The Haunted Chamber
‘And I suppose they told you too that my roll of life is not natural? But before proceeding to conclusively confute this begging question it would be far fitter for you, if you dare! to hasitate to consult with and consequentially attempt at my disposale of the same dime-cash problem elsewhere naturalistically of course, from the blinkpoint of so eminent a spatialist. From it you will here notice, Schott, upon my for the first remarking you that the sophology of Bitchson while driven as under by a purely dimedime urge is not without his cashcash characktericksticks, borrowed for its nonce ends from the fiery goodmother Miss Fortune (who the lost time we had the pleasure we have had our little recherché brush with, what, Schott?) and as I further could have told you as brisk as your D.B.C. behaviouristically pailleté with a coat of homoid icing which is in reality only a done by chance ridiculisation of the whoo-whoo and where’s hairs theorics of Winestain’.
- James Joyce, (1882–1941), ‘Finnegans Wake’.
The sophology of Bitchson, that is, the wise words of philosopher Henri Bergson, (1859–1941), author of ‘Time and Free Will’, 1889, in which he argues against Immanuel Kant, (1724–1804), for whom freedom resides in a domain outside of space and outside of time. Bergson’s rejoinder to such a notion was to charge Kant with having muddled up space and time into a concoction with the consequence that human action has then to be conceived as being determined by natural causality. For Bergson, on the other hand, so that one may define consciousness, and therefore freedom, one has to differentiate between space and time, to dis-unite them, so to speak; and through such differentiation one can then define the immediate data of consciousness as being temporal, that is to say, as duration; for within duration events are not set side by side, and consequently there is no mechanistic causality; it is only in terms of duration, in the technical sense that Bergson employs the term, that we may speak of an experience of freedom.
‘Time and Free Will’ may be summarised as follows.
1. It is inappropriate to limit thought to spatial concepts; time, in particular, should not be conceived of as extension.
2. It is misleading to conceive of dynamic matters by the use of static concepts.
3. In giving accounts of aesthetic feelings or sensations, philosophers often attempt to describe qualitative changes in a quantitative fashion.
4. Space is the material with which mind builds up the conception of number, but the sensations by means of which we form the idea of space are themselves unextended and qualitative, not quantitative.
5. Time is duration, and duration may very well be nothing but a succession of qualitative changes permeating each other.
6. A self of pure duration is not subject to the distinctions which are imposed upon the self considered symbolically; the self is free when its acts spring from the whole personality.
‘The time of the philosophers did not exist’, Albert Einstein, (1879–1955), (or Winestain, as Joyce refers to him in the above passage), reportedly asserted, who having unified space and time with his theory of relativity presented us with a block universe model of the world, according to which the universe is a giant block of everything that has ever happened at any time and at any place; the past, present and future, therefore, all exist and all are equally real. And Bergson, with his philosophical theory of time, did not agree of course, believing that our understanding of time could not be grounded solely upon clocks, albeit that clocks do assist us when it comes to recognizing simultaneities: ‘When our eyes follow on the face of a clock, the movement of the needle that corresponds to the oscillations of the pendulum, I do not measure duration, as one would think; I simply count simultaneities, which is quite different’. Something of significance and exterior to time has to be incorporated into our understanding of time; only that could reveal why we conceived of clocks as necessary to begin with.
Our perception of the world, according to Bergson, is not, as commonly supposed, primarily introspective, reflective, unattached, dispassionate; it is in fact already shaped by our memories; and both memory and perception are defined by our sense of what can be acted upon and what cannot. Memories are active participants, and further: ‘… if the difference between perception and memory is abolished … we become unable to really distinguish the past from the present, that is, from that which is acting’. The differentiation between the past, the present, and the future is therefore determined physically, physiologically, and psychologically; whereas Einstein’s theory of time treats of duration as a kind of insufficiency or defect, a treatment that impedes our realization of a future that is in reality open, unpredictable, indeterminate; which is to say, it eradicates that which is most affirmative in the real world, that is, real time. Time is not something separate and distinct from duration, according to Bergson; time is duration.
