within as much as it derives from

religious experience. Fiction allows the ineffable a frame

in which a reader, who stands as a witness like the unnamed

narrator in Conrad’s novel, willingly suspends disbelief.

The more that Marlow enters the depths of Africa, the more

he transgresses psychic thresholds, but he pulls back not

because he is “lucky enough” but because he must. In a post-

apocalyptic world we are all survivors having pulled back

from the edge upon which all literature treads.

Conrad is aware that authors of literature enter

perilous realms, like his sea voyagers. The ocean, as in

Hart Crane’s poetry, represents dangerous crossings into the

sublime. Freud called the sublime nature of the imagination

“oceanic.” Readers of literature enter fictional worlds at

their peril too, as I have argued. Theory, at least in its

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strong work as theoria, crosses a threshold of knowledge into

sublime unknowingness. It is an act of transgression whose

only reward is punishment for the desire to know, or

knowledge, while knowing that the only imperative is to

voyage ahead nonetheless. It dares to frame fearful

symmetries and the result is that theory in of itself

becomes both a religious and a traumatic enterprise. The

exploration of trauma traces sublime thresholds in order to

work-through the horror in an attempt to find the language of

working-beyond trauma. The language used to work-beyond

becomes the language that speaks beyond itself. As such it

at once testifies to the impossibility of reading and the

impossibility of testimony itself. Once the mysterium

tremendum becomes fascinans, a movement that political readings

attempt to do to rationalize the numinous within the novel,

we engage an unfortunate endeavor to turn literature into

therapy that comforts us with the belief that the limit-

situations of life have equations of meaning. Conrad resists

this at every moment in the novel. He compels us to engage

perilous reading more conducive to the disjuncture and

disconsolations of Freud than the bogus joys of American Ego

psychology.

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Postmodernism to Contemporary Literature:

from Apocalypse to PTSD

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For the past two centuries or more we have grown to

privilege literature’s power to psychically mend our wounds.

We believe that reading literature is tantamount to mental

hygiene. ***By reversing the opposition between mend and

wound we can provisionally privilege the psychic rupture

literature causes. By prioritizing wound, we can examine how

literature works-through trauma to perpetuate conflict in a

challenge to our assumptions about the world. The content of

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literature wounds and re-wounds experience whereas its

teleological form, the temporal “economy” of a work, gives

the appearance of closure. Most people refuse to read

literature because it does not deliver pleasure in a simple

expenditure of psychic energy.

To return to Harold Bloom’s Gnostic paradigm of crisis-

poetry: in the twenty-first century when we exist always at

the transitional end of serial catastrophe, the tropes that

make brokenness appear mended have worn out. We cannot

maintain the paradigms of closure because we have neither

adjusted to nor caught up with hyperkinetic clearing spaces

for aesthetic consciousness that had once, as recently as a

few decades ago, allowed for more self-consciousness

concerning the temporal distention between past and future.

The temporal condensation of a hyperkinetic age of

technological mimesis has allowed for the mediate and

immediate experience of trauma to superimpose, creating

something akin to temporal transumption. (Define)

The blueprint of tragedy for Steiner and other formal

critics is the Fall of Man. As Northrop Frye argues in The

Great Code, the Christian narrative forms a descending and

ascending arc of experience, or a U-shaped curve. Humankind

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begins in paradise, falls into the abyss, and is redeemed

with the restoration of paradise in the end. Comedy,

therefore, is inherently divine since the cohesion of social

inclusion banishes death. Tragedy asserts that the human

irreparably fallen. As Steiner argues, tragedy portrays “the

crime of man that he is, that he exists. His naked presence

and identity are transgressions . . . To come into the world

is to come into torture and death” (129). Refusing the comic

and redemptive vision of Christianity, tragedy is a vision

of an intolerable life.

Our loose but powerful usage of the term “tragedy” to

describe multifarious experience is symptomatic of not only

our tragic sensibility, but also our traumatic disposition

toward life that has increased over the past century.

The consoling nature of fiction and a belief in eschatology

signify life as we wish it to be, Freud seems to tell us. Fiction

mirrors our own conflicts because characters work out

theirs’ toward a resolution. Clarence Walthout argues that

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fiction allows us “to explore ways of understanding the

teleology of action and the possibilities of moving from

conflict to resolution” (126). The conflict fiction

represents, Aristotle claims, does not necessarily reflect

life as is, but life as it could be. Likewise, fiction does not

necessarily give us knowledge about past human actions for

Kermode, but “to educe the forms of a future.”

Aesthetic form is distinct from actual trauma. Whereas

dramatic representation has entelechy, the elements that

structure a play into a temporally cohesive whole, victims

of trauma live with past events that do not proceed through

to completion. Trauma is bereft of teleology. Although

traumatic experience must be represented, it does not have

inherent literary form. Therefore, trauma continues into the

present to remain current in every respect. In fact the

catharsis is always, like sublime experience, temporary.

There remains something else after we release traumatic

stimulation.

The gap between the actual and the aesthetic increasingly

narrows in our contemporary world, making the boundary

between catastrophe and fiction permeable. The instant

videography of 9/11 alone testifies to the immediate

conflation of actual experience and its aesthetic

representation. Within moments of the two explosions of the

World Trade Center the terrorist attacks became a tragic

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production. The ancient Greeks never confused the tragedy of

a play with circumstances in the actual world. Both were

discrete categories of experience. Unlike the ancient

Greeks, however, we apply the term tragedy to a vast array

of actual experience. Trauma and aesthetics conflate in our

contemporary world in ways that have never occurred in

history. Trauma victims are also tragic figures such that

trauma has become not only our actual condition but also our

literary ethos.

There is no means by which we can gain “closure” or

transcendence in an epistemological sense. One can only

create ontological or imaginary spaces of closure to question

the various worlds in which we live—and the different worlds

catastrophe create—and the many selves that evolve from

inhabiting worlds.

In many respects Freud is a tragedian who not only

reimagines catharsis in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, but also

forces us to rethink eschatology in light of our existential

position caught between the ultimate beginnings and endings

that preoccupy theology.

In many ways psychoanalysis secularizes the Judeo-Christian

struggle between body and spirit. Freud’s ideas extend and

demythologize the search for the soul humans conducted up

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until the nineteenth century. His economy of the unconscious

rewrites psychomachia: demonic urges of the flesh struggle

with the mind’s angelic “defenses.” The ego wages battle

with the id to gain mastery while the superego dictates our

moral negotiations in the world. Further, we are all victims

of a historically predetermined fall from grace. The

psychosexual trauma of the Oedipal dynamic forms the

original event of a structural trauma akin to Adam’s fall.

Terry Eagleton claims, “In this, [psychoanalysis] has a good

deal in common with what theologians know as original sin”

(Event 212). “The Adamic blueprint,” Steiner writes,

“however secularized, is unmistakable” (New Lit. History,

Winter 2004, 3).

Since the development of Romanticism in the late

eighteenth century, there has been a great psychological

shift in he means by which stories conclude. Although these

shifts and complexities in narrative closure have been

evident since the beginning of story-telling, the difference

in the twentieth century is that authors and critics become

preternaturally self-conscious about narrative and narrative

endings. Modern narratives now close with what I will

tentatively call “pseudo-endings.” In the works I will begin

exploring in Part II, I see three general means by which

narrative endings take form. 1) The story ends in a shocking

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act of violence, a sudden eruption in the plot, or an

epiphany that is normally unsettling; 2) the story becomes

circular, ending where it begins and beginning where it

ends, often as a means to evade the eschatological force of

a linear, providential plot or to reveal mythical or

archetypal patterns; 3) and most prevalently than the first

two, a narrator makes a self-conscious virtue out of the

fact that nothing has been resolved in the narrative, that

the story has gone nowhere. Nonetheless, narrators who end

a narrative in radical irresolution create an odd

epistemological or ontological affirmation because of or in

spite of irresolution. As we will see, these three paradigms

of narrative endings often overlap—a shocking ending can

also create an irresolute ending, like horrifying death of

Pinkie in Greene’s Brighton Rock; or an ending in which

nothing has been resolved can evolve out of a circular

ending that has gone nowhere, as in Waugh’s Decline and Fall.

Even more complex, a shocking ending, such as Sandy

Stranger’s betrayal of Miss Brodie, can lead to a circular

ending: the novel ends where we began, with a vision of

Sandy behind the bars of a monastery.

The current age of critical methodology in which

master-narratives, organic unity and totalization has broken

down for discontinuity, irresolution and plurality has been

loosely called “postmodern.” The “postmodern” is in of

itself an irresolute term: “post” implies “after,” but with

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no indication of what is next. The term is, in many ways, an

overstatement, since any present time is always “modern,”

and we are always “post” time, coming after or proceeding

from a past. But “postmodern” is also a strangely oxymoron.

In the narrowest sense, modern means “current,” so that to

designate our time as coming after current time is to imagine

that we live in a proleptic era, a time in which what we

experience in the present is the future that has not yet

happened. The least ambivalent interpretation of

“postmodernism” is that it indicates the end of an era and

that the postmodern marks an interim period before the

beginning of a new era. Hence, postmodernism is

apocalyptic, if not in a Christian millenarian sense, at

least in a sense of crisis. Although postmodernism is

generally characterized by crisis brought about by change

and cataclysm in the contemporary world—the decadence that

precedes the renewal of the world, such as the dropping of

the atomic bombs on Japan opened the atomic world—a feeling

that one’s era is crisis-oriented is as old as Judeo-

Christian tradition itself. We can see the exigency of end-

time in the intense and ambivalent ending of Mark’s gospel.

The apocalyptic ushers in a new world, but redemption is

possible only after the destruction of the old world. But

today we generally do not imagine the birth of a new

kingdom, a New Jerusalem, after the end of the world. World

War I was not the war to end all wars, but a transition to

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an even more horrific war—and World War II transitions to

the absurdity of the atomic era when for the first time in

human history we have the power to annihilate the existence

of all humankind. The twentieth century poetic vision in

response to the atomic age tends to be nihilistic,

reflecting Yeats’ rough beast slouching towards a new but

monstrous birth.

The shift from a belief in a cosmic apocalypse to a

personal and earthly ending is the result of giant paradigm

shifts in our relationship with the divine in the past two

centuries. Philosophy and theology has given up an attempt

at proving the existence of a transcendent God. A human

sense of a benevolent and providential God dies in a century

of atrocity. It is difficult for both a novelist and a

theologian to speak of God with the same sense of hope,

progress and positivism inherent in the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries. In the two centuries preceding the

twentieth, industrial, scientific and colonial progress

compelled the Western world to believe that they had a

divine mandate, that theirs was the providential

civilization. But the Western world’s sense of destiny was

shattered by the horrors of World War I. Theologian Jurgen

Moltmann in Theology of Hope claims:

The millenarian hope transported what was

eschatological into history and imbued what was

historical with messianic passion . . . between 1914 and

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1918, in the annihilating battles of the

First World War, the messianic dreams of

England, Germany, Russia and France turned into apocalyptic

nightmares of death . . . Just as

millenarianism draws eschatology into history in

a positive sense, in order to establish the kingdom of God

‘already here on earth’ . . . modern

apocalyptic draws eschatology into history in

a negative sense, in order ‘already here on earth’ to enact

the nuclear ‘Armegeddon (4-5).

When Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God, he was not

making an historical proclamation from divine revelation but

revealing a cultural reality that the age of Christianity is

rapidly coming to an end. God has ceased to provide for

unbelief. It would be a mistake to read Nietzsche’s

declaration as metaphysical doctrine. He wanted to

articulate melodramatically a direction and tone of culture.

Nietzsche announced a great refusal which the modern human

had made. The death of belief in a transcendent and

providential God has led many critics to call this a post-

Christian era. Generally, the notion that our age is post-

Christian leads writers to inevitably equate the decline of

religion with existential grief. Nels F.S. Ferre says:

Modern man not only grovels in despair. Nihilism

is the style. All of a sudden the happy ending

is taboo throughout the whole world of literature

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. . . In religion too there is a fad, if not a

full-scale fashion, to announce the death of the

gods. The post-Christian era is upon us. Modern man, we

hear, has once for all outgrown Christian

ideology (Finality of Faith 6).

For many theologians who had to face an existential

crisis in theology in the twentieth century, the general

shift away from belief in a cosmological, ontological and

metaphysical God could also be, interestingly, the cause for

creative celebration. As Thomas Altizer in Death of God Theology

claims, “God must die in the world so that he can be born in

us” (xi). The death of a transcendent God beyond us gives

birth to God immanent within us, in some ways a death that

gives fulfillment to Martin Luther’s notion of the

“individual believer.” The emphasis in theology, reflected

in literature, shifts form a transcendent God to the

incarnate God, the God born into history in Jesus Christ.

Frederick Hoffman claims:

One of the great metaphorical gestures is that of

maneuvering the metaphysical properties

of the Trinity into areas of secular improvisation

. . .God . . . is dropped from man’s calculations

as unmanageable or too remote from the immediate

needs of self-adjustment to be tolerated with

confidence. Christ, the middle figure of the Trinity,

gains immensely in the exchange; and the human

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imagination is most active in inventing new roles

and settings for Him (319).

In our current post-modern, apocalyptic—whatever—age of

liminal belief, there appears to be as much to mourn as

there is to celebrate concerning the shift in our perception

of God that Nietzsche had prophesied. Christian vision

suffers both loss and gains that become reflected in

paradoxical ways in literature. We have suffered from a

great loss of spirit as a result of the death of a

transcendent, providential and benevolent God; no longer can

we rely naively upon comforting myths of the past. At the

same time, one of the greatest developments in modern

history is an emphasis upon the incarnation, or the

affirmation of the ordinary, that is a result of a

secularized culture. Revelation no longer comes mystically

from above and only for a select few or an elect. We

experience the spiritual subjectively from what Heidegger in

Being and Time calls being-within-the-world. The immanence of

God makes fills our experience and our world with

sacramental signs that we must read and interpret. In short,

theological and literary thinking since the end of World War

II tends toward immanentist aesthetics.

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The Two Narratives of the State of Literature

In a time that feels broken and yearning for easy

closure, can literature help? Can literature heal our

wounds? Make us feel whole? Can literature make us better

people? These seem like goofy questions, but they never fail

to pester critical consciousness nonetheless.

Ever since Sir Philip Sidney wrote A Defense of Poesie,

there has been a subgenre of critical writing that defends

literature by extoling the virtues of poetry. From

Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Shelly’s Defense of

Poetry, Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” to Mark

Edmundson’s Why Reading? writers have sought to elevate

reading and interpretation to a nearly priestly occupation.

The defensive posture toward the value of literature

increases as its function in an increasingly industrialized

and technologized culture comes under question. What does

literature do? is the perennial question. What can

literature do for me? What is the utility of literature?

In the past decade this defensive genre has grown

exponentially. Dozens of books have come out with titles

that resemble the self-help genre of getting closure. How to

Read Literature, How to Read a Poem, How to Read Novels Like a Professor, How

Literature Saved my Life

. . . And there are the why titles, such as Why Reading? Why

Literature? And recently a subgenre of the memoir has been

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growing in which people explore the impact of reading

literature on their lives. A woman recently wrote her

account of reading a classic work of literature everyday for

one year as a means to work through the mourning over the

death of her sister. A journalist near retirement went back

to Columbia, his alma mater, to retake the courses in

Western literature he had to take as a freshman, and wrote a

bestseller about the experience.

One would think that people had never been more

enthusiastic about literature. People want to read. And

people want to read deeply and closely. Based upon the

Thomas Forrester’s surprisingly popular books, people want

to read like a professor, for some bizarre reason. (As a

professor I implore you, don’t try to read like a

professor.) Not only that, but based upon the even more

surprising success of Edward Hirsch’s exceedingly

enthusiastic book, How to Read and Fall in Love with Poetry, people

want to read poetry. Book clubs have never been more

numerous and diehard. The publishing industry increasingly

caters to members of book clubs, offering comments and

advice for group discussion at the endings of novels.

Further, it would seem that there is interest amongst the

layperson to read and understand dense academic

argumentation on literature, evidenced by Harold Bloom’s

tomes that chart appreciative but complex criticism of the

Western canon and top the New York Times bestseller lists (to

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the ire and jealousy of English professors). People want to

know what to read and how to read.

Not only that, but people want to write. Legions of

writers in the past couple of decades from humble

backgrounds least likely to pursue such a laborious venture

have been writing novels and memoirs. MFA programs, most of

them granting a nominally useful degree after a great deal

of work and money, have grown from just a dozen or so in the

1970s to the hundreds today. There is obviously a supply and

the University is meeting the demand. A publishing industry

has exploded in the past decade of books written by authors

and poets explaining the craft of fiction, poetry, drama,

screenwriting, memoir, and creative nonfiction. If there

were no demand for instructions on writing a novel, there

would not be such a supply of books that provide it.

Obviously a lot of people want to write a novel, or they are

at least fascinated with the notion of writing a novel.

Either way, people are drawn not only to the wholeness of

literature, but they also want to write a work themselves.

In short, it seems like the interest in literature is in a

heyday.

But there is another narrative counter to this

enthusiasm for books, and it goes like this. Humanities are

dying, if not dead. Growth industries dictate the degrees

students pursue. The university is becoming a service

industry as opposed to a center of liberal learning.

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Newman’s idea of a university is the defunct dream of a

bygone era. No one reads anymore. English departments are

collapsing. Whatever is left of the liberal arts have become

the dens of godless leftists feverishly indoctrinating

students into liberal and secular humanism. The interest in

literature has enervated as its usefulness in an industrial

world becomes vestigial. Funding for literary scholars is

scarce and growing scarcer, and the paucity of jobs

relegates thousands of professionals with PhDs into servile

adjunct work. The lucky few professors who have tenure

slovenly reap the benefits of security, caring little for

students’ education and leaving the dirty work of teaching

to subalterns. Scholarly journals are drying up, and the

writing they produce is unreadable. Cultural studies is

absorbing traditional English as attention draws to fast,

disposable pop culture. Caribbean postcolonial literature

replaces Shakespeare. Batman replaces Milton. Madonna and

Lady Gaga replace Chaucer. Hardly anyone reads poetry,

unless they are the lyrics of pop songs. Poets in particular

are a rapidly endangered species. According to some

journalists, poetry is dead.

In fact, the narrative of the state of Humanities,

particularly English, is downright apocalyptic. Those who

cry out in alarm over the death of humanities speak and

write in words of imminent catastrophe, the closing of the

mind, the coming end. Some English departments take on the

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posture of the last guardians of civilization manning the

walls and the gates from the final rush of barbarians poised

to take the empire. Other English departments welcome the

destruction, cheering on the breech of the wall. Some

students and professors see their work as not only education

but as revolution.

How could it be that enthusiasm for reading and interpreting

literature, and even producing literature, seems so intense

at the same time as the job of teaching and expounding

literature is either so apparently valueless or so

revolutionary that it invites visions of apocalypse? There

is a very real disconnect between the dour pronouncements of

literature’s death in academia and the apparent enthusiasm

about books outside of the arcadia of learning

Criticism versus Theory

Part of interpretation’s beleaguered state has to do

with the bad name literary theory has gotten as of late.

Often theory is distinguished from criticism as though each

wants to maintain distance from the other. Literary

criticism does not want to suffer from guilt by association,

so to speak.

The study or “science” of different means of

interpretation is called hermeneutics. Since we are fairly used

to the centrality of interpretation in English, we forget

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that hermeneutics has gained interest only fairly recently

in history. We take hermeneutics for granted. The idea that

there ought to be a systematic study of the ways in which we

interpret text was not a pressing matter throughout the

middle ages and the Renaissance. In fact, the times in

history when people cared about the interpretation of text

is rather infrequent.

Only when meaning becomes an urgent issue or when

ascertaining meaning becomes difficult does the study of

interpretation, or hermeneutics, become important. Most ages

take the meaning of texts for granted and form evaluations of

literature. In the eighteenth century, for instance, the

major poets and critics, like Alexander Pope and Samuel

Johnson, reflect upon the nature and value of literature,

and form evaluative judgments of works. But they show very

little concern for interpretation. Most writers of the

eighteenth century, like ancient Greek and Renaissance

rhetoricians, were concerned with establishing principles of

writing and what it should accomplish. Along the way they

would also raise moral and aesthetic questions. But meaning

is taken for granted—a poem means and that is the innate fact

—as most ages are not self-conscious of the ways by which

one forms interpretation.

Before the twentieth century hermeneutics grows into a

central concern during two major periods, the Reformation

and Romanticism. Before the seventeenth century most people

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could not read (for most people it was illegal to read), and

there was very little dissemination of text as the printing

press was still fairly scarce. Reading was an elitist and

clerical activity relegated to monasteries. Plenty of

royalty up until the renaissance were illiterate as there

was no reason for certain monarchs to read.

The only text most people were familiar with was the

Bible, which everyone knew orally, through the ear alone.

And the pope and church hierarchy adjudicated the meaning of

sacred scripture. It was nobody’s concern except for clerics

to interpret the Bible. What the Bible means was dictated.

Therefore there was little contention concerning belief

before the Reformation. Up until Shakespeare’s time it was

highly unusual for anyone to step outside of faith to

question it. Belief was innate. In many ways, the growth of

our modern idea of individuality is as predicated upon the

ability to question innate religious belief as it is upon

the growth of economic autonomy.

The Protestant revolution’s emphasis upon reading the

Bible, made possible by translation and the printing press,

made one’s relationship with scripture become rapidly

personal. One cannot overestimate the paradigm shift in

thought that occurs when people have a book, the Bible, in

their hands, and when they can read it in privacy and

without oral dictate. There was a profound shift that occurs

during roughly the seventeenth century when reading the Bible

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transferred belief from magisterium to the individual. One

began to think for oneself. The concern with interpretation

suddenly becomes central as everyone engages in trying to

understand what is ultimately very difficult material. The

Bible is not only one of the most central texts in the

Western world, it is the most difficult to understand. The

first genuine studies of interpreting text, hermeneutics,

evolved out of this need to address the personal attainment

of meaning concerning the Bible. As Protestantism grew,

people, both lay and clerical, began to write treatises

about interpretation.

