11
edits
The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Reflections of Time Past: Pattern, Time, and Memory in Norman Mailer: Difference between revisions
The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Reflections of Time Past: Pattern, Time, and Memory in Norman Mailer (view source)
Revision as of 14:26, 19 June 2021
, 19 June 2021no edit summary
No edit summary |
No edit summary |
||
| Line 5: | Line 5: | ||
{{dc|dc=N|early seventy years ago}}, T. S. Eliot wrote these words in his poem, “East Coker,” published in 1935 and later a part of his masterpiece, ''Four Quartets''. Hugh Kenner reminds us that East Coker is the name of “the village in Somerset where Eliots or Elyots lived for some two centuries, before the poet’s ancestor Andrew Eliot emigrated in 1667 to found the American branch of the family."{{sfn|Kenner|1965|p=263}} After Eliot died three decades later in 1965, his ashes were interred at St. Michael’s Church—in that same village of East Coker. In the church on a simple wall plaque are other words from that poem, “In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning.”{{sfn|Eliot|1952|p=263}} These enigmatic words seem, as Marysa Demoor has pointed out, “designed to elude death.”{{sfn|Demoor|2005|p=258}}{{efn|And T. S. Eliot’s poetry was the source for the epitaphs on two plaques commemorating his death in 1965. His ashes are interred in the church of St. Michael’s in East Coker, where a commemorative plaque on the church wall bears his chosen epitaph—two lines from ''Four Quartets'': ‘In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning.’ Significant lines of course, considering the topic of this paper. The circularity of the reasoning, as well as the engraving on the stone, seems designed to elude death. The T. S. Eliot memorial stone in Westminster Abbey, featured in the BBC documentary, reads: ‘The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.’ Taken from Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding,’ this even more intriguing passage marks a communication between the dead, the living, and the ‘beyond’—in other words, a communication licensed by God. Communication ‘tongued with fire’ may indeed be poetic language, endowed with special godly powers going ‘beyond the language of the living.’ Here, then, modernist poets see their dead selves as immortal souls whose language has divine qualities capable of reaching the living.”{{sfn|Demoor|2005|p=258}}}} Whether we see life as a manifestation of God’s providence or of a more impersonal Wheel of Life, surely we could see a strange sense of recursion and return in these simple facts of Eliot’s pilgrimage.{{efn|The concepts of recursion, strange loops, and “metaphorical fugues” are dealt with by Douglas Hofstadter in his ''Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid'' (Basic Books, 1979). His book won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, the same year that Norman Mailer won the Pulitzer Fiction Prize for ''[[The Executioner’s Song]]''.}} At times, does not life seem to ''fold back'' on itself? Or, to take up a hint from the title of ''Four Quartets'', is not life like a string quartet or a Bach fugue, weaving a series of complex musical variations upon various themes? As Kenner suggests, Eliot’s ''Four Quartets'' “traverse and exploit a diversity of timbres and intonations, interchange themes, set going a repetitive but developing minuet of motifs.”{{sfn|Kenner|1965|p=261}}{{efn|The music parallel to Eliot’s ''Four Quartets'' is sometimes said to be the “late” quartets of Beethoven, but Kenner (relying on information from Hodgart) maintains that Eliot was “paying attention chiefly to Bartok’s Quartets, Nos. 2–6.”{{sfn|Kenner|1965|p=261}}}} | {{dc|dc=N|early seventy years ago}}, T. S. Eliot wrote these words in his poem, “East Coker,” published in 1935 and later a part of his masterpiece, ''Four Quartets''. Hugh Kenner reminds us that East Coker is the name of “the village in Somerset where Eliots or Elyots lived for some two centuries, before the poet’s ancestor Andrew Eliot emigrated in 1667 to found the American branch of the family."{{sfn|Kenner|1965|p=263}} After Eliot died three decades later in 1965, his ashes were interred at St. Michael’s Church—in that same village of East Coker. In the church on a simple wall plaque are other words from that poem, “In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning.”