Bergson did employ the word time to grasp the sense of the everyday, non-philosophical, non-speculative and uncontentious facets of time, but the word duration he employs in a distinctive, philosophical and speculative, technical sense; duration is an intrinsically continual inter-connected process that cannot be divided up into separate moments; to say of time that it is duration is to say that the parts of time differ from the parts of space in that they do not have a separate existence juxtaposed to one another; but rather they inter-penetrate, they are the indivisible parts of a single continual, connected process; whereas, prior to Bergson’s own thoughts on the matter, science and philosophy conceived of time as spatialized and constituted of separate moments. He therefore presented arguments against such a spatialized conception of time; and in the process discovering, so he thought, parallels between space, time, duration, extension:
‘We set our states of consciousness side by side in such a way as to perceive them simultaneously, no longer in one another, but alongside one another; in a word, we project time into space, we express duration in terms of extensity, and succession thus takes the form of a continuous line or a chain, the parts of which touch without penetrating one another’.
Wyndham Lewis, (1882–1957), however, in ‘Time and Western Man’, 1927, took exception to what he regarded as a time-cult that he saw as the predominant philosophy of the early twentieth century and disseminated by Bergson and his adherents, Samuel Alexander, (1859–1938), and Alfred North Whitehead, (1861–1947), and practised by such authors as Gertrude Stein, (1874–1946), and Joyce himself (the above passage could certainly be read as a response to Lewis and his thoughts on time; there are allusions in there to Marcel Proust, (1871–1922), author of ‘In Search of Lost Time’, and of whom Lewis would also no doubt have had issues with). Lewis castigated the deprecation of space through the advancement of the time-mind of Bergson; time as Bergson conceived it, (‘the blinkpoint of so eminent a spatialist’, as Joyce wrote), represented everything that is degraded and debased in art itself; that is, fluidity, alteration, the propensity for romanticism, the horde, the masses, the subconscious. Space, on the other hand, represents everything that is agreeable and enticing: stability, cohesion, that which is fixed, a propensity towards classicism, the individual, and consciousness. Lewis thus endeavoured to render space and time as polar opposites; the former separates us and keeps us static; the latter conjoins us all together and keeps us continually moving.
Lewis, inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche, (1844–1900), regarded contradiction to be a mechanism of creation, which is evident in his style of painting that came to be known as Vorticism. ‘The New Vortex plunges to the heart of the Present’, said Lewis, ‘we produce a New Living Abstraction’; this style of painting consisted of a Cubist-like fragmentation of reality combined with a hard-edged imagery drawn from machine technology and the urban environment, a bit like Futurism in fact, although Lewis had an issue with Futurists also with their idolization of the world of tomorrow (he was no philosopher; it is something of a challenge keeping up with his inconsistencies. ‘The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present’ he said). Lewis asserted that the Vorticists ‘start from opposite statements of a chosen world… discharge ourselves on both sides… We fight first on one side, then on the other, but always for the SAME cause’; for ‘action is impossible without an opposite — it takes two to make a quarrel.’ The artist is thus perpetually at war, so to speak, for stability to be eventually attained as two opposing forces arrive at the maximal point of tension, and rather than cancelling each other out they produce a highly charged impasse; and the artist’s very identity is shaped by a type of interior civil war waged between conflicting facets of his personality: ‘the group that has proved most powerful I have fixed upon as the most essential me’.
And so, given that nothing can exist without its other, and art is created when the opposing sides come into conflict, for the tension between these two opposing factions to be maintained everything has to retain a certain distinctiveness, solidity and clarity of outline so that it would not be confused with its other, and the artist in particular has to retain his individuality. Clearly a method grounded upon contradiction is incompatible with the principle precepts of the time-cult as, in Bergsonian time, we inhabit a collective unconscious, since we all experience the same time, even when we do not occupy the same space. The individual is absorbed into the crowd in Bergson’s space/time perpetual fluctuations; for Lewis, Bergson’s philosophy was ‘an eternal mongrel itch to mix, in undirected concupiscence with everything that walks or crawls.’
