‘Time is a relative and subjective concept in
these texts.' (Between the Acts and Burnt Norton.)
We might usefully take a quotation from Burnt Norton as leitmotif for Between the Acts: “What might have been
and what has been / Point to one end, which is always present” (Eliot, 1983, p.
189). Woolf's multifarious uses of the imagery, imaginings or realities of time
are seeded everywhere throughout her text, almost to the point of madness,
embedded and propagated, all seemingly bent to one end – the great,
overarching, elusive fact of present time,
the numinous place where she experiences her epiphanous “moments of being” (Woolf, in Asbee, 2017, p.
196). And this centrality of present time, as perhaps one of the primary
purposes of her text sees the co-option of all other forms of time, including
factual history and the abstracted time she appears to claim that we generally
inhabit, gathered into her subjective scheme, relativised against the quickened time to which she directs us,
which we were perhaps about to witness for ourselves when “the curtain rose
[and] They spoke” (Woolf, 2008, p. 198). Both Eliot and Woolf deploy objective,
recorded history, including personal anecdotes (a visit to the derelict gardens
of Burnt Norton, for instance), but both assemble all these facts into their philosophic
schemes, which have – superficially, at least – something in common. Both are
concerned with the quasi-mystical pre-eminence and immanence of Present Time,
which, to Eliot's syncretistic religious thinking (“there is only the dance”
(Eliot, 1983, p. 191) conflates Christ with Shiva,
whose mythic dance engenders the cycles of life, regeneration, and dissolution
– time, in fact), potentially
includes all of time. And to advance
their arguments both use actual historical time (even prehistorical time: “a riot of rhododendrons and humming birds”
(Woolf, 2008, p. 98)), relative to
fictional time, narrative time, mythic time, and present time. Our answer to
the (possibly tautological) proposition that “time is a relative and subjective
concept”, then, must be that yes, time is variously subjective and relative –
while also objective and non-relative – in these two texts, as it is in our own
lives. And both writers are concerned to show us the great connectivity of
relative time as they perceive it, in their own highly subjective – though
attemptedly objectified – visions, of time's passing, of transition, and of the
ineffable and mystic present at “the still point of the turning world” (Eliot,
1983, p. 191).
We might note, in passing, that the titles of
both texts (the overall title of Four
Quartets rather than just Burnt
Norton) relate to forms of dramatic or musical art-forms, in which – while subjective time may be integral to their
devising and composition – time becomes objective
through performance. The constructions themselves might be regarded as entirely
human and subjective, but, once played or spoken, the time elapsed and what
occurred in that time becomes fixed and historical (especially if recorded). Between the Acts has an unusual level of
theatricality for a novel, perhaps unsurprisingly, considering Woolf's stated
intentions concerning her vision for prose fiction: “It will have something of
the exaltation of poetry, but much of the ordinariness of prose. It will be
dramatic, and yet not a play” (Woolf, in Asbee, 2015, p. 193); and Four Quartets, with it's
musically-reminiscent title, might almost operate successfully as a play for
voices – so both have an association with art-forms in which time, both
objective and subjective, is more integral and vital than usual in either
novels or poetry. As Eliot claims, “Words move, music moves / Only in time”
(1983, p. 194), perhaps invoking the connection himself.
The first names we encounter in Between the Acts are pastoral, classical
and/or religious in origin, establishing an immediate field of locality, of
continuity, and of deep time underlying the text. They seem pertinent to
Woolf's imperatives and to her presentation of time, and it seems unlikely that
they are merely serendipitous: Haines
derives from Old German hagano,
meaning 'hawthorn'; Oliver is, of
course, of olive trees; and Giles
derives from the Greek aigidion: a
young goat. And superpositioning these almost druidic, agrarian images is Isa – which, alongside being “a shortened version of Isabella” (Asbee, 2017,
p. 203), is a variant translation of Jesus,
representative of the
traditional, quasi-Arthurian, spiritual compact
between these English humans and their land.
And, as though foregrounding the pagan antecedents of this ancient
relationship, Isa is also a
diminutive form of Isis-Fortuna, the
mother/fertility goddess imported into England two thousand years earlier along
Roman roads such as that adjacent to 'Pointz Hall' in Woolf’s text. Adding
further metaphoric layers to this existential matrix of time and nature, Mrs
Haines is “goosefaced” (Woolf, 2008, p. 3) and looking for things to gobble,
while Isa arrives “like a swan” (p. 3) adorned with pigtails and peacocks.