{{sfn|Eliot|1952|p=263}} These enigmatic words seem, as Marysa Demoor has pointed out, “designed to elude death.”{{sfn|Demoor|2005|p=258}}{{efn|And T. S. Eliot’s poetry was the source for the epitaphs on two plaques commemorating his death in 1965. His ashes are interred in the church of St. Michael’s in East Coker, where a commemorative plaque on the church wall bears his chosen epitaph—two lines from ''Four Quartets'': ‘In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning.’ Significant lines of course, considering the topic of this paper. The circularity of the reasoning, as well as the engraving on the stone, seems designed to elude death. The T. S. Eliot memorial stone in Westminster Abbey, featured in the BBC documentary, reads: ‘The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.’ Taken from Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding,’ this even more intriguing passage marks a communication between the dead, the living, and the ‘beyond’—in other words, a communication licensed by God. Communication ‘tongued with fire’ may indeed be poetic language, endowed with special godly powers going ‘beyond the language of the living.’ Here, then, modernist poets see their dead selves as immortal souls whose language has divine qualities capable of reaching the living.”{{sfn|Demoor|2005|p=258}}}} Whether we see life as a manifestation of God’s providence or of a more impersonal Wheel of Life, surely we could see a strange sense of recursion and return in these simple facts of Eliot’s pilgrimage.{{efn|The concepts of recursion, strange loops, and “metaphorical fugues” are dealt with by Douglas Hofstadter in his ''Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid'' (Basic Books, 1979). His book won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, the same year that Norman Mailer won the Pulitzer Fiction Prize for ''[[The Executioner’s Song]]''.}} At times, does not life seem to ''fold back'' on itself? Or, to take up a hint from the title of ''Four Quartets'', is not life like a string quartet or a Bach fugue, weaving a series of complex musical variations upon various themes? As Kenner suggests, Eliot’s ''Four Quartets'' “traverse and exploit a diversity of timbres and intonations, interchange themes, set going a repetitive but developing minuet of motifs.”{{sfn|Kenner|1965|p=261}}{{efn|The music parallel to Eliot’s ''Four Quartets'' is sometimes said to be the “late” quartets of Beethoven, but Kenner (relying on information from Hodgart) maintains that Eliot was “paying attention chiefly to Bartok’s Quartets, Nos. 2–6.”{{sfn|Kenner|1965|p=261}}}} | ||
Did not Norman Mailer’s untimely death on November 10, 2007 cause some of us to look again at the trajectory of our own lives, seeking to come to terms with his passing but also, implicitly, with our own mortality? This reflection is not to become obsessed or haunted by death—our own or others—but to examine the more positive aspects of aging, to chart the slow development of character, to find deeper meaning in the contingencies of life. This path, surely, is a crucial part of self-knowledge: in discovering | Did not Norman Mailer’s untimely death on November 10, 2007 cause some of us to look again at the trajectory of our own lives, seeking to come to terms with his passing but also, implicitly, with our own mortality? This reflection is not to become obsessed or haunted by death—our own or others—but to examine the more positive aspects of aging, to chart the slow development of character, to find deeper meaning in the contingencies of life. This path, surely, is a crucial part of self-knowledge: in discovering character, Heraclitus tells us, we shall discover our fate. I freely acknowledge that such a stance may well reflect my own advancing years. However, as James Hillman the Jungian psychologist argues, part of the purpose of our “later years” may be that we are able to explore these deeper patterns of life. | ||
<blockqoute> Then we will be able to look at the decay of body and mind as more than affliction. We will connect it with an underlying truth we already feel: Something forms a human life into an overall image, including life’s haphazard contingencies and wasted irrelevancies. Later years are often devoted to exploring these irrelevances, adventuring into past mistakes so as to discover understandable patterns. <blockqoute> | <blockqoute> Then we will be able to look at the decay of body and mind as more than affliction. We will connect it with an underlying truth we already feel: Something forms a human life into an overall image, including life’s haphazard contingencies and wasted irrelevancies. Later years are often devoted to exploring these irrelevances, adventuring into past mistakes so as to discover understandable patterns. <blockqoute> | ||
