April 6, 10-11, Post 17

So much for a final post.
I'm doing another thesis - a "mini-thèse," as the department calls it - to fulfill my French major, and, as all my projects seem to circle around the same 4 or 5 major themes, the research I'm doing for that project seems to be as pertinent if not more so to this first project than to the one I'm actually trying to start now.

I've had trouble choosing a focus for the French project which, according to my Comp. Lit. friends, should not have come as a surprise to me; indecision has apparently been a long-present theme in my academic career. I've chosen three book (which I'd like to call novels except that Patrick Modiano makes that difficult), but I've been waffling back and forth between looking at the effects of place on identity and looking at how these three books deny generic classification and why that is important. When I started this post, I thought it would be the first project for sure, but now I'm leaning more toward the latter.

I’m frankly unwilling to choose between the two topics because I want my work to answer questions I myself have, not only to help me explain an idea I've already got in mind; I want to discover something over the course of my project, not just figure out how to best convince others that my position on something is the correct one. It seems a shame to have to pass over interesting connections that might lead to more interesting conclusions just because it's not certain that the connections are there to be made; I don't want to have to pass over questions of genre if I choose to look at place and identity simply because an inquiry into auto-fiction and the modern/postmodern detective novel would have to be either incomplete or would end up being a much larger project than the department has in mind. 

As this blog project has so conclusively demonstrated for me, the expository form is not conducive to productive thought; it is an effective tool for communication, but it necessarily restricts the richness of thought that is being communicated. Having been conditioned to produce expository work, I wonder how many connections I've missed over the course of my academic career - over the past year alone - that I could have found fascinating if I'd been able to think of my project in a less linear way. Theoretically, I could do all of this web-work and then stream-line into expository essays, but I think that, in most cases, the work would result in several essays and I'm afraid (and I don't mean that euphemistically - I really am afraid) that I don't have the energy for that level of commitment to this French project. I have (very) limited time, so the work I do needs to be pre-focused on the material that I will prove visibly useful in the written product.

I've started studying Bakhtin's essay "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel" from The Dialogic Imagination, and I can't help but think of the text first terms of this project and only in terms of my French work as an afterthought. I'm hoping that, if I discuss Bakhtin here, I'll be able to then focus on its applicability to French. Of course, there is also the very real possibility that I’ll do this work, I’ll enjoy the exploration, I’ll learn about Bakhtin in terms of events and autobiography, but will not ultimately save any time by the effort. However, prioritization is not a great strength of mine, and I honestly don’t care whether or not this is the efficient choice because the material seems so applicable to this Comp. Lit. project that it would be academically (intellectually?) irresponsible to ignore. So here we go. 

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Theory: the chronotope and adventure/biographical time

In this essay, Bakhtin coins the term "chronotope," literally “time space” (84). He explains the word in terms of artistic depictions, especially narrative representations in literature, of time and space, which he sees as inherently interconnected. Existence occurs in four planes, the first three being concerned with place, and the fourth being itself time, so a study of one is naturally also a study of the other. He idea of chronotopes offers a way of understanding how space/time is conceptualized in fiction during different historical periods, which sheds light on both the socio-political atmosphere of the time and on categorical questions of genre. Consequently, understanding how to recognize various chronotopes ought to give me a way to analyze the genres of literary works, either by identifying prevalent chronotopes or by recognizing how the works diverge from the expected treatments of space-time, though I am, of course, wary of using a post-structuralist theory as an organizing concept in my own work.

Furthermore, though Bakhtin discusses them primarily in fiction, he famously recognizes in his concluding remarks that “Every entry into the sphere of meanings is accomplished only through the gates of the chronotope,” (258). Though this is an old theory (it goes back, as Bakhtin notes, to Kant in his “Transcendental Aesthetics”), it’s important to this investigation because it extends the realm of chronotopic significance beyond the artistic oeuvre and into the worlds of the author and reader. Since all conscious experience is registered through an organizing filter, all conscious perception is the result of fictionalization. For my project, this means that chronotopes apply not only to fiction, but also to autobiography and the self-conceived identity.