(Time's passage operates even here at this almost Joycean level of
near-invisibility, through scatters of allusion.)
And of course their conversation is of cows and
horses; nightingales and laughing daylight birds; worms, snails, Romans,
Britons, children and graves; and Isa's thoughts are illicit fantasies of
herself and Mr Haines amorously transmogrified into actual waterfowl. Most
importantly, perhaps somewhat comedically – lest we fail to grasp Woolf's
multiple, metamorphic imagery of the land and the people, of the rooting and
propagating, of human and animal husbandry through time – their central topic
is the optimum siting of their collective excrement, perhaps the most
quintessential motif of the quotidian and the cyclic, the most base and essential;
the seasonal and the regenerative and the mortal (almost itself a stark image
of the 'dance of Shiva') – itself a ticking clock measuring animal and human
lives. “What a thing to talk about on a night like this!” (Woolf, 2008, p. 3)
exclaims Mrs Haines, but what sort of
night does she think it is? And is she protesting or applauding? Perhaps both,
in keeping with the numerous binaries and indeterminacies, and the “random and
tentative” (Woolf, 2008, p. xiii) nature of the novel; no doubt this is deliberately
vague, as are both the tacit characterisation of time, and the hinted dual role
of ordure as both filth and nutrient. In all of these ways, from the outset, we
are located and immersed in a layered nexus of human frames of time and place,
of belonging and interconnectedness; of an inescapable corporeal, spiritual,
and temporal alliance with the living, entangled, root-and-bone charnel house
of the natural world, expressed through Woolf's (and our) dreamlike,
historical, and ongoing constructions within and around it.
Notwithstanding his rather unconvincing (one
almost suspects grudging) qualifications of “perhaps ... [and] ... If” (Eliot,
1983, p. 189) at the opening of Burnt
Norton, Eliot seems to make overt and strident declarations of what time is, and how it works (rather exceeding
the discoveries of physicists in the process) and it is difficult to see how
such confident declarations by fiat
amount to much more than personal beliefs. Ultimately it may be possible to
find Eliot guilty here of that most tempting of poetical transgressions: telling rather than showing. In reality,
his attempts at showing – he shows us age, dereliction, children, foliage;
life, death and decay – do not truly connect to his assertions about time; they
may be appealing, may even be correct, but the showing does not logically
represent them and render them shown, and
despite these attempts, Eliot's time remains deeply subjective. Woolf –
avoiding grandiose attempts at objectivity – conjures in her readers an experience of her diverse discourses of
time through her distorting and conflictual use of the structures of language,
and by a near-bombardment with imagery and allusion, by which she gradually
envelops us in a densely layered accretion of images of both temporal
connectivity and relativism (“Tick, tick, tick went the machine” (Woolf, 2008,
p. 159), with her own actual death perhaps operating as the de facto final act of Miss La Trobe's
pageant. Woolf evokes time through what seems a reasonable imitation of human
consciousness, flitting around, intermittently, capriciously – even chaotically
– concentrating, remembering, musing, calculating, posturing, repeating,
wishing, lamenting ... Eliot evokes his own subjective vision of time in his
slow-paced, expansive rhythms (especially so in his own mellifluous and
persuasive recorded reading); he initially appears more comforting, more
enticing in his reassuring, paternalistic imagery of time, speaking almost as
though endowed with some divine licence, but one suspects it is Woolf who –
though with equal artifice – expresses greater honesty, and a vision of time
more familiar to humans in its broken mosaic than is Eliot's prophetic
sonority.