| Line 73: | Line 73: | ||
===Notes=== | ===Notes=== | ||
{{Notelist}} | {{Notelist}} | ||
1. An earlier version of this paper was given at the 2008 Norman Mailer Conference, October 16–18, in Provincetown, MA. | |||
2. “And T. S. Eliot’s poetry was the source for the epitaphs on two plaques commemorating his death in 1965. His ashes are interred in the church of St. Michael’s in East Coker, where a commemorative plaque on the church wall bears his chosen epitaph—two lines from Four Quartets: ‘In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning.’ Significant lines of course, considering the topic of this paper. The circularity of the reasoning, as well as the engraving on the stone, seems designed to elude death. The T. S. Eliot memorial stone in Westminster Abbey, featured in the BBC documentary, reads: ‘The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.’ Taken from Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding,’ this even more intriguing passage marks a communication between the dead, the living, and the ‘beyond’—in other words, a communication licensed by God. Kermode and Hollander 497!. Communication ‘tongued with fire’ may indeed be poetic language, endowed with special godly powers going ‘beyond the language of the living.’ Here, then, modernist poets see their dead selves as immortal souls whose language has divine qualities capable of reaching the living” ~Demoor 258!. | |||
3. The concepts of recursion, strange loops, and “metaphorical fugues” are dealt with by Douglas Hofstadter in his Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid ~Basic Books, 1979. His book won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, the same year that Norman Mailer won the Pulitzer Fiction Prize for The Executioner’s Song ~http://www.pulitzer.org/awards/1980. | |||
4. The music parallel to Eliot’s Four Quartets is sometimes said to be the “late” quartets of Beethoven, but Kenner relying on information from Hodgart, maintains that Eliot was “paying attention chiefly to Bartok’s Quartets, Nos. 2–6” ~261. | |||
5. “The idea we are moving in its place says it is to character that you are most truly yoked. ‘Character,’ said Heraclitus at the beginning of Western thought, ‘is fate.’ No, Napoleon, not geography; and no, Freud, not anatomy, either. Character governs— governing physiology, too. We will be maintaining, with all the heft and perseverance we can still summon, that genetic inheritance is shaped into our own peculiar pattern by character, that specific composition of traits, foibles, delights, and commitments, that identifiable figure bearing our name, our history, and a face that mirrors a ‘me’” ~Hill- man xvi!. | |||
6. I am not here dealing with the vexed question of Eliot’s anti-Semitism, which—if proven—would strongly suggest that Eliot might not be appropriate as a way to interpret Mailer’s work. Matthew Hart deals with this issue in a recent article, writing of “the centrality, in recent criticism, of the question of anti-Semitism” ~179!. Giving a brief bibliography on this subject (note 5), he writes, “the point is not just that Eliot helped create the unpleasant myths through which we comprehend his writing and thought; it is that these myths are partly accurate” 179. What seems undeniable is that Eliot’s complex identity—English, American, international, and perhaps the representative of modernism—makes such evaluations unusually problematic. | |||
7. Shortly after 9/11, Auden’s poem was read on National Public Radio and elsewhere on the Web. Eric McHenry wrote, “Auden on Bin Laden” in Slate.com on September 20, 2001 http://www.slate.com/?id115900. Some months later, Peter Steinfels wrote that the poem had been “endlessly quoted and reprinted to express grief over what had happened and foreboding about what was to come” in his New York Times article. | |||
8. “In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent became one of the three works of literature most frequently cited in the American media. ~The other two were poems by Wynstan Auden: ‘Sept 1, 1939’—also the subject of ‘Culturebox’—and ‘Musee des Beuux Arts.'” Shulevitz. | |||
