Travelling through Narrative Time

Travelling through Narrative Time. ¿

The unfortunate image of a ‘road’ to which the human mind has become accustomed (life as a kind of journey) is a stupid illusion; we are not going anywhere, we are sitting at home. The other world surrounds us always and is not at the end of some pilgrimage.

Vladimir Nabokov,1937-8:322.

1. The “Time is a Journey” Metaphor in Narrative.

2. The Journey in Fiction written in the English Language.

3. The Role of Time with the Rise of the Novel.

4. The Romantic Journey of Quest.

5. The Return Journey.

6. Modern Quests. The Labyrinth.

The concept of time has been present both in the structure and as theme in literature -and art in general- since its origins. The reason is, as we have pointed out, that time is one of our most basic concepts used to configure and order our representations (narratives) of the world. It is not at all surprising then, that the modern theme of the loss of meaning with a subsequent search for an alternative certainty goes hand in hand with a new conception of time.

Narratives have functioned, as legends have, as collective myths that confirm various primary ‘truths’ about ‘the way things are’. A primary formulating maneuver of these narratives is the convention of historical time, neutral and homogeneous, a commanding metanarrative, perhaps the metanarrative in Western discourse (Ermarth,1992:20). Since the 20^th-century, however, more and more narratives are presenting a different picture of historical time.

A narrative reveals the passage from a instantaneous temporality to a sequence of independent events constituting the story, that is a structural temporality and a gradual cohesion that links the different parts.

One way of rendering the impression of space is to use the metaphor of the journey. Following Genette’s analysis NT = ST in the traditional novel. The impression of time passing would then be located in the mimetic content (the showing not the telling) of the narrative. Another way is to expand both the discourse time and the reading time in relation to the story time NT > ST; a rhetorical figure known as hypotyposis, which expands the telling (diegesis). As we have noted before, this procedure has become increasingly popular in the modern period.

In this section, we are going to articulate two possible readings to the question of time that can be found in narrative fiction. It should become evident that both are representations of two different ways of experiencing time.

In the first reading we humans are special and part of a meaningful divine plan which is unknown to us in detail but hinted at in various ways and delivered to us in outline by a special text or sacred narrative of the world. This reading seeks a universal and enduring Truth, and a hierarchy of values which help to define our goal in life, and prepare our way (represented as a journey) for the afterlife.

In the second reading we are the result of time and chance. This reading maintains that the individual is always becoming as the result of his subjective will and passion, his choices, her risks, his reactions, her experiences of the world. In this reading, life is a continuum of fragments, and death is not a door but a wall, the inescapable and shared destiny of all persons.

1. The “Time is a Journey” Metaphor in Narrative.

La diosa de la Verdad que guía a Parménides en su poema, (Reinhardt, Parmenides und die Geschichte der griechischen Philosophie (1916)) le coloca ante dos caminos, el de descubrir y el de ocultar; ello no significa otra cosa sino que el ‘ser ahí’ es en cada caso ya en la verdad y la falsedad. El camino del descubrir sólo se gana en el discernir ambos y decidirse por uno.

Martin Heidegger, Ser y Tiempo, 243.

The journey is a pervasive thematic concern and a recurrent structural device for fiction because it is obvious, simple and flexible. The traveler’s tale is a “persistent oral form in all cultures” (Scholes & Kellogg,1966:73-77). It is “the one formula that is never exhausted” (Frye,1957:57).

As we have seen in Section 3, the journey appears in virtually all theologies. The biblical myth of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from paradise is a journey narrative, where a theological idea, man’s fall from God’s grace, appears in terms of spatial movement. Spiritual connotations of place and movement appear variously throughout the Bible contributing to form the history of humanity on a nomad basis. The Jewish and later Christian conception of historical-theological time is not only the very foundation of most Western narratives, but of Western metaphysics, as Heidegger, Derrida, Kristeva, among others, have pointed out. These patterns of journey narratives, however, can also be found in other ancient cultures. In the Classical Tradition, Homer’s Odyssey also demonstrates the usefulness of journey motifs conveying non-spatial experiences.

The hero’s descent into the underworld has become a regular feature of “night journey narratives”, symbolizing the hero’s spiritual experience (just like Dante’s Divine Comedy, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, etc.). The journey can be used as a metaphor for the passage of time or for penetration into different levels of consciousness. It symbolizes mankind’s efforts toward intellectual and moral goals, and even the search for meaning itself. Yet, in some journey narratives, it is the journey itself, the endless process of travelling, that matters not some end goal. For some authors, such as Walt Whitman, the journey means ongoing life, possibility.

The association of the West (sunset) with death is a major source of directional ambiguity. In American literature, the journey West may symbolize quest and progress, whereas Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist ends with Stephen’s intention of travelling eastward towards Europe. In other cultures the corresponding West/East values of the European and American traditions may be oriented to the North and South instead, as it is the case in some Semitic cultures. Walter Scott’s narratives, Waverly, The Heart of Middlothian, etc., also have a North-South orientation, as the hero or heroine travels from or towards Scotland in search of his/her identity.