Eliot also makes claims on the land and on
heritage, perhaps feeling for his own roots and his sense of English continuity
at a time of slowly advancing national crisis and personal transition. But
alongside being captivated by the poetical mastery and musicality of Burnt Norton, we should perhaps remember
that Eliot's wider subjectivity around time and continuity and belonging includes disturbing and
prescriptive messages such as the following, from two years earlier in 1933:
“The population should be homogeneous; where two or more cultures exist in the
same place they are likely to be fiercely self-conscious or both to become
adulterate. What is more important is unity of religious background; and
reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking
Jews undesirable” (Eliot, in Philips, 2011) – which could almost be from the
pages of Mein Kampf. And we should
consider Eliot's suggestions of his own missionary role – “the whole of modern
literature is corrupted by what I call Secularism” (Eliot, in Davies and Fraser, 2017, p. 155). Perhaps then we might
perceive a subtext to his ruminations upon time. For Eliot, time is an
exactingly focused figure of rhetoric and a rather cynical cohortative to the
reader; for Woolf, time is running out; it is real, urgent, and honest. Woolf
sets Between the Acts just prior to
the beginning of WW2, having already decided that she was unlikely to survive
another year, expecting that she and her Jewish husband would be killed by the
Nazis, whose invasion barges were already massing across the English Channel. One
detects a great appeal to time, an invocation of the vast river of English
history, animated by this fear and fatalism, animated also by Woolf's antipathy
to war, to Fascism, to anti-Semitism. Woolf's time is a wishful and gentle time of remembrance (ushering us towards the wakefulness of present time), not a declamatory or
pompous time. Time is indeed bent subjectively to her service, to that of her
vision of England, its people, and its literature, and it is – one suspects – a
time system engendered by her own feelings of time ending, of imminent
invasion, or of death from a random bomb, or perhaps of an intended suicide.
Poets, like anyone else, are of course permitted
to cogitate upon time and the universe, but unless they have special knowledge
beyond that held by science or the rest of Humanity, there is no reason
why we should grant their conclusions special credence. Eliot's formula is to
intersperse his grandiloquent propositions with more Modernistic and personal
or allusive detail, as if in support of his points, but the reality may be that
the more poetic and tangential asides, such as “Go, said the bird, for the
leaves are full of children” (Eliot, 1983, p. 190), only reinforce the
subjectivity of the whole, and one might prefer to read them – they are
wonderfully poetic, of course – without the sermonizing. And
the rhetorical devices, the use of chiasmus
(rhetorical reversal), anaphora – the extended parallelism of the word “time”
repeated eleven times – are always redolent of preaching, and are familiar fare
both in sermons and in ostentatious political speeches. Eliot's marginally
qualified considerations concerning time, for instance, such as “all time is
eternally present” (Eliot, 1983, p. 190) sound impressive, and his
authoritative tone and magisterial register may make it easy to miss his
crucial “if”, but he might, with as much justification and authority, have
considered that “all time is not
eternally present.” His meditations seem disingenuous and groundless, if rather
messianic, and the tone suggests not revelation or conclusion, but that he is
in fact presenting a favoured and highly subjective vision of time, one
presumably congruent with some syncretism of his studies of Buddhism/Hinduism,
Catholic theology, and his actual high Anglican faith. So we may be entitled to
conclude that these are not objective passages gleaned from some great personal
breakthrough into new knowledge, but are simply propaganda
reflecting his personal reading of religious dogma.
Much of Eliot's life, of course, might also be
said to be between the acts, as he
repeatedly transitioned to new states of style and belief, including those of
his personal life as well as his literary work. This compartmentalisation of
time perhaps gives it added resonance as he gazes out and ponders its
significance, and the ever-presence of time and potential time experienced as
both history and non-history, of constructed other-memory. So Eliot – as with the characters in Woolf's novel –
is playing his own localised historical pageant, and also establishing a sort
of eternity, also enacting his own life against the larger pageant of time
itself, envisaged as some grand cosmic cycling imperceptible to humans confined
always in an apparent present moment, their perceptions limited to personal
saccades.
One wonders if Woolf's claim that the meaning of Eliot's poetry eluded her – “I am held off from
understanding by magic” (Woolf in Asbee, 2017, p. 185) – was in fact a way of
mollifying Eliot without having to engage uncomfortably with his
religious/political beliefs, being both married to a Jew, and a committed and
certain atheist herself, which itself requires a wholly different conception of
time than that required by religion and expressed by Eliot. And following this
relativism between the two writers and their time systems, signifiers of time –
its passage, its seeming cessation, and its various past periods or moments –
occur everywhere in Between the Acts, as
do relativisms between present time (even present time as the future: “And
after that, what? […] Present time. Ourselves” Woolf, 2008, p. 158)), past
time, and the future. This is simultaneously relative and subjective and
objective, and this ticking clock into the past and the future runs throughout Between the Acts until it seems inescapable that Woolf – with her concept of “moments of being” (Woolf, in Asbee, 2017, p. 196) – is suggesting that we are abstract most of the time, that we do not generally inhabit
the “moment of being” which is present time. Perhaps this is too mystical, but
present time is where humans do their
being, and clearly she refers to its happening only for moments, between which,
presumably, there is a stasis, a non-place of abstraction, while we await the
next act in present time.