9. On a lighter note, Auden’s poem “Stop all the clocks” became popular after it was fea- tured in the funeral scene of Mike Newell’s 1994 film, Four Weddings and a Funeral. The poem, also known as “Funeral Blues,” is poem IX in Auden’s “Twelve Songs” (Collected Poems 141.) | |||
10. “When ‘old’ gains its definition only by pairing, it loses its value. In a culture that has identified with the ‘new’ since Columbus, ‘old’ gets the short end of the comparative stick, and it becomes ever more difficult to imagine oldness as a phenomenon apart from the lazy simplicities of conventional wisdom” (Hillman 42.) | |||
11. Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996) used the idea of paradigm and paradigm shift in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Although the term paradigm has been used for a long time in English, it is Kuhn’s usage that since the 1960s has become influential. | |||
12. I briefly examine religion as a form of patterning in the final paragraph below. | |||
13. Since 1978, there has been an International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR), with member bodies in many countries. Lawrence O’Gorman’s article describes some of | |||
the developments. | |||
14. Patterning in time is obviously integral to both music and literature but seems less crucial in the visual arts, like painting. But from the perspective of Physics, a particular color is certain light vibrations per second and hence is a transformation (or pattern) in time. As Einstein saw with startling originality in 1905, a stationary light wave has no meaning. In addition, all forms of art and language are cultural transformations in time. The visual arts qualitatively changed when Masaccio (1401–1428) and others developed perspective: music patterns were different after Stravinsky from before. | |||
15. Ahead of many others, W. H. George argued the human activity of patterning was at the heart of science and its theories. In the mid 1970s, I became aware of George’s significant role through a Mr. Frost who taught History & Philosophy of Science in the University of London’s Extra-Mural Department. Back in the 1930s, George had written: “To remove the human element is to remove science. When Newton formulated his law of universal gravitation he did not reduce by one the number of absolute truths too be discovered, he created a new pattern into which facts could be fitted. Einstein created still another pattern into which these same facts, together with others, could be fitted” (George 19.) | |||
16. “‘Burnt Norton’, published in 1935, was written five years before the other three quartets, which were published within a year of one another: ‘East Coker’ in 1940; ‘The Dry Salvages’ in 1941; and ‘Little Gidding’ in 1942” (Spender 155.) | |||
17. The second law of thermodynamics concerns entropy, a scientific concept that has had some effect on our culture and literature. Entropy is a kind of unavailable energy, a man- ifestation of the chaos or randomness of a system.“In 1850 Rudolf Clausius said that there is energy which is available, and there is also a residue of energy which is not accessible. This inaccessible energy he called entropy, and he formulated the famous Second Law of Thermodynamics: entropy is always increasing. In the universe, heat is draining into a sort of lake of equality in which it is no longer accessible” (Bronowski 347.) | |||
18. The oral traditions of The Epic of Gilgamesh may be as early as 2,000 BC, Homer’s Iliad perhaps dates from 1,000–800 BC, and the Old Testament sagas and narratives may date from 1,000 BC, the time of King David, or earlier. The written texts, of course, would be somewhat later. | |||
19. In December 1988, less than a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Mikhail Gorbachev addressed the United Nations in New York. He began his speech by “invoking the great English poet, John Donne, cited in his novel by Ernest Hemingway, ‘No man is an island ...’”(Josephs 9).Allen Josephs comments,“Were not these ever-widening gyres precisely what Professor Baker had meant by the partisanship of humanity? It is one thing to cite John Donne’s ‘Meditation,’ but an altogether larger issue to invoke Donne as invoked by Hemingway, invoked in turn by Mr. Gorbachev in his historic, bridge-building address” (9). Donne’s conceit and Hemingway’s bridge are indeed potent metaphors—especially across the Wall, behind the Iron Curtain, as quoted by Gorbachev. | |||