Once the artist becomes subsumed into the crowd he or she is finished as a discreet being with an opponent and is thus unable to engage in conflict. Stein is thus criticised for becoming the people she wrote about, entering into the mind of a character in an act of intuition, thereby abandoning her distinctiveness. And Joyce is criticised for his method of interior narration. Intuition, for Lewis, is associated with time and a subsumption into fluidity and mutability, whereas the intellect thinks spatially as it operates analytically, separating things into distinct elements: ‘the intellect works alone…[and] it is precisely this solitariness of thought, this prime condition for intellectual success, that is threatened by mystical mass doctrines.’ And thus externality is as essential as the exterior world of space was real and not immaterial like the interior mental landscape; a visual artist should thereby value the spatiality and stability of the visual world which is obstructed by the time-cult.
The time-mind is excessively preoccupied with the past and future to the disservice of the present, and according to Lewis: ‘there is no present, there is past and future — and there is art’; for the artist exists in the present which is a space of conflict; the point at which the past and future encounter each other. Emphasis upon the present is the stamp of modernity; as opposed to dependence on the past, which is overly romantic, or the future, which is simply speculative. Lewis therefore was critical of the stream of consciousness literary technique with its preoccupation with a world that was solely in the past; through the recreating of the process of memory and free association, Joyce, the accusation goes, relies upon things in the past and which exist no longer other than in the mind, which is to say, in time and not in space; thus endeavouring to bring dead matter to life, to disguise the past as the present; as in ‘Ulysses’, for instance, Joyce is accused of employing an ‘all-life-in-a-day-scheme’ that compresses past and future into the present, thereby annihilating time’s elegant and orderly linearity in favour of an agitated confusion; and obstructing our view of the here and now in the process. And Lewis criticises poet Ezra Pound, (1885–1972), for his predilection for archaic forms and for his devotion to the past. Not that Lewis could be said to have presented an alternative philosophy to dethrone the time-cult; it seems more like an exercise in giving vent to his own contradictory opinions; rubbing terms against each other, space and time, stability and flux, classical and romantic, perhaps with the intention of creating the kind of intense standoff that he is apparently in favour of.
Lewis is correct to be critical of Bergson’s philosophy of time and duration, but he is so for the wrong reasons; there is something the significance of which cannot be over-estimated and which he is overlooking, as did Bergson himself for that matter, but which Joyce did not; to attack Joyce for promoting a Bergsonian time cult or for disguising the past as the present is so very wide of the mark.
According to Bergson our perception of the world is shaped by our memories; perception and memory are intertwined, to differentiate them leads us to be unable to distinguish the past from the present, from that which is acting, and the distinction between the past, the present, and the future was determined physically, physiologically, and psychologically. The problem with this view, however, is that our brains work in two very limited scenarios; in the case of memory it lies to us when we try to remember events; and in the case of perception it actively works to make things look like what it has decided those things should be even if it is wrong about what those things are. Memory operates in curious ways and is poorly understood psychologically speaking, it is even known to alter over time; events once perceived as objective reality can become befuddled fabrications, for instance; and we let slip from memory things for many years which then unaccountably and suddenly re-appear in our consciousness. ‘A thought comes when it will, not when I will’, said Nietzsche.
So too memory is poorly understood physically and physiologically, it is uncertain how memory is stored; or why particular neurons fire at the moment they do and others do not. The mind deviates and oscillates continually and persistently, affording no ostensible regularity. At times bad memories are repressed, at other times they haunt us; and all of this is so much dependent on the forever altering and modifying perspective and frame of mind of the internal cartographer.