We have seen that the concept of time is readily translated into spatial metaphors (see Section 1). We explained that in the subject/object relation we hold with the world, we assume instinctively ourselves as fixed points. In this way we can experience time as flowing away from us. This perceived experience is much the same whether the knower is moving in spatial terms or fixed in termporal/perceptual terms.

We saw, however, that there is another fork to this “time as journey” metaphor, in which we perceive ourselves as changing phenomena. In this model time is perceived in relative movement to the observer (who is also in movement). This situation requires a high level of abstraction (we have mentioned that normally we would not perceived ourselves in movement) and it may produce relative perceptions of time, sometimes called subjective: time stretching or contracting, elastic time, etc. These dual perception of inner and outer dimensions makes possible the “inward journeys” or process of introspection.

In the following lines we would like to identify some basic patterns of journey narratives in the history of literature written in the English language.

2. The Journey in Fiction written in the English Language.

Let a man learn to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting.

Emerson

The establishment of Christianity throughout the territories that formed the Roman Empire meant that Europe was tutored in the systematic approach to life developed by the early Church Fathers. In the West, the fusion of Christian and Classical philosophy formed the basis of the Medieval habit of interpreting life symbolically. Through St. Augustine, Platonic and Christian thought were reconciled. Nature became a symbolic revelation of spiritual truth.

The church not only established the purpose of literature but preserved it. St. Benedict´s monastery at Monte Cassino in Italy was established in 529, and other monastic centers of scholarship followed, particularly after the 6th and 7th-century Irish missions to the Rhine and Great Britain and the Gothic missions up the Danube. These monasteries were able to preserve the only classical literature available in the West through times when Europe was being raided by Goths, Vandals, Franks, and, later, Norsemen in succession.

Time in the Old English Epic Tradition is presented as fate, portraying reality as a solid, interconnected, consistent order. Events unavoidably lead to their corresponding consequences and there is a sense of immutability of the cosmos, of time and of nature. Fate helps to keep uncertainty under control. The individual tale transcends to the whole of society, becoming a symbolic representation for humankind. Death is presented in an objective way and given dignity and significance through the role of kinship.

The Christian influence closes the cycle of the heroic society. The death of the hero in Beowulf is the death of a race. Beowulf’s companions fail to help him. His is a fight against evil/destruction/dark forces. Good is sharing, company/harmony and light/sun. Narrative time appears to be irrelevant, giving the impression that the audience must have been well-acquainted with the story. Order is more thematic than chronological or sequential, so that events are narrated both synchronically and diachronically. There are allusions, as if the actions had already happened, completed before they begin, a lack of chronological timing of events, constant anticipations, comparisons, flashbacks, etc. The sense created by this peculiar style of narration is that of a pattern of process where everything is interrelated. All events form part of a larger pattern of reality which has a circular structure, the linear journey narrative embedded in it.

Other poems in the Anglo-Saxon tradition which are structured as journeys are The Wanderer, narrated by a man, deprived of lord and kinsmen, whose journeys lead him to the realization that there is stability only in heaven, and The Seafarer where the journey motif more explicitly symbolizes the speaker's spiritual yearnings. Both are included in the Exeter Book and written between the 8th and 11th centuries.

After the Norman Conquest in 1066 the Anglo-Saxons are placed in a position of inferiority, which eventually kills their culture and literature. The new literature has no longer a practical aim, defending a fixed system of survival. It is a literature of entertainment. The epic gives way to courtly literature (lyric and romance). The world of men becomes influenced by the world of women. Sir Gawayn and the Green Knight is a poem greatly influenced by the new tradition, a combination of heroic ethos with celebration of civilized life, a balance of opposing contrasts, ambiguity of pagan and Christian consciousness (Crucifixion and Resurrection related to pre-Christian myths of seasonal cycles; Wasteland restored to fertility by sacrifice and resurrection of a god -the Fisher King). The outside world of the palace is the realm of malevolent supernatural forces. The Christian, civilized world of rules is within. Sir Gawayn combines the entertaining tradition of romance with a didactic scheme (texts of loyalty, chastity and good faith: he fails the last text-truth- because he loves his life; a conflict between the ideal codes and human limitations which makes morality more effective), emphasis on personal salvation and on moral and spiritual responsibility. These Christian elements make the hero more immediate and loveable. Through the confrontation with supernatural and evil forces, the hero will get to know himself better and discover his own weaknesses, being eventually re-established into the community, with the moral code one more reaffirmed. The journey-adventure is an internal purification of the self. The motivation and aim behind it is to achieve immortality, not through poetry, as the epic hero, but through spiritual salvation. The linear journey-like time structure is, like in Beowulf, embedded in a larger circular pattern given by the Christian notion of repentance and Resurrection, psychologically more stable and desirable, as Mircea Eliade has noted.