20. “So I can have the hope that this book may stimulate your sense of our time . . . In effect, this is a book that nearly all of us have created in our own minds; each book vastly different yet still related by the web of history, the style of our lives, and the river of becoming that we refer to by the most intimate and indefinable of words, the most mysterious word of them all—time. Time!” (Mailer, The Time of Our Time xii). | |||
21. “I am inclined to believe that God’s chief purpose in giving us memory is to enable us to go back in time so that if we didn’t play those roles right the first time round, we can still have another go at it now” (Buechner, Telling Secrets 32). | |||
22. “Only this woman Sethe could have left him his manhood like that. He wants to put his story next to hers. ‘Sethe,’ he says, ‘me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow’ ” (Morrison 314). | |||
23. Zora Neal Hurston suggests this blend of the conscious and unconscious in human memory when she says “Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly” (1). | |||
24. Why, some might ask, would kairos be an aspect of Jewishness? After all, kairos is a Greek word for time, dating back to Hesiod’s Works, and signifying opportunity, significant time, right time, critical time, as opposed to the word chronos, the more general term for time as a period. Kairos is both common and important in New Testament usage and Christian theology. But significantly—it seems to me—in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, kairos occurs about three times as often as chronos to translate the usual Hebrew word for time, ét (Hahn 835). To that extent, it seems that the perspective on time that is represented by the Greek word kairos is as much Jewish as Christian in origin. As Hans-Christoph Hahn has said, “The creator, Yahweh, has created the whole of time and fills it in accordance with his will, and also fixes the individual kairoi (cf. Gen. 1:14)” (835). | |||
25. “This is the time of tension between dying and birth / The place of solitude where three dreams cross . . . ” (Eliot 66). | |||
===Citations=== | ===Citations=== | ||
| Line 79: | Line 105: | ||
===Works Cited=== | ===Works Cited=== | ||
{{Refbegin}} | {{Refbegin}} | ||
. . . | {{cite journal|last=Auden|first=W.H.|title=Selected Poems|journal=The Mailer Review|volume=2.1|date=2008|pages=376-384|ref=harv }} | ||
{{Cite book |date=1979|title=The Book of Common Prayer...according to the Episcopal Church (BCP)|location=New York|publisher=Oxford UP|ref=harv }} | |||
{{cite book |last=Bronowski|first=J.|date=1973|title=The Ascent of Man|location=New York|publisher=Little, Brown|ref=harv }} | |||
{{cite magazine |last=Peter|first=Brooks|date=1996|title=Reading for the Plot|magazine=Essentials of the Theory of Fiction|pages=326-347| ref=harv }} | |||
{{cite book |last=Buechner|first=Frederick|date=1982|title=The Sacred Journey: A Memoir of Early Days|location=San Francisco|publisher=HarperCollins|ref=harv }} | |||
{{cite journal |last=Busa|first=Busa|title=This is a Town Worth Digging in and Fighting For|journal=The Mailer Review|volume=2|issue=1|date=2008|pages=87-96|ref=harv }} | |||
{{cite journal |last=Cappell|first=Ezra|title=Norman Mailer: A Man of Letters Inspired by the People of the Book|journal=The Mailer Review|volume=2|issue=1|date=2008|pages=97-99|ref=harv }} | |||
{{cite journal |last=Demoor|first=Marysa|title=From Epitaph to Obituary: the Death Politics of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound|journal=Biography|volume=28|issue=2|date=Spring 2005|pages=255-275|ref=harv }} | |||
{{cite book |last=Devlin|first=Keith|date=1997|title=Mathematics, the Science of Patterns: the Search for Order in Life, Mind, and the | |||
Universe|location=New York|publisher=Scientific American|ref=harv }} | |||
{{cite book |last=Elliot|first=T.S.|date=1952|title=The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950|location=New York|publisher=Harcourt Brace|ref=harv }} | |||
{{cite book |last=George|first=William Herbert|date=1936|title=The Scientist in Action|location=London|publisher=Williams and Norgate|ref=harv }} | |||
{{cite journal |last=Hahn|first=Hans-Christoh|title=Time,kairos|journal=The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology|volume=3|date=1978|ref=harv }} | |||
{{Refend}} | {{Refend}} | ||