At first hermeneutics was relegated to the

interpretation of the Bible. Up until the eighteenth

century, sacred texts were the only ones worthy of study.

The value we place on the study of literature, we must

remember, is only something that grows in Matthew Arnold’s

Victorian era. As the Protestant revolution evolved into

democratic revolutions, particularly in the eighteenth

century, people self-conscious of their position and rights

within a state or nation grew more interested in the nature

of the laws under which they lived. As a result,

hermeneutics expanded beyond religion to incorporate the

interpretation of law, something that affects everyone

living in a democracy or in a state that desires democracy.

The American Revolution was the result of new literacy and

the dissemination of printed material that interpreted and

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professed the rights of people in the colonies. Thomas

Paine’s Common Sense, which sold over 200,000 copies in 1776

(making it, per capita, the bestselling work in American

history), did more to incite Americans to revolution than

anything else. As we know, it is impossible for the law to

escape hermeneutics today. The meaning of the Constitution

has vast consequences upon our daily life, as do the ways in

which we can parse law to our advantage.

Hermeneutics, therefore, is practiced when meaning becomes very

important to people, and when the objects requiring interpretation are difficult.

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—

Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth’s superb surprise

As lightning to the Children eased

With explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind—

In her famous poem Emily Dickinson explores obliquity

in the poet’s attempt to approximate meaning, a sort-of job

description of poetic vocation. The poem alludes to the

Bible and, like all of her poetry, draws its form from

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hymns. There is a sarcastic inflection to Dickinson’s

assertion of Truth, however, that distinguishes her work

from devotional poetry. By predicating Truth with “all the

Truth,” and describing it as “superb surprise,” she does

more to make it undecidable than she does to make it

determinant. There is something banal about the phrase

“superb surprise” that, along with “infirm Delight”

juxtaposes the severity of blindness rather coyly. The poet

must circle around the impossibility of immediate “explanation”

whereas hymns express belief directly. Hymns do not try to

play coy. Her poem is about poetry’s evasion of literal

statement in its draw toward mystery as opposed to

theology’s function to describe and systematize mystery. It

is the function of tropes to find “Success in circuit,” to

avoid dangerous transgressions in making direct reference to

the divine. Naming the divine is one of God’s ultimate

prohibitions. “Lightning” is both the magnitude and terror

of nature and God, but the poem centers on what makes for

“Success” in poetic representation and expression, not

faith.

The hymnal form of Dickinson’s poetry gives the reader

a false sense of lyrical comfort. The alternating trimeters

seem to turn her subject matter, such as death, into catchy

jingles, but she ensnares us with unsolvable mysteries that

encircle us with danger. All of her poems ironically play

form off of content, the jingle-effect estranging us from

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the subject matter to create the surreal disorientation of a

dream. For Dickinson, poetry may be seductive but, in its

draw toward mystery and away from coherent explanation,

treads dangerous water. A reader enters at his or her own

peril.

In the two-line poem, “The Secret Sits,” Robert Frost

echoes Dickinson’s intimation of truth as hallowed,

tempting, beguiling.

We dance round a ring and suppose,

But the secret sits in the middle and knows.

The secret “sits in the middle” like a smug blank space

upon which we can ascribe anything, but it is a blank that

intimates something foreboding: it “knows.” Whatever “sits

in the middle” seems to dare the reader to enter the ring

and “know” it as opposed to “suppose” it. Nonetheless, as

the poem suggests, most of us “dance round a ring” like

diviners of meaning, children in a game, or participants in

a ritual. Truth rests in a center like a demon that must be

expiated. Secrets have wonderful and terrible potential for

revelation. There are those things we willfully and

consciously conceal for many reasons that can be

psychological, legal or societal. Secrets can be

empowering. We like to keep our secrets because they are

something over which we have control. But secrets are also

pernicious: the secrets of shame; guilt over a crime at

one’s psychological detriment; wielding power like blackmail

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over others. The withheld secret leads inevitably to a

reckoning. Revealing a secret can be as much of a

transgression as it can entail a virtuous or healthy act.

Something about unveiling a secret involves kenosis, the

emptying of the spirit.

In her socio-psychological study, Secrets, Sissela Bok

argues, “concealment, or hiding [is] the defining trait of

secrecy. It presupposes separation, a setting apart of the

secret and the non-secret, and of keepers of a secret from

those excluded.” Secrecy and privacy are inextricably

linked. At a very early age we learn that a great deal of

life involves secrets. The toddler’s increasing awareness of

secrets and the act of keeping a secret rehearse for the

formation of privacy. Bok has examined studies that prove

that as early as the age of three children help other

children learn to find secret hiding places when they play

hide-and-seek. The toddler might be an ultimate egotist, but

he somehow learns the means by which to share his knowledge

of secrecy to other toddlers.

Most people imagine that poetry contains a secret only

experts have the code to crack. For most people poets seem

to purposefully exclude readers. In her famous poem,

“Poetry,” Marianne Moore confesses,

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are

important beyond all this fiddle.

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She goes on to say of poems,

When they become so derivative as to become

unintelligible,

the same thing may be said for all of us, that we

do not admire what

we cannot understand . . .

People who believe that poetry conceals meaning to exclude

others from its secrets are partly right. The means by

which poets distress language alienate most readers. Poets

never reveal without concealing the secrets they withhold,

bending language willfully to conceal direct statement. The

means by which poets trope, swerving and deviating around

direct signification, becomes like an array of coded

messages, a puzzle, a labyrinth, a secret inscription.

The concision of Dickinson’s poems does not mean they

are brief or simple. The form of Dickinson’s poems creates

self-referential attention at the same time as it gestures

to its own shape and structure. Her poems’ seemingly closed

nature makes them feel like hermetic systems. The densely

packed lyric is the crux of her work. The clipped lineation

frames expansive experience: death, infinity, eternity,

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despair. The sing-song quality that makes them famous (they

sound like jingles) juxtaposes the frequently disturbing

content. The expansion of experience in constricted space

forces one to dwell in her poem. By the sweat of

interpretation one struggles to open her work with meaning.

There are endless ways in which events interrupt a

sense of coherence to life. Trauma, as we will see, results

when familiar patterns of expectation disappear. In order to

cope with life in the middle that has been interrupted by

loss or violence, one must readjust the ways in which to

make sense of experience. It has become ubiquitous to

associate trauma with catastrophe, and indeed catastrophic

experience most violently rends life’s familiar meaning. The

past century is characterized by serial catastrophe. But

there also needs to be an understanding of the trauma of

everyday life, which includes the many ways in which

experience requires one to reimagine the world. ***

History depends upon events, a chronology of serial

moments that, as Hayden White argues, transform into a story

when one emplots them into a narrative. To emplot ascribes

value to certain events or experiences in the same “dire”

craft of selecting and comparing that James attributes to

the job of forming closure in a novel. Events transform into

history when the historian shapes a chronicle into a

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meaningful pattern with a beginning and an end rounding off

the middle of a portion of life. White deepened our

understanding of history by revealing the salient links

between the factual and the figural entailed in any

narrative concerning the past. The retrospective analysis of

the past afforded by the necessity of a narrative ending

place historical events into the context of how things

turned out. Generally a work of history does not emphasize

the meaninglessness of events. For instance, the typical

high school textbook of American history depicts a

frequently providential story of progress. Everything in the

past, its glories and its atrocities, fits a pattern of

coherence. Nothing is left to chance. There are rarely

outliers in history represented as a broad sweep, which does

beg the pertinent question, what is marginalized in the act

of forming concord?

We inherit the drive toward total coherence from the

ancient Hebrew effort toward selecting and arranging the

canonical texts of the Bible, deepened further by the

ancient Church fathers, like Augustine, who form a seamless

linkage between the Old and New Testament. For Kermode the

concordance of the Old and New Testament is in fact the

paradigm of concordance between beginning, middle, and end

by which the novel evolves. The West derives its sense of

and compulsion for narrative closure from the Bible, a book

with a definitive beginning, an origin, and a consummate

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ending, an apocalypse. There are many ways to examine how the

canonical texts of the Bible structure a coherent order, too

complex to go into here. The two acts of closure I want to

touch on for the moment are the linkage between the Old and

the New Testaments based upon typology, and the epic arc of

experience the typological process achieves.

But getting closure heals trauma and resists

interpretation in an unusual way. Instead of achieving the

goal of freedom and peace getting closure promises, it

involves perpetuating conflict. Like one story replacing

another in importance on The Huffington Post, closure perpetuates

the simulation of life on the move. Prior conflict has been

substituted, displaced, repressed or forgotten in the act of

gaining closure.

The Rage for Meaning / The Articulation of Trauma

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The process of interpretation, the struggle to find a

sense of meaning through literature allows one to reconnect

to the urgent and intense concerns of traumatic experience

without the threat to one’s life that trauma poses. Reading

strongly affords one the opportunity to surrender to life’s

antinomies without the need to either perish or triumph.

Literature offers the increasingly scarce space to be

melancholy while not becoming an outcast, to get in touch

with darkness without surmounting to it. A book does not

die. A book does not threaten your life.

Therefore, reading also counters the all-consuming

traumatic sublime into which catastrophic experience too

easily sinks. It is reflexive to define trauma as

inexplicable, unspeakable, unknowable. These terms

conveniently resist the stories that trauma can produce and

which need to be heard. Indeed, far from the suffocating

unknowingness attributed to the emotional suffering trauma

entails, the voice of emotional pain always has and

continues to find verbal expression. Trauma is not

inexplicable and unspeakable. Instead, we lose the

willingness and ability to listen to its expression because

we avoid its interpretation.

The reluctance to listen to trauma is usually because

it is articulated in a literary language, the language of

figuration that represents experience in a richer, more

distorted way than practical discourse. Trauma is itself a

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complex but distorted experience that pushes up against the

limits of cognition, often going beyond the circumference of

what is familiar. Literary works are the most urgent places

in which to explore and inhabit these depths and limits of

what makes us most human. But we are losing touch with these

literary spaces, shrinking away from the difficult pleasure

interpretation yields, the emotional threat literature

poses, and its cognitive demands. To read is to encounter

what it means to be human. The interpretation required of

literature preserves life because it makes it worth living.

Indeed, reading for interpretation is one of the best

ways in which to counter the dangerous allures of

apocalyptic thinking that all too easily consumes

individuals and communities, particularly in the new

millennium. It is the very nature by which works of

literature achieve closure, how works enact their own

apocalypses, which make them temporal spaces where one can

divine meaning from seemingly senseless experience. Unlike

closure accomplished through an enumerated process from the

Internet, the closure achieved by a poem, a story or a novel

is hard earned. A literary work, likewise, makes demands on

us, pleasurable nonetheless, but it is, in Percy Shelly’s

words, “a difficult pleasure.” It is a pleasure that yields

greater joy from a deeper and often disturbing confrontation

with the self through otherness that allows us to dwell in

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and reflect on our uncanny position in the world where we

recognize our own estranged self.

Enchanting Hypotheticals and Disenchanting Realities

The famous term, “willing suspension of disbelief,” comes from

Coleridge.

It was agreed, that my endeavours should be

directed to persons and

characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet

so as to transfer from our inward nature a human

interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to

procure for these shadows of imagination that

willing suspension of disbelief for the moment,

which constitutes faith.