The Arthurian poems, from the 12^th to the 15^th centuries, are another manifestation of journey narratives in the Middle English Period. Thomas Malory’s Morte Dartur is like one big rèsume of all the previous writings about kind Arthur and his knights (Chrétien de Troyes poems and The Lancelot en Prose or Vulgate Cycle, a huge trilogy comprising Lancelot Propre, La Queste del Saint Graal and La Mort de Roid Artu written in Old French between 1215 and 1230). In these Medieval “quest journeys”, narrative elements were ritualized. By gaining the sacred token (generally the Holy Grail, but sometimes a stone; remember Bloom keeps one in his pocket) the hero also won spiritual rebirth for himself and regeneration or restoration for his society, as in T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. The function of space in Medieval allegory is not governed by mimetic predilections or the later emphasis on verisimilitude characteristic of the realist novel. Space is not understood as a physical setting, but rather as a moral place. Dante’s Divine Comedy is a clear example of this (Muscatine,1953:115-22 cited in Stout,1983:16).

The latter half of the 14^th-century was a turbulent period in England. Politically the 100 year war with France had begun. Richard II, young, inexperienced and unfortunate ascended to the throne, and was later deposed and murdered by Henry Bolingbroke, later Henry IV. England was to suffer the plague of the Black Death three times during Chaucer's life. In 1381 came the Peasants' Revolt. A large and increasingly important middle class (merchants and craftsmen) was constantly infiltrating the aristocracy and constituted a new bureaucracy and a new kind of literary audience.

Chaucer’s collection of tales framed by a fictitious pilgrimage to Canterbury is a linear sequence in which each person, each tale has a momentary interest which makes it "seem" to happen in the present. Chaucer brings the past momentarily into the present. Though most scenes are recounted in simple past, the author brings the present for moments of direct communication particularly in the general prologue and in the links between tales. The pilgrims' voices have the same ring of vivid direct communication as the narrator's. Individual tales in their conclusions return us to the outer form, the ongoing pilgrimage, which implies the mutability of life itself. Chaucer offers a plural temporal perspective. The different contexts of time and place demand different emotional and intellectual responses. It is this multiple perspective which accounts for the element of humor, due to Chaucer's ability to see things from a sympathetic but detached distance perspective (refer to the previous section for an analysis of narrative distance and irony). Reality is not presented as a single, fixed, static picture, but as the process of constant change, requiring constant adaptation to manage the different situations and relationships. Successful characters are those capable of adapting. Change and alternation lead to a kind of unchanging harmony, unity within multiplicity. The vision of fragments of reality compose a harmonic reality, which is a unity within the multiplicity, like a musical composition. Everything is part of God's creation. All individualities are integrated in the larger pattern of God's reality. There is no hyper-valuing of the individual like in the Romantic period, no breach between self and context -a breach which takes place in the 19^th century when the individual does no longer feel part of a larger pattern. He/she feels outside the changing world, incapable of adapting to its pace. The loss of faith and of a unifying perspective is clear since the 19^th. Chaucer’s linear journey of pilgrimage is integrated once more in the larger circular structure of God’s universal and cosmic time.

After 30 years of dynastic strife between the houses of York and Lancaster, the dispute ended with the marriage of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, establishing what is known as the Tudor period, a period of strong central authority. The power of the barons had been weakened by the wars, and the church was supported by the king. The Tudor kings were positive and strongly identified with their country; they brought unity and prosperity to England. The Tudor scene is an age of great progress due, among other things, to the discovery of America, the decline of feudalism and the growth of trade and manufacture, the growth of literacy (now texts are printed and more available), the penetration of Italian Renaissance thanks to the increasing number of translations, etc.

To counter the fear of uncertainty in everyday life (there was a constant fear of invasion by Spain and Scotland; people could starve to death if crops failed, etc) Elizabethans had a firm and fixed concept of order, in which everything in the world had its natural mode of working and a place in the scheme of things. Order imposed by God upon Chaos. This could be seen in their rigid class structure, in their cosmology with planets following fixed orbits, etc. Without order life would disintegrate. Political power was linked to religion. The king ruled by divine appointment, an added protection against rebellion. There was a moral justification in the figure of the monarch, who helped to maintain order and stability as well as kingship (this is seen in Shakespeare's plays). Everything is linked in a chain of being, and nothing can happen in isolation. There were six classes in the chain of creation: God, the angels, Man (the ruler being the highest rank), higher animals, vegetative class and finally the inanimate class. The universe was moved by God, who inhabited the outermost of nine concentric spheres. The two innermost spheres were the moon and the earth, which was the center of the universe. The world was made up of four elements Earth, Air, Fire, and Water which were immortal. Adam and Eve's fall from grace brought mutability into the sphere of Earth, and now the elements were either impure or mixed in the wrong proportions, and so subject to decay, death and sickness. Outside the sphere of the Earth and moon, all was still pure. The spheres were supposed to produce a divine and marvelous music as they revolved, though this could not be heard by human ears. It was believed that after the Fall, the stars exerted an influence on the world.

This circular vision of the universe (the sphere was considered the most perfect and stable geometrical figure and cosmic time was considered circular, while man’s time remained linear) had its correspondences in the human body. The brain was the guiding and controlling force. There were four humors: choler, blood, phlegm, and melancholy. If they were mixed in perfect proportion then the person was healthy and had a good personality.