Ambivalence is a state often associated with
Modernist writers such as Eliot and Woolf, and in one sense ambivalence is
another subjective and relativistic way of looking at time. If we think of
Eliot's line, “Footfalls echo in the memory / Down the passage which we did not
take / Towards the door we never opened” (Eliot, 1983, p. 189), then we are
already involved in past ambivalence setting up alternative timelines. If life
is a series of choices bifurcating our path, then each choice requires the
rejection of one or more other choices, with the effect of at least a temporal
ambivalence but more likely a multivalence, in which the unselected
alternatives run alongside us in the imagination, as though in some facsimile
of Eliot's notion all time is indeed subjectively
“eternally present” (Eliot, 1983, p. 189). One is tempted to invoke Hugh
Everett's 1957 'many-worlds theory' here, and imagine those other timelines
actualised as other worlds, and Eliot's “footfalls” echoing not merely in the
memory but in the actuality of an alternative, multiversal reality. Modernism
(we can at least conveniently hypothesise Burnt
Norton as late Modernism) often
sets up such dramatic fields of binary oppositions, and attempts to locate the
reader in the liminal space between two (or more) poles. Far from merely being between the acts in Woolf's novel, we
appear to be between almost everything and everything else: the language uses
archaic inversions, idiosyncratic punctuations, oppositions, contradictions,
contrasts, antitheses, advances and retreats – subverting itself at every turn,
creating, evoking, refuting, suggesting this liminality whereby a thing has
only just been established when it is instantly thwarted (or balanced) by the
presence of some counter-proposition thrust forward to neutralise it. Where are
we in all of this? Clearly we are inside Woolf's head, immersed in the “exact
shapes” of her interior, which she statedly wishes to convey. Not much happens
in terms of story or plot on the
surface of this novel, but its very tissue and fabric are alive with creativity
and creation, which gives us another clue to time, which slows to a muddy rural
crawl above, while its inner mechanism spins almost – though never quite – out
of control.
Woolf has already constructed not only her own complex
literary time, but perhaps more crucially her own endtime. And as though the entire text is an unfinished prophecy
choked in the mouth of a dying sybil, she will effectively die in its pages,
unable to go on to an ending of which she cannot conceive, weighed down with
fear for the future, fear of the dreadful unknown, and the rising recurrence of
her own madness, shortly to conspire in this great weighting down by filling
her pockets with stones and wading out to die, writing – and thereby
controlling – the narrative of her own death rather than waiting for it. Miss
La Trobe's pageant unfolds English literary time, which perhaps Woolf felt was
reaching its own endtime, and perhaps she was consciously or unconsciously
planning her own suicide as the logical – even necessary – denouement of the
respective pageants of England, of war, and of herself, her own literary
terminus perhaps mirroring or symbolising the ending of English literature
which she may have envisaged as the inevitable outcome of a successful Nazi
invasion. If so, then her ideas of subjective time may have now seemed as
finite and limited as Miss La Trobe's sequential imaging of Englishness
exemplified by literary pageantry.
The traditional outdoor nature of the pageant
effectively co-opts bystanders and audience into an inclusive presentation of
the dreams and identity of England, as though Woolf is saying that this last
great fatalistic and terminal act to come will involve all of us, before
processing to her own final outdoor performance (her suicide in the River Ouse),
which involves her in in a meta-sense in her text, symbolises the end of
England that she foresees, and is performed with deliberation, theatricality
and courage. Between the Acts feels
like a wholesale marshalling of the historical and cultural forces of a nation
about to perform its next great but potentially foredoomed act; it feels
optimistic about history alone, despite its wistful evocations of a present
time just out of reach. And, with this in mind, an unfinished novel suggests
another kind of subjective and liminal time between acts, a time which was
either wrong or insufficient for the finishing of the work, and a next act
never to arrive – all her future moments of non-being
only. And perhaps the reality is that Woolf, with her litany of subjective time
and recalled time has in fact evoked a sort of experience in the reader of the
most objective time of all, the present,
while Eliot, for all his attempted authority and objectivity, has made his own
statements of time seem both more subjective and far less stable.
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