Coleridge attributes the “moment” when fiction enchants to

“faith.” The ability to project one’s own imaginative

construction of reality into fiction transforms characters

and actions into life. The imagination, which Coleridge

elevated to a level of divinity, transubstantiates the

frozen and dead figures of a text into flesh and blood. The

“rage” to create meaning transfigures linguistic

constructions into Hamlet or Leopold Bloom and turn plot and

action into the feeling of actual historical events. The

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make believe entailed in reading, therefore, makes fiction

serious and ludicrous at the same time.

The willing suspension of disbelief flirts with madness

of a kind. In the actual world belief in imaginary worlds is

schizophrenia. Does not reading, whether it is a novel or a

film or television, improvise a madness of sorts? The

difference between schizophrenia and reading fiction is that

we can always bring our willing suspension of disbelief to

an end. The closure fictions produce keeps us self-conscious

of the distinction between fiction and reality. Although we

flirt with madness when we read fiction, we know that

fiction has clear frames that allow from departures from and

returns to the actual world. In fact, Stevens, as in “The

Idea of Order,” emphasizes how poetry clarifies distinctions

between imaginative consciousness and our consciousness of

reality that deepen the meaning of both.

But a strict dichotomy between fictions and reality,

madness and sanity, seems untenable. Fictions permeate our

everyday activities and our experiences that we denote as

reality. How might our entertainment of fiction transform

the actual world? In what ways are the boundaries between

fiction and reality permeable? Do we willingly suspend

disbelief in certain experiences in so-called reality? And

what happens when that which we call “life” as opposed to

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fiction offers us unbelievable experience, when truth is

stranger than fiction?

Ever since Plato there is a notion that prevails today

that equates fiction with madness. The Platonic conception

was that inspirational powers take over a poet, like demonic

possession, that obscures reality. Whereas today we hope the

muses are on our side, Plato equated muses with violence.

Since the poet sees the world through fantasy, fiction

dangerously misleads an audience. Even worse, fiction, with

the power of rhetoric, can persuade an audience to adopt

false positions. It can inspire one to madness through

influence, infecting the mind like illness. The word influence

derives from influenza. Inspiration has not taken on healthier

connotations until the romantic poets elevated it to an

experience of spiritual possession rather than an illness or

madness. Inspiration is a divine intoxication.

Shakespeare always portrays the thin line between

imagination and madness. In fact, Shakespeare seems

ambivalent concerning the power of the imagination as he

explores the nature of “play” in both its healthy and

dangerous aspects. Although the nature of play is central to

A Midsummer Night’s Dream the imagination remains equivocal

nonetheless. When the noble lovers return from their

fantasia in the forest, Theseus, greatly suspicious of the

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imagination, lectures Hippolyta on what he believes are the

dangers of fiction in the frequently quoted passage:

The lunatic, the lover and the poet

Are of imagination all compact.

The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to

heaven;

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen

Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.

A couple of centuries ago a person would agree with

Theseus’s assessment, despite his fallacious neo-Platonism.

But today we highly value the very same aspects of

imaginative play that Theseus condemns. We engage serious

discourse about “airy nothing,” figures and events that do

not exist without being considered crazy. It has only been

in the past century that discussing imaginary people who

inhabit literature is a job requirement for a profession and

not a mark of lunacy. As Terry Eagleton quips, “In everyday

life, talking about imaginary people as though they were

real is known as psychosis; in universities, it is known as

literary criticism” (22).

Hans Vaihinger argues in Philosophy of as If (1924) that

hypothesis structures our understanding of the world.

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Scientists use the imagination more than they depend upon

empiricism by analogically compelling possible concepts to

fit reality. He argues that no scientist can directly

observe the phenomena of subatomic particles, but they

imaginatively construct the possibility for their existence

based upon observations that begin with hypothetical

assumptions. Quantum physicists conduct research and work on

entities that may not exist. Astrophysicists go so far as to

postulate the possibility of infinite universes while

string-theorists argue for the possibility of up byzantine

dimensions to time and space.

As fantastic as contemporary physics sounds, the

difference between science and literature is that the

hypotheses of science may just be real whereas nothing about

characters or events in fiction can be proven. Without

substantive proof to its hypotheses, science remains

fiction, which is why so much current quantum physics often

read like long prose poems about the universe. Even

theologians must assert a quantum of proof concerning God.

If God becomes hypothetical, theology devolves into a

prelude to unbelief, which is why belief always feels

tenuously intimate with madness. When science surpassed

religion in its claims to truth in the nineteenth-century,

unbelief became a powerful force against Christianity as

religion became equated with fiction by the twentieth-

century in ways it never had in history. The rise of studies

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and classes called, “The Bible as Literature,” is

symptomatic of just such a shift. Theology is more inclined

today to speak of God in terms of poetic possibilities and

religion as an imaginative narrative construction of

reality. Nonetheless, God must be affirmed in some way or

theology turns into the same hypothetical realm of fiction.

With nothing objective to prove, literature explores

hypothetical truths far more freely than science, history or

theology.

Literature allows for an infinite play with truth,

which is why Goethe, Shakespeare, Sophocles and many other

authors continually inspired Freud. When Freud was hailed as

the “discoverer of the unconscious” during his seventieth

birthday celebration, he admonished the speaker, claiming:

“The poets and philosophers before me discovered the

unconscious. What I discovered was the scientific method by

which the unconscious can be studied.” However, Freud’s

claim to his “scientific method” has also been questioned.

Karl Popper argues that untestable hypotheses cannot be

legitimately called scientific. The only genuine scientific

hypotheses are ones that can be falsifiable, which is why he

asserted that psychoanalysis is not a legitimate scientific

theory. A psychoanalyst can always reinvent a reason to

account for human behavior if one hypothesis fails. The

problem with Popper’s argument is that it does not account

for our adherence to certain hypotheses, indeed our belief

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in them, despite adverse evidence. That a hypothesis cannot

be proven neither negates its effects upon us nor does it

suggest it will not be proven or altered in some other way

in the future. The question is the nature and context of

hypotheses.

Adam Phillips claims:

These days, when we are not being told that

psychoanalysis is or is not a science, we are,

perhaps unsurprisingly, being told that it is an

art. And since, as a talking cure, its medium is

mostly language, the arts with which it bears most

obvious comparison are the literary arts. In the

anxious quest for reassuring analogies . . .

literature, after science, has seemed the most

promising. It has been to writing and not . . . to

the oratorical arts that psychoanalysis has

turned.

(Promises, Promises 1).

Literature, in fact, enjoys a double freedom from

determinate truth. Fiction is predicated upon “as if” at the

same time as it does not have to assert its inherently

hypothetical nature. Literature does not have to make

explicit or lay bare its hypotheses. An author or poet does

not have to proclaim, “Now I ask you to suspend disbelief,”

except for the little ancillary disclaimer before a novel

begins. As Samuel Johnson claimed in his argument against

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Aristotle’s Three Unities concerning drama, an audience

assumes fiction as no one confuses a performance with

reality. Like an audience to a play or a movie, when we open

a novel or begin to read a poem, we expect to enter a

hypothetical reality. Our desire for truth when we read

science or history is far more exacting because we expect

such work to have claims to an objective reality, even when

the lines between science, history or theology blur with

fiction. We do not expect scientists or historians to lie to

us whereas we are prepared for poets and authors to do so.

Before we open a piece of literature we are ready to submit

to the “as if” of fiction, and “for the moment” we have

“faith” in the world an author presents to us.

Everyday, however, we form powerful analogies between

fiction and the real world, connections that remain

dominantly unconscious. Our inattentiveness to the

relationship between fiction and life is why psychoanalytic

criticism has been so alluring in literary studies. The

hypothetical “as if” of fiction forms a powerful metaphor of

belief that changes the way in which we understand what it

means to be human. And we generally remain unconscious of

the effects of fictions of all sorts upon our perception of

reality. The transformational power of literature, its

ability to bring us pleasure despite the horrors certain

works present, and its ability to disturb us to the point

that we return to certain pieces to be disturbed all over

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again (just as we might watch a horror movie a second time),

continues to mystify us. We are drawn to literature because,

despite its fabric of lies, some kind of truth evolves

nonetheless, a textual weaving between truth and lies that

keeps us enthralled.

To return to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare is

aware that reality constitutes a relationship between our

imaginative projections into it and the extent to which

fictions can approximate our construction of reality.

Despite the fact that Theseus thinks the lovers are nothing

but a group of goofs whose overactive imagination have made

them loony, Hippolyta seems to convince him that their

stories resonate with a kind of truth.

But all the story of the night told over,

And all their minds transfigured so together,

More witnesseth than fancy's images

And grows to something of great constancy;

But, howsoever, strange and admirable.

Perhaps inspired by his imminent nuptials, Theseus ignores

Athenian law, invites the lovers back into society and

allows them to marry.

Even though the lovers’ irrational and ephemeral

experiences with the fairies were a fantasia, an “airy

nothingness,” the imagination affirms something real in the

end nonetheless. But Shakespeare’s affirmation of

imagination’s “constancy” is equivocal at the end of the

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play. He draws a clear distinction between reality and play

when he devotes Act V to the rustics’ ridiculous

performance. The actors spend an arduous but hilarious

amount of time making sure that the audience does not

confuse their “tragedy” with reality. Perhaps Shakespeare

satirizes anyone who would argue puritanically, like many

did in the sixteenth century, that drama compels audiences

to confuse truth and fantasy. Fiction “grows to something of

great constancy,” but play can also be, as Hippolyta quips

in the middle of the performance, “the silliest stuff ever I

heard.” It is interesting that Theseus, the rigid critic of

poetry, argues, “The best in this kind are but shadows; and

the worst / are no worse, if imagination amend them,” to

which Hippolyta replies, “It must be your imagination then,

and not theirs.” If reality is lacking, Theseus seems to

claim, our imagination has to power to rectify it, although

explicitly he argues that a play is best when it remains

distinctly play. Instead Hippolyta seems put-off by the

rustics’ bad taste.

In his wonderful early essay “The Poet and Day-

Dreaming” (1908), Freud argues something that both Theseus

and Hippolyta recognize and the rustics do not:

“Notwithstanding the large affective cathexis of his play-

world, the child distinguishes it perfectly from reality”

(45). Just as we do not confuse literary genres—we know when

we are reading a piece of history as opposed to a piece of

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fiction—we also know when Shakespeare ends and daily life

and its slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune begins.

Daydreaming is a means by which an adult compensates

for the loss of imaginative freedom he or she reveled in as

a child. As Freud claims, when the child grows up and loses

the ability to free-play, he will “adopt a

substitution . . . instead of playing he begins to create

phantasy.” For Freud, poets make play acceptable for adults

by framing fantasies in poetic form. Our reflexive

willingness to suspend disbelief over fiction resembles the

adult activity of daydreaming. We substitute the freedom we

had to fulfill wishes during play as children by reading or

writing poetry. Daydreams allow us a space in which to

freely fantasize about anything. The daydream does not

threaten reality. Only the psychopath acts out on his or her

darkest fantasies, like Macbeth’s inability to resist the

desire to put his murderous instincts in action as hard as

he tries to in Act I. Reading is a rarefied and directed

form of daydreaming. A conscious activity, daydreaming

resembles the control we have over imaginative ekstasis. When

fiction transports us into its hypothetical realm, we have

the power to wake up, to snap out of it, to return to

reality.