There are few examples of journey narratives in England during this period, an age where poetry and drama flourished, but American history, however, begins to shape itself on this metaphor: the voyages of exploration and colonization (Columbus, John Smith, etc), the journeys of escape, which the Puritan pilgrims viewed as a visionary escape from religious oppression, etc.

The explorers’ accounts are mainly geographical and spatial descriptions of the new land, and portraits of the people encountered (American Indians, other settlers, etc.). The journeys of escape can take several forms. Some consist on a motivational building toward the culminating act of breaking out and liberation, a celebration of personal transcendence, where the hero or heroine must struggle to overcome obstacles which very often take the form of natural elements (mountains, rivers to cross, etc.) with an allegorical meaning. These obstacles may be sent by God himself and they are intended as theophanies (God’s manifestations, in terms of Mircea Eliade), trials and spiritual difficulties which the pioneers must suffer before reaching the promised land. One of the clearest examples is Pilgrim’s Progress.

Other journey narratives take the form of a new home-founding, focusing on the building of the house, the family, pregnancy and the first birth in the settlement. This emphasis on the development of social order and collectivity is another defining element in American narratives where the founding of a better society is shown as the main goal (Stout,1983.29-46). In these narratives the question of a motive or righteous purpose is crucial in the narrative’s interpretation and evaluation of the migration experience. There is a extreme concern with a serious constructive purpose.

3. The Role of Time and the Rise of the Novel.

I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness –in a landscape selected at random- is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern- to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.

Nabokov, 1947:139

The rise of the novel at the end of the 18^th-century owed much to Locke’s conception that truth can be discovered by the individual through his senses. Modern realism begins from this position. The new kind of mimetic experience that the novel tries to present does not reside in the kind of life it presents, the fact that Moll Flanders is a thief, Pamela a hypocrite, or Tom Jones a fornicator, but in the way it presents it. This literary traditionalism was first and most fully challenged by the novel, whose primary criterion was truth to individual experience, a literary change that was analogous to the rejection of universals and the emphasis on particulars which characterizes philosophic realism. Despite the critical tradition in the early 18C governed by the strong classical preference for the general and universal, a tendency particularly pronounced in the neo-Platonist tendency, which had always been strong in the romance, a contrary aesthetic tendency in favor of particularity soon began to appear. Artists such as Rembrandt and writers like Henry Fielding, Daniel Defoe and Tobias Smollett, Samuel Richardson and Laurence Sterne began to give importance to aspects such as characterization and presentation of background.

Locke had defined personal identity as an identity of consciousness through duration in time; the individual was in touch with his own continuing identity through memory of his past thoughts and actions. This location of the source of personal identity in the repertoire of its memories was continued by Hume, and this point of view became characteristic of the novel. Sterne, Woolf, Joyce, Proust, Nabokov... have made their subject the exploration of personality as it is defined in the inter-penetration of its past and present self-awareness.

Time is an essential category in another related but more external approach to the problem of defining the individuality of any object. The "principle of individuation" accepted by Locke was that of existence at a particular locus in space and time, so that circumstances need to be specified. In the same way the characters of the novel can only be individualized if they are set in a background of particularized time and place. Scott’s historical novels are a clear example of the role of historical background in shaping the psychological identity of the characters.

Both the philosophy and the literature of Greece and Rome were deeply influenced by Plato's view that the Forms or Ideas were the ultimate realities behind the concrete objects of the temporal world. Those forms were conceived as timeless and unchanging, a premise diametrically opposed to the outlook which has established itself since the Renaissance, and which views time, not only as a crucial dimension of the physical world, but as the shaping force of man's individual and collective history.

The novel's plot is distinguished from most previous fiction by its use of past experience as the cause of present action: a causal connection operating through time replaces the reliance of earlier narratives on disguises and coincidences, and this tends to give the novel a much more cohesive structure. Even more important, perhaps, is the effect upon characterization of the novel's insistence on the time process. The most obvious and extreme example of this is the stream of consciousness novel which purports to present a direct quotation of what occurs in the individual mind under the impact of the temporal flux.

The role of time in ancient, Medieval, and renaissance literature is certainly very different from that in the novel. The restriction of the action of tragedy to twenty-four hours, for example, the celebrated unity of time, is really a denial of the importance of the temporal dimension in human life; for, in accord with the classical world's view of reality as subsisting in timeless universals, it implies that the truth about existence can be as fully unfolded in the space of a day as in the space of a lifetime.

As Ian Watt (1959) has pointed out, Defoe is the first author whose fiction presents us with a picture of the individual life in its larger perspective as a historical process. This impression is much more strongly and completely realized in Richardson. He was very careful to locate all events in his narrative in an unprecendentedly detailed time-scheme: the superscription of each letter gives us the day of the week, and often the time of the day. Fielding introduced an interesting innovation, the use of an almanac in Tom Jones. With slight exceptions nearly all the events in the novel are chronologically consistent.