The first section of his essay is concerned with analyses of the three ancient novelistic forms he recognizes: the Greek Romance, or the Novel of Ordeal, the Adventure Novel of Everyday Life, and the Ancient Biography and Autobiography. He then goes on to identify and explain several figures that create important chronotopes, like the Road and the Fool. Finally, he undertakes an analysis of the Rabalaisian chronotope before making his closing remarks, in which he revisits the major chronotopes of the road and threshold and expands the concept of the chronotope beyond the world of the novel to that of all perception.

The first kind of ancient novel, the Greek Romance, presents a static view of the individual by representing the story as two biographical poles with extra-temporal "adventure-time" between them. Though he does not explain biographical time in this essay, given its usage, I image that  it corresponds with time as we experience it when under no unusual duress, and is a kind of time that leaves a trace on the individual (90). Adventure-time, in contrast, is "highly intensified but undifferentiated,"(90). This particular genre involves a chronotope that depicts adventure as the hiatus between real life experience in which the characters travel widely and overcome many obstacles, but are ultimately unchanged by the events they’ve experienced. They meet and fall in love, and biographical time stops until they are married; everything between these two plot points is interchangeable.

The second ancient story archetype, which he provisionally titles the "adventure novel of everyday life" is marked the "mix of adventure-time with every day time," (111), and by the presence of individual agency at the expense of a diminishment in the power of fate, though he notes that agency is still limited to the individual who has no illusions of creating change in the wider world; there is still a lack of heterogeneity in the presented world (119).

As opposed to the first kind of ancient story, the ancient romance, this genre's most prevalent chronotope allows the hero to undergo an important change because of the events that happen to him in the story. (I do say "him," here, because Bakhtin doesn't identify any female heroes in this genre). The identity of the character, then, is at stake, though I don't believe this early novel includes meta-diegetic awareness. (By this I mean that the character whose identity changes would not reflect on the change he undergoes. To my knowledge, that realization is unique to 20th and 21st century literature like the novels I've studied in this blog.) This is an important distinction to make because it separates the ancient Greek "adventure in everyday life" chronotope from its derivative contemporary narratives, the pedigree of which I will now discuss.

In this kind of novel, "Time is not merely technical, not a mere distribution of days, hours, moments that are reversible, transposable, unlimited internally, along a straight line; here the temporal sequence is an integrated and irreversible whole," (119). It is irreversible because, in contrast to the Greek Romance, this genre's definitive chronotope allows the past causal power on the present/future. 

This introduction of temporal causality means that time in this novel is necessarily different from that of the Greek romance. Biographical time in this second genre is allowed a role instead of being relegated to the two poles of the story between which all the adventure takes place. However, these kinds of novels still cover a vast period of diegetic time. The typical solution to this conflict between the confines of the novel form and the time represented is to choose pivotal events and to explain those in biographical time, which, nonetheless, occupies what Bakhtin calls the vertical axis while the story’s arc (guilt --> punishment --> redemption --> blessedness) moves the story along horizontally.  (I say typically because, as Bakhtin notes, Tolstoy generally refuses disturb biographical time, preferring instead to allow his characters to come to slow conclusions than to introduce “suddenly” adventure-time logic to his novels. See 249.)

Though the biographical time is represented only in fragments, presenting several static pictures of the hero that are separated and explained by interspersed periods of crisis, it’s not an adventure-time logic that prevails, but rather a moralistic one. In Bakhtin’s example of The Golden Ass, Lucius really is guilty, and its his own actions that motivate the story’s motion, not the unpredictable intervention of the gods or fate; this means that the individual has gained agency in this genre which he lacked in the previously discussed one.

This power to influence the character of the hero reflects a shift in the purpose of the novel. Bakhtin calls the Greek Romance a “novel of ordeal” because it presents the hero with a test or trial, which he must then overcome while maintaining his sense of integrity. This genre offers the reader an existential reassurance that the self remains the same across tribulation. In contrast, the adventure in everyday life novel focuses on metamorphosis of character, showing “how an individual becomes other than what he was,” (115). This novel offers no existential consolation, but, instead, allows the character agency to affect his own life. This development is important for the history of the novel, as it's in part because of this second kind of work that others such as Nausea, which grant the protagonist too much freedom from fate, have been able to develop; there is no crisis of choice if there is no choice, so this development in the novel allowed for existential exploration to occur in the form.