The Subject versus the Self

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My feeling is that people are hungering for meaning.

But professors (me included) and the universities where we

work are providing information for our students to process

instead of books for them to interpret. We are providing

utilitarian methods of citizenship instead of tools to make

meaning. Therefore, they are losing the ways in which the

written word can make a life meaningful.

The digital world provides a certain kind of meaning. I

am not going to write a diatribe about the Internet or the

Age of Information. It makes no more sense for me to do so

than to rage over the loss of the typewriter. There is value

in the fast, accessible, impulsive satisfaction information

provides. There is also value in the archives of research

readily available. Further, I think that discourse in such

spaces as the blog is valuable and produces new platforms

for the dissemination of thought and feeling. Every written

word cannot rise to enchantment. Consummate value would make

literature indistinguishable from advertising.

At the same time one cannot blindly accept the march of

digital progress without critical self-consciousness. A

majority of the writing on the Internet forms an endless

scroll of information. It creates complete immersion into

text that threatens give everything value. Complete

immanence of value ultimately makes all information

valueless. Again, there is a wonderful democracy in the

splayed plane of discourse in which every voice contributes

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to what Martin Luther King called our “garment of destiny.”

But what does it mean to read a Shakespeare sonnet that is

framed by advertisements for automobiles, cruises,

homeowner’s insurance, and online courses? What does it mean

to read a novel on a screen that shares space occupied by

Facebook updates? What is the effect of reading Hamlet on one

half of the screen while reading Hamlet made Simple on the

other half?

The democratization of discourse has made literature

available to everyone. The Internet has become a sort of

Open University as schools such as Yale provide some of

their classes online for free. A public interest in the

deeper rewards of close reading and interpretation evidences

a desire for substance, for the type of organic wholeness

that information cannot provide. The problem is that English

departments continue to emphasize brokenness, fragmentation,

meaninglessness. The profession of literature values a

“hermeneutics of suspicion,” a process of interpretation

that was once valuable, but now works to demystify and

disenchant literature, turning writing into text that not only

competes with advertisements in the margins but belongs

there.

Literature has always been political, whether

explicitly or covertly. It is naïve to avoid the political

contingencies a text either hides or makes manifest. To

teach a pure aesthetics or poetics of literature to students

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would also empty out text of meaning and rob students of the

discourse literature can instigate. But there has been a

politicization of literature in the past few decades that

dehumanizes the value of literature by reducing literary

text to mere information. This is ironic. The political

energy literature embodies ought to emphasize the human, the

polis, a community that struggles, questions, and debates its

values. But instead the goal has been to setup antagonism by

creating enemies in the abstract.

One can see this development of interpreting in the

abstract in the phenomenon known as readings. In advanced

courses, or even introductory courses, students are

compelled to conduct readings of a text, such as Marxist

readings of Shakespeare, Freudian readings of Woolf,

Historicist readings of Whitman, and so on. Instead of

reading a work as something integral to itself and working

outward from that integrity, students read a work with an

agenda formed and prepackaged from outside the text. And

instead of human meaning imposed on a text, the student

forces the text to conform to an abstraction of thought. The

interpretation conforms to the ideology adopted. The reading

does not produce the interpretation. In some cases it would

seem that one could conduct certain readings of a text

without the text itself. Instead of the Death of the Author,

we have the Death of the Text! It would be an interesting

exercise to reverse the formula, perhaps, and do a

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Shakespearean reading of Marx or a Woolfian reading of

Freud.

The same reduction of textual integrity has also worked

its way into the reader herself. Instead of a self, the

reader has become a subject, a reading subject, or a Marxist

subject, or a culturally determined subject. Since the 1980s

it has become doctrine to turn the human self into subject. The

critical impulse was to expose selfhood as an illusion. The

“self” (in scare quotes) is a material construction, a sign

within a field of other signs, the product of material

acculturation and most intensely inherited from an

Enlightenment elevation of individuality. A hermeneutics of

suspicion bolstered by Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Darwin

dismantles the integrity of the sovereign self, the self as

a centered and self-conscious human individual. Instead,

selfhood is socially constructed, the product of forces that

determine us. The interpretive work requires demystification

to uncover the extent to which we lack autonomy. Literature,

therefore, makes apparent the ways in which material forces

construct not a self, but a subject that is subjected to

indeterminate forces.

Demythologizing selfhood does have its value. It

compels people to recognize injustice, particularly

oppression that was, perhaps, covert, not readily available

for interpretation. It places the examination of texts into

a purely political landscape that allows one to see forces

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that form hegemonies and determine the selfhood that we had

thought was free. It reveals the warring forces within us,

the unconscious that compels or impedes our desires. And it

has aided us in our awareness of voices that are elided by

the dominant discourse of any given era. The movement of

historicist analysis has shown us ways in which to gain

empowerment.

But it appears that translating the self as a subject

is not tenable or enduring, at least for a majority of

people who, despite the conflict and trauma that makes them

feel subjected to forces beyond their control, feel a sense

of selfhood nonetheless. There is a discernable shift back

to discussing the self in literary criticism today. One can

only go so far in reducing the human to a mere plaything of

material signs and forces before one grows weary of

nihilism’s allure. The rejection of subjection is similar, I

will argue, to counter-apocalyptic thought that is almost as

powerful as apocalyptic seduction. There is only so much one

can draw from fantasies of the end until one tries to

salvage what remains of value from a world that we perceive

as broken and valueless. And one of the things of

rediscovered value is the Self and literature, both of which

are united in ways forgotten.

The Defense of Literature

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There are many arguments for the value of reading

literature and the humanities. The most common are: 1)

Literature is not utilitarian; its uselessness (Oscar Wilde,

“All art is useless”) is exactly what makes it valuable for

a culture that requires usefulness from everything. A

culture that forgoes aesthetic disinterestedness is one

poised for barbarism. 2) Literature is very utilitarian; it

is useful because it offers readers the ability to imagine

possibilities, to stand in others’ shoes, to gain empathy

for plural points of view, to engage in argumentation. 3)

Literature reflects the culture and values of the time and

civilization that produced it. It provides a more inclusive

and imaginative view of the past than historical

abstraction. 4) Literature can educate through learning and

pleasure, whereas philosophy and other disciplines educate

through abstraction. 5) Literature cultivates taste that

allows a civilization to endure. The work of reading and

interpreting masterpieces makes it possible for one to

recognize greatness. It resists low art and bad taste from

eroding civilization. 6) Literature offers opportunities to

learn complex means of interpretation that are applicable to

other fields (a popular pitch of English departments). 7)

Literature embodies spiritual and even religious value,

since religion depends upon its ability to make stories

(Christ ministered through parables). Further, literature

replaces the loss of religious faith in its witness to

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transcendence. 8) Literature embodies material and political

value, making one more open and prone to enacting change,

even revolution. It has the power of propaganda.

As you can see, there are many ways in which to defend

literature, most of which contradict each other. Perhaps the

biggest value of literature is that there is no consensus

concerning what makes it valuable. This makes it harder to

dismiss its importance.

But I think that there is a way in which to defend

literature that can include most of the above arguments. A

literary work is a closure without an ending. A poem is both closed (out

of necessity it brings a beginning to an end) and open (it

is the site of plural analyses and it promises more

literature).

Matthew Arnold famously argued that studying literature

entails the “disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate

the best that is known and thought in the world.” Studying

the “touchstones” of literature elevates civilization above

the ephemera of politics, work, industry, and capital,

particularly when religion begins to fail to do so. In 1880,

Arnold argued that poetry replaces religion in an

industrialized world.

Our religion has materialised itself in the fact,

in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion

to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But

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for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a

world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry

attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the

fact. The strongest part of our religion to-day is

its unconscious poetry.

In effect, literature, like religion, can save us.

Very few of us, however, are self-professed Arnoldians.

Be that as it may, the relationship between studying

literature and religion remains powerful. Like many

Victorians, Arnold saw the most crucial issue of his day as

a crisis of faith. When dogmas and traditions fail, one can

turn to poetry for consolation. He prefigures T.S. Eliot who

argues in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” that the

great poets since Homer constitute a sort-of apostolic

succession. But unlike Catholicism, Eliot’s program does not

study the lives of the saints. Eliot promotes something more

Protestant: the study of poems, not poets, the Word, not the

Saints.

The argument that literature is secular scripture still

retains a great deal of currency. About sixty years after

Arnold’s religious pronouncements, Wallace Stevens made a

similar argument that poetry replaces God. But Stevens’

Supreme Fiction, as he calls it, has nothing to do with

Arnold’s belief. For Stevens belief in poetry compensates

for the loss of God as the dominant fiction. God served a role

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as an ordering fiction that poetry replaces. For Freud,

belief in God is belief in fiction, albeit a dangerous one.

What Stevens hoped would replace belief in God is belief in

fiction as fiction, turning poetry into a good in itself.

For Stevens, the Supreme Fiction means to believe in

fictions while recognizing that they are fictions, and

discovering that that is good enough.

Unlike most poets of the twentieth century, Stevens is

most at home with himself. A majority of literature from the

late nineteenth century until now, however, is marked by an

acute and uprooted sense of crisis. We live in times that

feel traumatic as literature since the early twentieth

century becomes preoccupied with the catastrophe of

existence itself. The struggle between belief and unbelief,

the acceptance and rejection of God, is one of the most

prevalent themes in literature of the past century. But a

crisis of belief is not a simple matter in the context of

fiction and poetry. The Modernist struggle between belief

and unbelief often results in literature that explores an

ambivalent middle ground: an inability to reject the God we

resist.

Rage for Order

Wallace Stevens explores the ordered and rarefied realm

of poetry juxtaposed to the ordinary world the poem

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inhabits. A poem is a closed object, separate from other

objects, unique to itself. But a poem also exists in the

ordinariness of the world it both reflects and informs. A

question Stevens asks in all of his poetry is, does a poem

have life (ontology)? Does it have spirit? To what extent

does an ending bring meaning and value to a work (“Death is

the mother of all beauty”)? To what extent does closure

elide inherent conflict or impose a false coherence over

contingent experience that “Had to be imagined as an

inevitable knowledge/ Required, as a necessity requires.”

In “The Idea of Order at Key West,” the speaker

describes a setting imaginatively altered by a woman he

witnesses singing at the edge of the ocean. The poem

emphasizes that her song does nothing to alter the natural

world. “The water never formed to mind or voice,/Like a body

wholly body, fluttering/It’s empty sleeves.” The speaker

calls the woman a “maker,” the Greek definition for a poet,

in order to make her activity distinct from the natural

world that is not contingent upon human activity.

For she was the maker of the song she sang.

The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea

Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.

Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew

It was the spirit that we soght and knew

That we should ask this often as she sang.

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Her song can shape perception, but it cannot alter nature.

The sound of her song and the sound of the ocean remain two

separate realms. Something about the woman singing makes the

speaker think of “spirit.” The nature of this indefinable

presence of “spirit” becomes the speaker’s cognitive

conflict, something he needs to think through. “If it was

only the dark voice of the sea,” he speculates, “If it was

only the outer voice of the sky” the setting would express

merely “The heaving speech of air . . . And sound alone.”