Defoe´s Robinson Crusoe (1719) can be read as a journey of home-founding. There are no pregnancies or babies but we can find a taint of paternal imperialism that was to characterize British colonial expansion in the following years. Moll Flanders is also structured as a journey, somewhere between the individual quest, that is, a journey of search for an envisioned but not clearly defined located goal, a quest for a place in society and a portrait of that society rendered by the successive encounters with different class-types in the same way as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Swift’s Gulliver Travels (1726) or Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) and Joseph Andrews (1742).

The nobody consciousness that narrates 19th-century novels reconciles all private and apparently separate times of individual awareness into one and the ‘same’ time, confining language to history. The narrative consciousness of modern novels, however, belongs to a changeable reader-writer who is engaged in conspicuous construction, that makes time and consciousness into the dimensions of language.

4. The Romantic Journey of Quest.

Es necesario afirmar proposiciones y hablar para tener ideas universales; porque tan pronto como la imaginación se detiene, la mente sólo puede proceder por medio del discurso.

Bernard Gagnebin y Marcel Raymond “Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de línegalité”, Oeuvres complètés,. París: Gallimard. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. 1964. vol3. Cited in De Man,1979:171

The Romantic era was one of technical, political, and social revolutions and counter-revolutions, of industrialization, urbanization, of increasingly massive industrial slums, of the first global European war and post-war economic collapse, of progressive specialization in work, alternations in economic and political power and consequent dislocations of the class structures, of competing ideologies and ever imminent social chaos.

The immediate effect of the French Revolution (Storming of the Bastille 1789) was temporarily to abolish the French monarchy, to reduce for ever the rigid class divisions of French society, and to begin wars (lasting till 1815) which for the time being extensively altered the map of Europe. Its lasting effect was to inspire the European mind with the belief that change is historically inevitable and static order unnatural, and to imbue it with modern ideas of democracy, nationalism, and equality at least of opportunity.

Literature was implicated in the Romantic revolution in many ways. It was the field of struggle for self-definition of the classes who produced and consumed literature, principally the professional middle classes. For, besides this reaction to the external situation and political changes, Romanticism is also an internal revolution, a radical change of attitude towards the value of intimate human experience. During the 17C and 18C scientific discoveries and analytical reasoning had been the instruments of the so called “Enlightenment”, when human beings were valued mainly as citizens playing a proper and fixed place in society. The Romantics reacted in particular against previous attitudes toward individuality, imagination and nature. They believed than human beings are individuals, not merely members of a society, and that they are linked to nature more than they are to urban artificiality. They did not accept religious or social ideas defended as the only truth, but sought a freer concept of truth, based in individual experience and what is more important, based in imagination (both David Hume and Kant coincided in affirming that knowledge should begin with an understanding of experience). The action of the mind in apprehending conditions of experience works first combining the elements into a single act of knowledge which Kant identified as imagination and Hegel as “the Absolute”. Romanticism can be considered primarily a metaphysic in which the world is perceived from inside to outside. Art becomes subjective and organic and external reality is mirrored seeking its perfect form, the world of platonic ideas, leaving out the particular and retaining only the general.

The journey narratives of this period take the form of a quest for social identity and provision for social structure, exemplified for instance in Walter Scott’s Waverley series. In James F. Cooper’s Pioneers or The Prairie, the rendering of the national theme and questions of right motives become essential. American narratives are particularly vulnerable to the question of law breaking. It appears as threatening to the stable social order and to the primitive but righteous communion of man and nature. All these journey narratives present a balance between the linear narration of aspiration, progress and building and the cyclic pattern of nature, which provides a higher order replacing the old theocentric Medieval world view (see Stout,1983).

Among the poets, Blake’s (1757-1927) extremely complex and subversive view of social problems -cruelty, self-righteousness, sexual disturbance, social inequity, repression of energy by reason- which he identified as symptoms of a sick society and stagnation of the spirit rather than causes, contributed to his special description of the nature of life and time. In Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, Blake describes two different states of the soul which are both part of a cycle he conceives in the following manner:

· primal unity > fragmentation: innocence (the child)

· experience (the father) >organized unity: higher innocence (Christ)

Blake holds a dialectical view of both states (without contraries there is no progression) and believes that the true vision cannot come to the innocent unless he has gone through the painful distortions of experience, to a transcended and comprehensive vision that encompasses both, a journey back to unity again.

For Blake, innocence is a fresher condition of the mind and the spirit, that allows you to see the world as it ought to be. The speaker in Songs of Innocence is a piper for whom the past represents the primal unity, the present = innocence, and the future is experience. The child is a happy creature but aware of future sorrow. The reader must maintained the ability to see beyond innocence. Blake tries to teach the reader how to transcend the simplistic vision of the innocent and lead him in his/her journey to the final unity of vision[1].

The world seen after experience (Songs of Experience), is the product of a systematic empirical distortion. A disappointment, a 'fallen state' of the soul, and a purgatory we must traverse on the route to the heavenly kingdom of higher innocence. The speaker here is a bard (poet-prophet) for whom the past is innocence, the present is experience, and the future is higher innocence. His voice is solemn and saddened. Innocence is only a memory, but there remains the possibility of finding the way to higher innocence, of awakening out of erroneous perceptions. Institutional life and the distortion of Christian values are responsible for this situation of moral, psychological and spiritual corruption.