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Roquentin’s problem of adventure: an infelicitous aesthetic solution in itself

I’ve focused on this genre of the ancient novel because I believe that the mix of adventure and biographical time helps explain Roquentin's conception of adventure/events and suggests a new reason behind his inability to decide whether or not he has experienced any.

The explanation Bakhtin gives of the biographical/adventure time dichotomy in this genre gives me insight into the problem Roquentin experiences in recounting his experiences. As I've discussed before, he believes that one has to choose to either live life or to tell it; one cannot do both. This means that up-to-the-moment self-consciousness is impossible; the comprehension of self will always be retarded by the continuation of experience and the necessity to conceptualize events lived before they can be understood as part of that self’s experience. Roquentin recounts several instances where he feels that he is having an adventure, only to lose the sensation as soon as he realizes what he's feeling.

Is it possible that he’s attempting to cast himself as protagonist of an adventure-time narrative? Since adventure-time disallows the individual to change, it disallows him live in the real world;  conceptualizing himself in terms of an adventure-time narrative would effectively rob Roquentin of his ability to act. As adventure-time is a purely fictional construct which cannot exist in the real world, attempting to overlay that chronotope on life would result in the collapse of self consciousness. If this is in fact the case, this constitutes a mimetic aesthetic solution like we have already witnessed in Revel's case which, as in Passing Time, proves destructive to the individual.

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Chronotopic Non-identity: fiction to reality

Though this essay is full of interesting thoughts, I’ll skip from here to the end because it’s Bakhtin’s discussion of adventure-time in contrast to biographical time, which I’ve already touched on, and his extension of chronotopic importance to the real world, which he undertakes in the Concluding Remarks ,that interest me most in terms of this project.

Until this section of the essay, which was written in 1973, a full 35 years after the rest of the text, it wasn’t clear to me exactly where one chronotope might end and where another would begin. Bakhtin responds here to this concern by explaining that chronotopes are “mutually inclusive” (252); the chronotope of meeting, for example, often is evoked by the chronotope of the road. This creates a dialogue between all representations, which is, in turn, filtered through the chronotopic world of the reader. The answer to my question is then that chronotopes are not rigid categories into which to sort material, but multiplicitous clues to the relationship of art to the experienced world.

Beyond offering that precision, this last section of the essay underlines one of the primary probems the protagonists of Nausea and Passing Time encounter. As Bakhtin poetically puts it:

“It is just as impossible to forge an identity between myself, my own ‘I,’ and that ‘I’ that is the subject of my stories as it is to life myself up by my own hair. The represented world, however realistic and truthful, can never be chronotopically identical with the real world it represents where the author and creator of the literary work is to be found,” (256).

In light of this quotation, it seems that the protagonists of my chosen novels struggle to rectify their lived chronotopes with those they are writing, Revel more so than Roquentin; it is Revel who agonizes over his inability to authentically or correctly represent his experiences, while Roquentin seems to have more basic chronotopic problems to at hand, as I’ve mentioned above. Since the two times can never be identical, the attempt at authentic representation is a priori doomed, though, as Revel demonstrates and as I have personally discovered, it often takes a failed attempt at unification to prove this.

Roquentin, though he also demonstrates this truth in the entry where he corrects the account he has just made of an even so that it includes the nonevent of the newspaper, is more concerned with his lived chronotope by itself; he doesn’t understand, for example, how to move from the present into the future, though it’s clear to him that everything changes at every moment, meaning that the world is in fact in temporal and spatial action. I would suggest that this leads him to accept the mimetic aesthetic solution, as discussed above, which causes his unnecessary confusion over “adventures,” which, as we know, cannot bring themselves into being but instead require retrospection for their birth, and which furthermore demonstrably cannot be lived. 

Bakhtin's text is long and covers a large spectrum of material which could all potentially be useful to my investigations. I've already started two or three other posts on individual ideas which didn't fit well into this discussion, so I imagine I'll be writing more on the essay.

Is the concept of completing a project as daunting as that of beginning one? I never thought so, but it may yet prove to be as difficult.

KJ Treehouse, Hamilton College, NY - 11 April 2013.