Her song, “More even than her voice” amongst “The

meaningless plungings of water and wind” fills the setting

she inhabits with an excess of experience we associate with

spirit.

It was her voice that made

The sky acutest at its vanishing.

She measured to the hour its solitude.

She was the single articifer of the world

In which she sang.

In fact the speaker claims that the woman singing has, like

a poem, come to embody a world complete in itself, a sort of

heterocosm.

As we beheld her striding there alone,

Knew that there never was a world for her

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Except for the one she sang, and singing, made.

If the poem ended here, the experience would be marooned in

abstraction, hermetic, leaving the speaker’s aesthetic

revelry oddly emotionless, even pedantic. As if to emphasize

human connection, however, the poet addresses “Ramon” in the

penultimate stanza in a moment of epiphany.

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,

Why, when the singing ended and we turned

Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,

The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,

As the night descended, tilting in the air,

Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,

Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,

Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

The description certainly sounds like magic now!

Despite the poem’s distinction between nature as creation

and human as maker, something about the woman’s song has

altered the setting and infused it with beauty. It is indeed

“enchanting.” The song has cast manmade objects—the

streetlights, the boats, the lights glowing from the masts—

into a spiritual glow that is, at the same time, firmly

rooted in the ordinary world. It has brought these objects

to life by “arranging” them in a world that had been

previously inchoate. The boats turn the ocean into a map and

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the lights atop masts become sidereal. By “portioning” and

“arranging” reality, poetry forms the lights into

“emblazoned zones,” the imaginary lines traced between stars

to plot constellations. The memory of the song transfigures

the setting into a picture of experience that the speaker

frames to make available for artistic reflection.

“The Idea of Order at Key West” is in the tradition of

ekphrasis, which means a poem about a work of art. In this case

the poem is doubly ekphratic. The poet describes the woman

singing, and then he describes the reimagined setting after

the song has poetically transformed it into a picture.

Perhaps this climactic moment of charged vision will inspire

the speaker to write a poem, perhaps the poem we read. The

word inspiration, of course, is closely related to the word

spirit, a wind that breathes life into inanimate matter. All

of Stevens’ poems are, in some ways, about the poet

breathing life into the ordinariness of things.

It would seem the penultimate stanza would be a fitting

end. But the final stanza serves as falling action to the

poetic narrative at the same time as it breaks the

suspension of disbelief.

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,

The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,

Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,

And of ourselves and of our origins,

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In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

One almost wishes the poem had ended with the visionary

second to last stanza. But the poem moves with the temporal

structure of drama: the woman enters, sings her aria unaware

of her audience, and exits, after which the speaker offers

an epilogue. The final lines sound somewhat hyperbolic and

pedantic. They sound suspiciously like a paraphrase of a

play’s Epilogue reminiscent of Puck’s farewell to the

audience in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

It is easy to miss that the penultimate stanza is a

question. Nature is no longer innate—nature is no longer

natural—but staged for evaluation. It has become a still

life. In a tone of aesthetic disinterestedness, the speaker

answers his own question in a way that subtly disenchants

the fullness of experience. He attributes the transformation

to the poet’s rage for order, his desire for “keener sounds”

to clarify the noise of nature. But the compulsion for order

threatens to drain the beauty from the experience. It is

easy not to notice the subtle shift in which reality is

suspended at the end.

The modernist rage for order

In one of his letters, Keats described what he called

“negative capability,” a state in which a poet “is capable

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of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any

irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Literature places

us in such a position in which we can dwell within

brokenness without necessarily feeling it incumbent to fit

everything into coherence.

In “The Theory of the Formal Method” Boris Eikhenbaum

argues that literature is a battleground where one treads

with caution, and that authors and poets continually

“struggle” for “survival.” Concerned with promoting a

science of literature, he draws the terms “struggle” and

“survival” from Marx and Darwin. But the terminology of

battle and survival is not that far from our academic notion

of literature as “work” that produces a literary “work.” The

poet works on a poem, produces a work, and the critic goes to

work on interpreting it. The critic’s work entails “doing

battle.” And if a poem is successful, we often announce, “it

works!”

Work is also a word endemic to trauma. Sigmund Freud

calls the process to overcome loss “the work of mourning.”

The struggle to overcome neurosis entails “working-through”

trauma. A victim of trauma survives catastrophe and struggles

with or works through its effects. And we tend to refer to

the struggle with both physical and emotional distress as a

battle. A patient battles illness. Freud couches psychoanalytic

processes in martial terms. Conscious and unconscious are in

conflict. The unconscious forms defenses in preparation for attacks

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or assaults from external threats. In coping with the trauma of

everyday experience, the goal of repeating experience and

working-through effects is to gain mastery over events that

could potentially cripple us. And the goal of consciousness

is for the human, in a Darwinian sense, to develop powers of

self-preservation in order to circumvent the extinction the id

desires.

This work will combine an anatomy of narrative (known

as narratology) with examinations of the individual

experience of time when reading, or time-consciousness

(known as phenomenology). The former tends to be more

scientific whereas the latter is more philosophical. Science

and philosophy have always been strange bedfellows.

Physicists of time who incorporate philosophy always risk

the disdain of purists while philosophers who adopt the more

stringent claims of science often risk looking un-

philosophical.

The wonderful aspect of literary criticism is that it

can entertain science and philosophy without committing to

either. Fiction is based upon hypothesis. Every story is

predicated by as if. The critic, therefore, can remain open to

the endless possibilities that hypotheses offer. In other

words, as a literary critic I have the freedom to play with

interpretation. It is a pleasurable freedom that has grown

increasingly lost in the constraints of a hyper-specialized

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world of English. The economic demands of a service culture

have also divided the study of English into ever narrowing

areas of specialty. It is my hope that the exciting freedom

to play with interpretation in this book will inspire you to

suspend disbelief, as Coleridge famously says, and enter

into the frequently ludic world of meaning-making even

though interpretation is very difficult business

I will attempt to reconcile eternalist and presentist

perspectives of time in the context of the reader’s temporal

experience in narrative and lyric. For the purposes of

literary analysis, I will shift these terms to the

categories of clock-time as opposed to mind-time, or

cosmological time as opposed time-consciousness. Narrative

or lyrical theory has a tendency to aspire to science, which

means that literary analysis becomes fraught with absurdly

superfluous technical terminology. (Look up a guidebook or

introduction to narratology. The terminology will leave you

cross-eyed.) Jargon has its place, and every discipline

needs its technical lexicon. But my goal is to make the

subject of temporality and closure in literature readable

for anyone, and to make the experience exciting and

pleasurable. I believe that the issue of closure and endings

is urgent: our perception of time has changed such that we

feel a thickening sense of coming at the end of an era, if

not the world. The issue should inspire us to read and value

literature more deeply as we become aware of how much time

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we are losing to do so. There is an ethics of reading at

stake, I believe, that has implications on how we live in

the irreversible process of moving toward our own personal

endings. I will try, then, to use as little jargon as

possible while always defining my terms in the context that

I use them.

As William Carlos Williams says at the opening of his famous

poem, “so much depends/ upon” the reader’s willingness to

see the poem as a thing in itself. That is in fact the point

of Williams’ poem. Framed by a selective vision, temporally

suspended as a snapshot, everything in the poem’s “reality,”

or its “thingness,” is bound up in “the red wheel/barrow,

the “glazed rain/water, and the “white chickens.” No matter

how frustrated my students get the first time they read this

poem, all of them admit that they stare at it for a while.

They stare in disbelief or confusion. Or perhaps they stare

in vigilance for the poem to do something. So I tell them

that, in a sense, the poem has achieved something: it draws

attention!

The Beauty of Finitude

But this middle position where we all exist “torn

asunder,” as Augustine says, between past and future, is not

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a just a ghastly paradox. The sheer fact that life is

temporally limited not only allows us to be ethically self-

conscious about our actions, but it also makes beauty

possible. Selection and limitation is essential to draw form

from the contingency of life. A narrative or lyric might be

imaginatively boundless, but, as forms, their power derives

from the narrow temporal space they inhabit. Their power

derives from finitude. The ways in which the irreversible

process in the forward movement toward an end provides life

with a “rage for order,” to quote Wallace Stevens, generates

our inexhaustible drive to make fictions.

The creative process always operates under the threat

of time. We cope with the inevitable end by turning life’s

various and many exigent events into points of closure from

where we can make new departures. In our rage for order, we

are mental cartographers, plotting points of experience that

make connections with other experiences within the space we

live through time. The ability of authors and poets to

configure the various plot points into a temporal form makes

literature such an essential calibrating function in life.

Fiction and poetry are like global positioning devices that

situate us in the many spaces in the world and guide us

through the labyrinth of what it means to be human in our

connection with others and otherness.

* * *

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The beauty that form makes out of finitude is

bittersweet. Endings entail loss. We all experience the odd

and conflicted combination of satisfaction and sadness when

we are about to reach the end of a really good book. It is a

mixture of bittersweet feelings that intensify as we flip

the last remaining pages. If we have grown particularly

intimate with a good book, we might put off reading those

final pages in order to defer the departure from something

that has become the equivalent of a new friend. Most of us

defer goodbyes. No matter how much you might console

yourself in knowing that the book itself is not going to

leave, you still have the wistful, even painful, feeling of

loss when you reach the last page.

Mourning is a process, often ritualistic, of working-

through the pain of loss or the pain of something that has

come to an end. For Freud, mourning results from the loss of

an object that is irrecoverable whereas melancholy results

from the failure of the rituals of mourning to work-through

loss and “get closure,” a term we will examine closely in

the next chapter. We do not associate endings with gain.

Instead, mourning seems more like a period one must pass

through in order to leave loss behind.

There is a great deal to gain from loss, however. I

argue that one should revel in the wistful feeling of loss

experienced at the ending of a book. In our fast culture

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that values convenience, one is inclined all too easily to

snap the book shut when the reading is done instead of

allowing the blankness after the final words to speak to us.

There is a lot to be learned by dwelling in the feeling of

loss that, paradoxically, accompanies the sense of

satisfaction after one finishes reading a book. Christian

liturgy practices similar meditative pauses at the endings

of various rituals during a service or mass. “Amen” after a

prayer, which means “let it be,” gestures toward silences

that invite us to dwell in the blankness from which the next

prayer forms.

Loss and gain are two sides of the same coin. A

departure is an arrival at the same time. It is what T.S.

Eliot means in Four Quartets,

What we call the beginning is often the end.

And to make an end is to make a beginning.

The end is where we start from.

We manage the pain of loss, whether it is the death of a

loved one, leaving a place of familiarity, recovering from

violence, by engaging in interpretive activities that

provide trauma a semblance of closure. We could tentatively

call them activities of mourning.

Even if you live everyday perpetually sentimental for

the past, however, life moves on. That’s the bitch of time.

You might not want to depart from the past and let go of the

lost object, but the future arrives anyhow. One of the few

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fundamental truths about time is that it moves inexorably

forward.

Jacques Derrida, in an uncommonly lucid moment,

explains the complex temporal structure of belatedness.