Spiritual regeneration is also explored by Shelley in Ode to the West Wind, and escape from time, change and decay at the expense of eternal lack of fulfillment in Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn.

The Byronic hero represented a model to be followed by the Romantic poet, always dissatisfied with the roles provided by his society, characterized by his self-isolation or alienation (Childe Harold Canto 1, line 100 - 103) from the rest of the common mortals. In the first place, his distance is determined by his isolating superiority to the rest. (Ibid. Canto 1, line 103- 108; Canto 3, lines 1050-1053). This superiority determines his constant search for extreme intensity, a reveling in a world of senses and experiences (Ibid. Canto 1, stanza 2), both of intense pleasure and of intense pain (Ibid. Canto 1, line 53), which nonetheless leave him forever dissatisfied. Contemplation of death with gloating relish, as the ultimate intense experience is also typical of Romantic poets, who finally find the necessary intensity in self consolation.

Dissatisfaction explains the Romantic need to escape reality into a para-reality created by their imagination which can lead the poet to a higher reality than that of actual observable life (Ibid. Canto 1, stanza 6). It is this search for intensity which explains another characteristic of the byronic hero: a permanent depressive, moody, gloomy state, isolated, a wanderer and an exile; an arch-rebel, with a self-generated moral code which is the reverse of accepted moral values: a man characterized by his anti-social behavior. Characters such as Captain Ahab in Melville’s Moby Dick face their quests with isolation and proud self-reliance, almost with titanic self-assertion. The chief defining quality of the Romantic as distinct from the romance quest is its even greater emphasis on the theme of self-realization or self-discovery. It is a journey of aspiration. Its goal is primarily, rather than secondarily, a psychological search for identity (Bloom cited in Scholes & Kellogg,1966:237). The setting becomes a projection of the mind of the quester, and the outward and forward motion of the questing journey becomes metaphoric for the inward search of self-discovery (Stout,1983:89). It may also take the form of a symbolic journey of the creative artist toward full understanding of himself and his art. The quest, then, tends to be a mental journey. The narrative is released from everyday external reality to designate an abstract or spiritual goal.

A parallel development to the shifting of emphasis from the geographical and spatial setting towards more abstract and thematic concerns in the quest is the tendency for emphasis to be shifted away from the goal of the quest toward the process of quest(ion)ing itself. The importance of “the question” or enigma in Medieval romances, reappears in the Romantic and modern quests such as Eliot’s The Wasteland. In a limited and skeptical world the goal of the quest appears impossible to attain, or seen under an existential light, the quest’s essence is just questing, leaving the question up to the reader’s own quest. As we shall see Woolf’s narratives are structured as night journey narratives (like The Voyage Out) or wandering narratives of quest for a no-answer (like The Waves, The Years, etc.). Joyce’s skeptical irony resolves in a no-journey, just recursive, wandering narrative (Finnegans Wake) or a frustrated return home, although with a difference (Ulysses).

5. The Return Journey.

A boundless mass of human Being, flowing in a stream without banks; up-stream, a dark past wherein our time-sense loses all powers of definition and restless or uneasy fancy conjures up geological periods to hide away an eternally-unsolvable riddle; down-stream, a future even so dark and timeless -- such is the groundwork of the Faustian picture of human history.

Oswald Spengler, (1918) The Decline of the West, 165

The Victorian period was a stable and prosperous period of great colonial expansion. Many intellectuals, however, expressed their anxiety and their lamentation (Tennyson’s elegiac meditations are a typical example) for the new sense of alienation. Technological developments, which had taken place too fast for the mind to adapt to, displaced the individual from his world and the traditional patterns of life. The character of scientific discovery was seriously disturbing the 19C minds. Instead of providing evidence that the universe is both stable and transparent to the intellect, it showed the universe to be incessantly changing and probably governed by the laws of chance. After the publication of The Principles of Geology (1830-3) by Charles Lyell (it showed that the time of the earth could be measured by its strata) and later On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) by Charles Darwin, many intellectuals were forced into religious disbelief, or into some form of personal religion which, though it might contain elements of Christianity, was essentially non-theological. There is a sense of being at loss, of uncertainty, of pessimism, and a general belief that the industrial and political leadership has brought a great deal of unhappiness. These general themes/concerns are expressed, particularly in the second half of the century, in certain recurrent subjects such as the awareness of time (past, present, and future) and a preoccupation with humanity's relationship to God. A clear example are the novels by Thomas Hardy and George Eliot.

Another kind of journey narrative begins to reappear on the scene. It’s the return home narrative, exemplified in the biblical story of the prodigal son, or in Odysseus return to Ithaca. This type of journey narratives, common in the biblical tradition (see Abrams,1971) are less frequent, probably because our own experience of time moves away from us (we are the fixed point, and future lies away) and not towards us. In American writing this type of writing has generally signified defeat or retreat, frustration and the giving up of freedom (Stout,1983:66).

In the return-home narrative of the American tradition, there is a moralistic opposition of country (West) to the evil and decadent city (East), also closer to Europe, which represents the past and therefore the abandonment of American future ideals of progress and social perfectibility. This is the scheme at the heart of American sentimental novel (for a detailed description see Stout,1983:65-85).

The American journey to Europe is sometimes presented as the satisfaction of a feeling of nostalgia or loss. Hawthorne’s late romances deal with these journeys to Europe and show his own urge to retreat from the turbulence of American life to a more secure way of life, generally to the past. A similar pattern can be found in some of Henry James’s novels, although they are not so much narratives of the process of journeying as examinations of the results of journeying. His interest is in the traveler’s social experiences and impressions after he or she has decided to venture out and has arrived at a European destination, with his theme of American innocence confronting European duplicity seen in The Ambassadors (Ibid. 78- 80).

The resort to Europe in the narrative of the so called “Lost Generation” meant “back trailing on a grand scale” (Ibid. 67). In the poetry of Pound and Eliot, the journey to Europe comes to mean a turning away from present reality and a delusory search for the past –“delusory because the Europe of the dramatized encounter is itself a part of the frustrating present” (Holder 268, cited in Stout,1983:82).

The quest for identity becomes in Freud’s work a search for origins. The emotional impulses of dreams, while triggered by recent events and thoughts, must be sought, according to Freud, in forgotten or repressed childhood memories. Tracking identities to their sources takes on a historical character, both in an individual sense and in a collective sense.

6. Modern Quests.

To sum up: the story goes this way: mumble, mumble, lyrical wave, mumble, lyrical wave, mumble, lyrical wave, mumble, fantastic climax, mumble, mumble, and back into the chaos from which they all had derived. At this superhigh level of art, literature is of course not concerned with pitying the underdog or cursing the upperdog. It appeals to that secret depth of the human soul where the shadows of other worlds pass like the shadows of nameless and soundless ships... If you expect to find out something about Russia, if you are eager to know why the blistered Germans bungled their blitz, if you are interested in ‘ideas’ and ‘facts’ and ‘messages’, keep away from Gogol. The awful trouble of learning Russian in order to read him will not be repaid in your kind of hard cash.

Nabokov, 1944 quoted in Ermarth,1992.

Quest and pilgrimage are two kinds of journey undertaken for spiritual benefit but, while the pilgrimage is a journey toward a fixed goal, the quest is a search for an envisioned but not clearly located goal. Thus, the aspiration of the quest is more abstract or spiritual and its action a symbolic inner journey.

A sub-species of the quest is the night journey, Odysseus descent in the underworld, or the trials that the hero must undergo in Dante's Divine Comedy. This kind of journeys are familiar in the world of mythology and of religious experience. They have close ties with initiation ceremonies in which the hero must prove his worth and perseverance enduring a number of trials. The hero of an inward journey, however, is not controlled by his conscious volition, as the quester, but he feels himself carried along by a great undirected force. Poe’s narrator in “Descent into the Maelstrom” and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym are examples of this kind of journey (Stout,1983:90-92).

Quests become dominant at the turn of the 20^th-century, a time where an arduous search for new ideas was under way. These modern quests, however, differ from the typical Medieval narratives of religious myth where the hero returned from his voyage enlightened. Marlow, Conrad’s hero in Heart of Darkness, returns from his African journey having tasted “the horror” but knowing not too well its meaning, only to discover that he is capable of telling a lie. The narrative circles back to the point of origin leaving us with an incomplete or fragmented quest, a labyrinthine space of absence. Forster’s Passage to India also shows this incapacity of “connection” in his void middle section ‘caves’.

A basic strategy for expressing a frustrated desire to escape in the modern period is assigning a nightmare character to contemporary society. The world of dreams is a para-reality beyond rational control. Reality cannot be confronted except as a dream, as in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. But strife, ruin and futility of the modern reality can also be transcended or escaped through a mythic scheme which helps to explain it. The sense of timelessness or transcendental order in myth offers the Modernist a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving shape and significance to the panorama or anarchy that is contemporary history. Myth and art become an epistemological instrument to understand the world and history. The cyclical patterns of some myths can redeem the feeling of chaos. A mythic scheme is therefore superposed to the unpredictability of the modern world in order to understand it. In Joyce’s Ulysses the myth of the difficulty to return home, the sense of having lost your home explains the contemporary situation.

A further development in modern versions of the quest, closely related to its tendencies toward incompleteness and fragmentation, is the modulation of journeys of quest into journeys of wandering, with uncertain destination or duration. This becomes particularly obvious in the interwar years (1818-1939) by the after-effects of the first and the foreboding of the second. The period saw the immediate post-war mood of desperate gaiety and determined frivolity give way to doubt, uncertainty of aim and a deeper self-questioning on ethical, social and political problems.