This radical otherness with respect to every

possible mode of presence can be seen in the

irreducible effects of deferred action . . . In

the otherness of the “unconscious” we are dealing

not with a series of modified presents—presents

that are past or still to come—but with a “past”

that has never been nor ever will be present and

whose future will never be its production or

reproduction in the form of presence (162-3).

Derrida goes on to explain that everything already begins

with a reproduction—we know the world through its

simulations, its fictions, and the memories we make for the

future—as deferral always reconstitutes our sense of

presence by signifying experience drawn from “repositories

of meaning which was never present” (164).

I have a lot of disagreements with Derrida, particularly his

notion that delay can never produce presence. The notion of

presence, tied up as it is in the temporal slipperiness of

meaning, is a thorny issue we will revisit throughout.

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Literary endings and closure prepare us for endings in

life. Further, literature prepares us to anticipate endings.

I am aware that this is a strange claim. We do not usually

think of anticipation as something we prepare for. We do not

anticipate anticipation! To be more specific, narrative anticipates a

future that can be understood retrospectively in the present as a memory.

This thickly layered present formed by reading performs the

ways in which we understand and prepare for the many

different endings we encounter in both life and in fiction.

The Interruption of Literature

Harold Bloom offers his four principles of reading in

the unfortunately titled How to Read and Why: clear your mind

of cant; do not attempt to improve your neighbor or

neighborhood by what or how you read; do not fear to read by

your own inner light; and finally, be an inventive reader. I

am indebted to Bloom for what I interpret as his take on

forming a “clearing space” in his prerogative to open the

self to creative freedom. For Bloom, there is no salient

relationship between the difficult pleasure of reading

literature and the public good. It is not an activity, he

argues, that helps someone other than you.

Bloom also promotes another facet of reading: “One of

the uses of reading is to prepare ourselves for change, and

the final change alas is universal” (21). It might be a

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morbid notion that reading is a preparation for death, but

so are most activities. Reading provides readiness for

change, and all change reflects the renewal that eventually

leads to death. The most salient connection between reading

and death is that a work of literature enacts its own

ending. The future of a literary work is already realized

before we read it. Reading is, in effect, an experience of

belatedness. It is no coincidence that a common phrase is,

“I’m catching up on my reading.”

We expect of fiction what horrifies us most in life: an

end. Endings in fiction and life are inevitable, but we

desire the former and resist the latter. Reading, therefore,

plays a dual role seemingly at odds with each other: it

resists death at the same time as it prepares for it.

There is a sacred and secular trajectory in literary

history by which authors have contended with endings. In the

ancient and medieval world, apocalypse is the literal,

ultimate, and revelatory end, a notion that transforms into

tragedy by the renaissance in a well-known argument of Frank

Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending that will figure prominently in

this study.

In his classic study, Frank Kermode reduces the basic

elements constituent of a plot to the sound of a clock. We

cannot bear the interminable designation of its sound as

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tick tick tick tick, so we say the sound of a clock is tick

tock. In doing so, we have imposed a plot upon a series by

juxtaposing tick to tock, thereby offering a sense of

completion. The plot begins with tick, moves through the pause

in the middle, and ends in tock.

Moving up with a bit more complexity, E.M. Forster famously

illustrates the minimal elements that differentiate between

statement and story, fragment and coherence. “The King died

and then the Queen died” is a disparate series of events,

like the serial nature of tick tick. However, “The King died

and then the Queen died of grief” achieves a basic fabric of

plot as “died of grief” allows difference to form tick—tock.

Disparate statements link into a sense of beginning, middle,

and end. The King’s death results in the Queen’s death from

grief, allowing for temporal movement (the word emotion

means “motion”) that intimates a story

I have contrasted time as an innate and abstract concept

to temporality, the ways in which we provide time with a

structure. But let’s make time a little less abstract and

speak for a moment in terms of chronology, particularly as a

way to make more sense of the unique past future tense of

all literature.

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Chronology is the bare sequence of events verbalized in

the form of a chronicle, the linear order of things as they

occur without the explanation and coherence of plot.

Chronology is a step up from what Paul Ricoeur calls

cosmological time, or clock-time, which is bereft of value or

significance. Temporality derives from the human imposition

to structure clock-time by molding or imposing a

configuration over mere sequence. A chronicle, therefore, is

time transformed into a temporal structure in order to

redeem it from pure contingency. It orders mere consecution

with eventful markers.

None of us lives life conscious of time’s passage as

mere sequence. We would lose our minds. All of us are

chroniclers. We keep calendars of some sort, whether it is

one that hangs on our wall or stored on our cellphones.

Usually we scribble into the grid of days during each month

an important event, an upcoming appointment, a reminder.

Additionally, most calendars are produced with important

holidays indicated. These are the chronological markers that

form a chronicle.

Notice, however, how many days on a calendar are empty.

No holiday, no important event or upcoming appointment. This

is like the dominance of white space on the page of writing.

These blank spaces on the calendar represent the unorganized

gaps or durations of time that we associate with mere

sequence. Frank Kermode calls purely sequential, unorganized

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time, chronos. In contrast, kairos is the time that we bestow

value or that we distinguish from usual duration because of

holidays or important events.

Not only would pure sequence be unbearable, it would

also be meaningless. In terms of clock and calendar-time, we

give meaning that we can live with by organizing days around

events, heightened time or kairos. However, we need chronos, or

pure sequence. Daily life perpetually charged with

significance would also be unbearable. Everyone has

experienced the need for uneventful time after a period of

busyness or a time of crisis. One often takes time off from

work in order to experience dull sequence.

Fiction

We try to provide ourselves with a temporal guide or

roadmap when we construct a plot summary out of a work of

literature. But you can immediately recognize how temporally

unique literature is when you try to turn a piece of fiction

into a chronicle. A chronological account of a novel is

almost always woefully inadequate. Although the two are

often conflated, there is a big difference between

chronology and plot. A plot is not a chronicle but the

configuration, or emplotment, of events into a structure

that rarely follow a chronological sequence. To create the

chronology of plot would require abstracting the plot from

the narrative discourse and reducing it to a rearranged

chronicle of events. The “clock time” of a novel, therefore,

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would look like an enumeration of events placed into a

serial order. H WHITE - EMPLOTMENT

The means by which a plot is narrated constitutes the

narrative discourse, the ways in which the story is told.

The configurative dynamic of plotting and the many aspects

of voice that provide a plot with its viewpoint and

discourse swallows chronology into its own organic world

that does not refer to a so-called real world in the same

way as an account of something that happens in actual daily

life. Since there is no clock time in fiction, it has the

license to do things with chronology that, for lack of a

better word, is illegal in other written forms. Plot and

discourse makes a work’s chronology unique to that

particular work and inseparably part of the integrity of a

narrative as a whole.

The impossibility to reduce a work of fiction to a

chronicle, however, does not annul the dependence of fiction

on clock time. It is impossible to reject chronology even

from the most temporally distorted narrative. In fact, a

narrative that explicitly rejects chronology only draws more

attention to the brute reality of the sequential and forward

movement of time. For instance, in Slaughterhouse Five, Billy

Pilgrim witnesses a World War II movie run in reverse so

that the B-52 bombers suck all of the bombs back up into the

bomb bays, reconstituting destroyed cities in the process;

the bombs return to the factories where they are dismantled.

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Billy extrapolates beyond the movie and imagines time

continuing to reverse so that everyone reverts back to Eden.

The famous scene is obviously a moral fantasy, but it

does not reject chronology by reversing it. It only

emphasizes even more through trenchant irony the inexorable

movement of time forward. Billy’s inability to confront the

moral implications of the horrifying past makes him resist

the brute reality of temporal causality, which spells out

dire consequences for his mental health. He remains stuck in

a present in which he wants to believe his existence has no

moral consequence. Vonnegut might revel in temporal

shenanigans in his novels, but he does not, by any means,

endorse escapism.

In Time’s Arrow Martin Amis appropriates Vonnegut’s

backwards film sequence for a more extended examination of

the moral repercussions of time and causality. He depicts a

SS doctor from Auschwitz moving backwards in time from the

1970s so that, when he reaches 1945, he rescues prisoners

from the gas chambers instead of exterminating them. Like

Vonnegut, Amis’s extended and ironic joke only emphasizes

the moral weight of irreversible time and causality; hence,

the title’s reference to the arrow of time. Chronology

affirms how time moves in a sequence and the unavoidable

moral implications of actions. In its creation of

temporality, fiction rejects chronology to perform these

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moral implications, but a rejection of linear time cannot

ultimately reject forward motion.

As a result of digital videography, narration that

follows events as they occur happens in real time. We will look

at the phenomenon of real time and the digitization of the

present in Chapter 4. For now, however, I want touch on how

our digital age rapidly recontextualizes the immediate past.

(DEFINE) The dominance of mechanical reproduction has made

us increasingly driven to record and dissect the “now,” the

immediate moment of time. TRANSITION

For instance, the television-show 24 simulates the real

time of the minute-by-minute twenty-four hour day in the

world of secret agents chasing terrorists. A digital

chronometer appears beneath the screen to create the

suspense of a countdown, except that it counts-up toward

some explosive climax in which Jack Bauer will save the

nation. The count-up in the footer of the screen reminds us

of where we are to the second, emphasizing an inexorable

forward movement. With little time to save the day, every

action has ruthless consequence (which means that our heroes

often do morally reprehensible things for the greater good).

The real time of the program also thickens the experience of

sequence by orchestrating numerous parallel plots and

depicting simultaneous events from multiple points of view

oftentimes by fragmenting the screen.

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The real time of the program, however, is a semblance.

It uses chronological time to contract the elements of a

thriller, generally occurring over longer duration, into

highly charged sequences of action divided up by minutes and

seconds. 24 intensifies the serial nature of conflict rising

to a particular and explosive climax that is the staple of

the thriller genre. Conflict advances up the classic pyramid

of action in a series of highly charged, instantaneous

“nows.” Each episode works its magic to hook the viewer: the

speed by which events occur leaves one in a state of

suspense by the end that can only be satisfied by the next

week’s episode, that inevitably defers the climax. But the

program also plays perfectly into the sense of a perpetual

state of crisis during the post-9/11 terrorist threat when

we were, in many respects, addicted to the media

serialization of events. Like repetition compulsion, the

serial catastrophes of 24 distended into an inexorable

progression allows us to cope in an entertaining way with

the very real experience of events in real time many of us

witnessed on television that day.

Most clock-time, however, is fairly empty. Sequence is

not usually thrilling. Samuel Beckett is more aware than any

author of entropy and wasted energy. His plays all depict

inexorable and unredeemed progression in which there are no

heightened moments. They fill time between the beginning and

the end with the minimum required to create movement in

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plot, foregrounding the leaden weight of chronology. The

more that a narrative filters out its games with time that

draw the reader into a story, the closer it gets to the

experience of time that no longer needs the accouterments of

fiction. The closer that fiction represents pure duration,

the less necessary it is.

Chronology might be imaginatively impoverished, but

fiction is merely an alternate way of representing duration.

But we don’t read fiction to be reminded of this. In fact,

we read fiction to distract ourselves from how mere

progression from day to day drains life of meaning. We read

fiction to experience the unique and “thick” configuration

of characters, events, and objects within highly charged

space where everything has value.