The wandering, labyrinthine journey renders an oppressive sense of futility or incapacity for decisive action, like the rush back and forth endlessly from party to party in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) or Tender is the Night (1934), and the calculated monotony of the dialogue in Hemingway’s novels and short stories. Images of motion and transport convey this aimless sense of urgency in John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer (1925), while D. H. Lawrence prefers his characters to wander in the barren countryside of the English Midlands mining regions, epitomizing their symbolic impotence. No common or viable value system can provide an orientation to these journeys. The characters lack both home and destination. These spatial metaphors can be understood in the temporal dimension as having no past worthy to return to, nor a hopeful future.

Generally, in fiction of the 20^th-century the motif of the journey has found expression not only in the homeless wandering or night journeys of descent. As narratives become fragmented so does the metaphor of the completed journey. Besides different kinds of journey overlap as the sense of purpose motivating them has dissipated. In Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, the dying protagonist, Henry, undertakes a kind of night journey into his past, which is at the same time composed of a number of aimless wandering journeys, sequences of past empty experience. It is frequent that many of these incomplete journeys end with the death of the hero or heroine, offering the implication that there is no hope that their lives’ duration will bring them to any integrated understanding of experience. There is a generalized apocalyptic feeling: the sense of the utmost failure of human history, a feeling that the war marked the tragic end of a historical/cultural cycle, the end of contemporary history and that there was now a period of death and destruction awaiting for new regeneration. This idea is phrased both in fiction and narrative poems such as The Second Coming by W.B.Yeats, which introduces the concept of the "gyre" (cycle). History is seen as a cyclic process of destruction and recreation. Eliot’s The Wasteland also presents the vision of the contemporary world as a wasteland, a dead-land where God has disappeared, a land of destruction demanding regeneration. Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley shows a deep concern with the historical catastrophe, and is an attempt to re-write history and western literature in a more meaningful way.

A new kind of metaphysics of death has been developed, particularly in the second half of the 20^th-century, whose roots can be traced back to the so called Modernist period. Although Britain and the United States may have had too much interest in the empiricist models responsible for their material and political hegemony to absorb the critique of empiricism so persuasively underway elsewhere in Western culture, the narrative fiction of the period clearly reveals an increasing sense of crisis and urgency. The lack of faith in the psychological stability of the individual personality has given way to a deep questioning of all empirical, philosophical and religious solutions to human problems. The allegorical subjectivity of the texts, conveying the vision of a fragmented self in quest of identity, the rejection of ‘the Absolute’ which lead Joyce to claim that "The Absolute is Dead” (Joyce: Stephen Hero 1963:211), the pragmatism, pluralism and skeptical irony of Modernist texts are both the cause and the effect of what Hayles has called “the denaturing of time and consciousness”. If Fredric Jameson is right the very notion of social-democracy, grounded on a capitalist culture of well-being has brought about this reflexivity in which, with the help of media and technology, time has become just a moving now.

Works Cited.

Abrams, M.H. (1971) Natural Supernaturalism. New York. Norton.

Allen, Walter (1969) The Urgent West: The American Dream and Modern Man. New York: E. P. Dutton.

Albert, Edward (1987) History of English Literature. Nelson.

Baugh, C. (1967) A Literary History of England. Routledge and Kegan Paul. London. 1967.

Campbell. Joseph (1972) Myths to Live By. New York: Viking Press.

Currie, Gregory (1999) “Can There be a Literary Philosophy of Time? In The Arguments of Time. British Academy. Oxford University Press.

Eco, Umberto (1994) Six Walks in the Fictional Woods. Cambridge, Mass Harvard University Press.

Foster, E.M. (1927) Aspects of the Novel.

Fraser, J. T. (1966) The Voices of Time: A Cooperative Survey of Man’s Views of Time as Expressed by the Sciences and the Humanities. New York: George Braziller.

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Gibbs, A.C. (1966) Middle English Romances. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Grellet, F. An Introduction to English Literature. Hachette.

Holder, Alan (1966) Three Voyagers in Search of Europe. Philadelphia. University of Pennsylvania Press.

Jameson, Fredric (1989) “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism", New Left Review 146 (July-Aug. 1984): 53-92. London [etc] : Verso, 1992

Muscatine, Charles (1953) “Locus of Action in Medieval Narrative”, Romance Philology, 17, 115-22.

Nabokov, Vladimir (1944) Nikolai Gogol. New York: New Directions, 1961.

(1937-39) The Gift. Trans. M. Scammell with the collaboration of the author. New York: Capricorn Books, 1963.

(1947) Speak Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. New York: Capricorn Books, 1970.

Singer, G.F. (1933) The Epistolary Novel. Philadelphia.

Scholes, Robert & Robert Kellogg (1966) The Nature of Narrative. New York. Oxford University Press.

Spengler, Oswald (vol I 1919; vol II 1922)) The Decline of the West. Ed. Helmut Werner. Introd. Stuart Hughes. Trans. Charles Atkinson. Oxford University Press, 1991.

Stout, Janis (1983) The Journey Narrative in American Literature: Patterns and Departures. Wesport, Conn: Greenwood Press.

Watt, Ian (1959) The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Zweig, Paul (1974) The Adventurer. New York. Basic Books.

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[1] See Section 11 for Blake’s influence upon Joyce’s narrative and of his conception of a poet-prophet.

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