In its rejection of chronology, the novel affirms time-

consciousness. Time-consciousness reaches a height in

modernism when novelists subordinate chronological or clock

time to phenomenological or mind-time. The novel begins to

flaunt its freedom to roam in time in a temporal

slipperiness that remains intense up until today.

Time-consciousness increases in the late nineteenth

century, and reaches intensity in the literature of the

early twentieth century that was preoccupied with

reconciling the past with present experience. The

predominant question of the modernist author or poet is, how

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can one redeem time from the contingency and vicissitude of

modern life? Time-consciousness shifts after World War II

not by necessarily rejecting the past, but by incorporating

its conventions as conventions in contrast to modernism,

when authors and poets treat the past almost religiously.

Modernist authors are more inclined to find something

transcendent and revelatory about the past in ways that look

naïve to the postmodernist, for whom time generally takes on

a more eternalist view: tense and aspect, the past, present,

and future, have equal and depthless value.

McClatchy goes on to suggest that the Roman setting

might represent Hecht’s experience of guilt. After his

traumatizing service in Europe during World War II he

returned there on a fellowship in the 1950s to “luxuriate.”

He cites a passage from a letter Hecht had sent him

concerning the poem that offers insight into the childhood

memories he worked into it.

As for "A Hill," it is the nearest I was able to

come in that early book to what [T. S.] Eliot

somewhere describes as an obsessive image or

symbol – something from deep in our psychic life

that carries a special burden of meaning and

feeling for us. In my poem I am really writing

about a pronounced feeling of loneliness and

abandonment in childhood, which I associate with a

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cold and unpeopled landscape. My childhood was

doubtless much better than that of many, but my

brother was born epileptic when I was just over

two, and from then on all attention was, very

properly, focused on him. I have always felt that

desolation, that hell itself, is most powerfully

expressed in an uninhabited natural landscape at

its bleakest.

Although Hecht attributes his method in the poem to Eliot,

his description of an obsessive image in nature is more

evocative of Wordsworth’s “spots in time.” Hecht seems to

share Wordsworth’s obsession in The Prelude with certain

desolate landscapes as memorial connections to childhood.

Awakening from a dream or vision is a popular romantic

motif. The poet undergoes a sublime and sensational

experience, but he or she must struggle to remember and

recreate the experience by transforming it into verbal

expression. For the romantics, like Coleridge, Wordsworth

and Keats, poems become less about the dream vision and more

about the artistic activity involved in recreating it.

What proceeds from the “not yet” of the apocalypse?

What replaces the belief in a literal end to the world?

Although Yeats ends the poem with an ominously open-ended

question, there are many answers we could retroactively

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supply from our position in the twenty-first century. As

Harold Bloom comments, the poem “belatedly was regarded by

Yeats as a prophecy of fascism, whose representatives in

Mussolini and Franco the poet was to support.” And he goes

on to argue that we “commit our own misprision upon Yeats,

who would not have shared our horror. ‘The Second Coming’ is

a celebration of the rough beast, not a lamentation. Neither

a Christian nor a humanist, Yeats was an apocalyptic pagan

who would have looked on and laughed in what he called

‘tragic joy’”(185-6).

Like Yeats’ speaker we suffer from the trauma of

survival, left to conjure new projections of imminent

catastrophe. In a post-apocalyptic mentality, we are not

traumatized by the possibility of Armageddon; we are

traumatized that the world has not come to an end when

everything suggests it should. We imagine the world coming

to an end, and then look back from the future at what we

have lost from the past wondering what remains of value that

we can salvage. The speaker of “The Second Coming” works-

through post-war trauma by conjuring further conflict. His

vision is both personal and racial: it comes from his own

ability to create personal symbols combined with the

collective and unconscious symbols of the West, but poetic

expression does not organize into a consoling coherence.

Instead it shifts the emphasis of trauma from its immediate

historical contingency into a repository of mourning over

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the loss of millenarianism. Deliteralizing the apocalyptic

ending distends poetic vision into a prophecy of further

catastrophe. Although I understand Bloom’s argument that

Yeats celebrates the beast as perhaps a new aesthetic

annunciation, I am not sure I entirely agree. The poet might

revel in the strange pleasure that arises from tragedy, but

the speaker of the poem seems not to know what to make of

his vision.

The speaker’s revelation is immediate, “but now I know,”

awakens our suspicions. The beast is a composite of images

from the Book of Revelation, Shelly’s Ozymandias, a Sphinx-

like being and a private symbol hatched from Yeats’

imagination. In its composite manifestation it takes on the

form of condensation in a dream. The superimposition of

various images into one amorphous beast “vexed to nightmare”

suggests a dream that must be turned into verbal expression.

It is important that the beast is “to be born.” Yeats

turns apocalyptic truth into the power of Western desire to

give shape or will into being something monstrous. And it

remains ambiguous whether the speaker or we are meant to

revere its sublime force. (As we all know, Yeats was

attracted to fascism and desired a sort of world

destruction.)

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Forming new modes expression in a modern world in which

familiar categories of meaning enervate but remain necessary

becomes the crisis for many modern poets. What do you

salvage from metaphysics to “make it new,” as Ezra Pound

exhorted, without becoming drawn back by tradition? How do

you reconfigure reality without rejecting reality? Stevens’

project is almost a search for the ultimate heterocosmic

aesthetic: a consummately autotelic object that reality

requires nonetheless; the poem that creates divinity that

has no external reference to the transcendent except one

that refers to its own divine fiction: the supreme fiction.

Without the foundation of absolute truth toward which poetry

had once signified, the modern poet must “construct a new

stage” in *** because

It has not always had

To find: the scene was set: it repeated what

Was in the script.

He compares the previous centuries to a production deadened

by its repetitive performances. Freed from metaphysical

assumptions, poetry has now become concerned with the

strenuously cognitive work required the craft poetry, “The

poem of the act of the mind.” There is no longer a need to

search for truth beyond that which the mind can encompass.

Since the beginning of history mortality has been the

biggest threat of nihilism for any civilization. The

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incredible works and ideas in Athens during the 5thC BC that

constitutes the foundations of Western civilization arose in

resistance to dangerous apathy posed by the finality of

death. Instead of responding with “what difference does it

make?” (Athenians often did assume such fatalistic attitudes

that philosophy attempts to correct), the Greeks prove that

forms of closure could make all the difference in the world.

Every era pursues dreams of permanence by attempting to

create out of the contingent morass of experience a

meaningful continuum. Establishing monuments that will

outlive the ravages of time is one of the biggest reasons

why cultures in every era produce literature. A civilization

wagers its own permanence in the face of inevitable entropy.

To varying degrees the threat of nihilism posed by finitude

urges civilizations to value artistic production.

Perhaps because of my own egotistical view as an

English professor, I argue for the necessity, indeed the

prerogative, of literature. As much as we value literature—

people read more extensively now than ever in history—the

institutions that support readers devalue literature at an

alarming rate. Financial and administrative support in

higher education has undergone a wholesale shift from the

liberal study of humanities to an education that caters to

growth and service industries. Despite the fact that people

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read extensively and that the study of literature has waned

very little since higher education began to shift toward a

service model around 1970, English has become little more

than a department that supports cultural literacy. (In a

sense, English has regressed back to the polite education of

the “technical schools” in England in the mid-1800s.)

This shift in value is not marginal to the concerns of this

book. The devaluation of literature in higher education is

at the center of what I will call terminalism, a sort of self-

fulfilling prophecy of literature’s death that beleaguers

contemporary culture and increasingly alienates people from

a sense of historical situation. There comes a point when

the alarmist assertions that literary study and the book

itself are dead serves as the impunity for institutions to

kill off its study. This alienation has been protracted by

the byzantine ways in which digitized culture and the

accelerated archiving of information creates what Mark

Currie calls the rapid recontextualization of the present.

What people generally read extensively is a fragmented

digital replication of a recycled and recent past that

distends the present in the creation of a “thick” presentism,

which obfuscates a felt sense of the past or future.

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Even if science develops a grand theory that thoroughly

explains time, it is unlikely that it will change perception

enough that our fascination with temporality in fiction will

end. The Copernican revolution is one of the greatest

paradigm shifts in our understanding of place in the

universe, but our literary drive to explore our place in the

world has not changed that much as a result. Darwin

radically changed the unique status of the human, but

fiction continues in its rage to understand what it means to

be human. Human being still remains as unique as it was when

we believed that God singularly created us.

The resilience of literary concerns in the face of

immense historical and scientific change is an amazing

phenomenon. The universal themes that preoccupy authors have

not changed all that much since Homer. Further, the

continuity of structures we use to create meaning and

literariness is equally resilient. We might do more

experimental things with form, and genres might evolve from

other genres, but the basic structures that make lyric or

narrative recognizable have remained fairly stable in time.

Stare at this page for a moment.

Instead of focusing on the words, the black marks on

the page, try to focus on the white space that surrounds

them. It is difficult to do because the presence of writing

gives form to the blankness that dominates nonetheless.

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We often forget how much writing occurs in this

blankness. The white of the page is, in some ways, like the

mysterious black matter that occupies most of space. There

is an unconscious struggle at work when reading in which we

resist the annihilation that this void threatens. How

temporal structure emerges from this void with language can

teach us a great deal about our understanding of not just

literature, but all of the ways in which we try to make

sense of things in life, particularly things that tend to

defy understanding.

My book aims to make a different contribution to trauma

studies by examining in part the blankness not only at the

end of narration or lyric—the white of the page where no

more text follows that announces the end—but also the

blankness that surrounds all of language. It is a void from

which we give shape that I call forms of closure.

It is no surprise that trauma theory has discovered the

more sublime language of theology. The threshold of

knowledge, which Karl Jaspers calls the limit-situation—

death, great moral decisions, catastrophes—transforms into

the beyond that we equate with transcendence. ****

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***This is out of place, BUT, this is also where I want to

bring in apocalypse. So is the Dickinson poem. This whole

opening to chapter four is a jumble.

As tragedy becomes less a form and more a metaphor for

the trenchant antinomies of the human condition, it grows

increasingly intimate with the traumatic sublime. Like

tragedy, traumatic events test the limits of human

understanding. Trauma is expressed in terms of what exceeds

the human capacity to take in and process the world. The

excess of human experience catastrophe creates compels us

think beyond the human. Like apocalyptic language, trauma is

always expressed in discourse that speaks beyond itself.

Kant equates the sublime to the unthinkable of God, that

which is beyond representation, serving as the historical

injunction against representing Him. Like Jacques Lacan’s

the Real, Kant’s sublime is the conjunction between cannot

say and must not say, the point where language stops. Judith

Herman alludes to the sublime in the opening of her

groundbreaking book, Trauma and Recovery: “The ordinary

response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness.

Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to

utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.”

Trauma theory examines what cannot be mastered by knowledge.

As Elie Weisel says about his testimony to the Holocaust: “I

have not told you something about my past so that you may

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know it, but so that you know that you will never know it.”

The terror of the sublime often that results from

catastrophe accounts for . In The Idea of the Holy, Rudolph Otto

argues that numinous experience, an encounter with holiness,

is not consoling, but terrifying. The otherness of holy

experience is an overwhelming encounter with mystery, a

phenomenon akin to a state of shock that he calls mysterium

tremendum.

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