And further, as time goes by memories become re-written, perhaps in order to reconcile them with other alleged facts; or as a consequence of the brain’s re-wiring as we get older. It is also possible to compound and compile several memories into one. It is very much an error to imagine that a supposedly true or real memory will be temporally properly ordered; events are consigned to oblivion, or disorganisation persists.
Which brings us back to ‘Finnegans Wake’. Recollection occurs from one’s own unique perspective; brought into focus by a multitude of other experiences and a horde of sensory prejudices; every recollection is coloured by one’s present set of circumstances. And in the dream narrative of ‘Finnegans Wake’, under the influence of imagination familiar figures transmogrify into symbols generated from the interaction of their physical selves, the memories and conventions connected with them, and the state of the observer; and such a process is always one of projection, as in this passage that reports on different characters perceptions of the plink-plunking of water drops:
‘The rushes by the great nuns’ pond: ah eh oh let me sigh too. Colmansbell: behoves you handmake of the load. Jenny Wen: pick peck. Johnny Post: pack, puck’.
Because of remembering things mistakenly that were perceived mistakenly to begin with we can know full well that witnessed accounts become garbled commencing from the very moment that the witnessed event occurred. In Akira Kurosawa’s, (1910–1998), film ‘Rashomon’, a murder is recounted in four conjointly contradictory ways by its four witnesses, as they present subjective, very different, self-centred, mutually inconsistent renderings of the same occurrence. The Rashomon effect, named after the film, occurs when the same occurrence is given contradictory interpretations by different individuals involved, due to the motivations and mechanisms in operation while reporting on the circumstances in questions and the subjectivity in play in perception and memory; as well as in reporting, all due to the requisite epistemological framework, the modes of thinking, knowing, and recollecting, for the understanding of complex and indefinite situations. And ‘Finnegans Wake’ has its own trial scene, replete, as the whole novel is, with instances of the Rashomon effect; the trial of the Festy King (Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker) with its four judges reviewing confused and contradictory evidence given by witnesses concerning H.C.E’s somewhat shameful transgression in Phoenix Park, whatever exactly it may have been:
‘Remarkable evidence was given, anon, by an eye, ear, nose and throat witness, whom Wesleyan chapelgoers suspected of being a plain clothes priest W. P., situate at Nullnull, Medical Square……’
……
‘A stoker temptated by evesdripping aginst the driver who was a witness as well? Sacred avatar, how the devil did they guess it!’
……
‘Sooner Gallwegian he would say. Not untoxicated, fair witness? Drunk as a fishup’.
……
And so on.
(Note: null null (German) = zero zero, sign for toilet).
If duration is a persisting qualitative continuum that is experienced by consciousness, or that which is immediately present to consciousness, and the immediate data of consciousness is thereby temporal, if time is duration, if perception and memory have to be so intertwined so that we may differentiate the past from the present, or from that which is active, the active present, if our conception of the world is shaped by our memories, and if this is how we are to conceive of time and duration, then, given what we know of how memories are constructed, fabricated one might with justification say, the past is dead and gone, and the future, far from being open and indeterminate, is grounded upon deceptions and distortions.
One need not be a Chamber — to be Haunted -
One need not be a House -
The Brain has Corridors — surpassing
Material Place -
- Emily Dickinson, (1830–1886).
Notes to ‘Finnegans Wake’ quotation:
1. conclusively = finally, decisively.
2. confute = to confound, render futile, bring to nought. +
3. begging question = beg the question, to take for granted the matter in dispute, to assume without proof. When one begs the question, the initial assumption of a statement is treated as already proven without any logic to show why the statement is true in the first place; and begging, the action or habit of asking earnestly, specifically of asking alms.
4. hasitate =, hesitate, to stop or pause respecting decision or action
5. consequentially = as a consequence or result, with logical sequence or consistency.
6. attempt = to attack, to make an effort or attack upon, to try to take by force (as, ‘to attempt the enemy’s camp’).
7. disposale = disposal, power or authority to dispose of, determine the condition of, control, etc., especially in the phrase ‘at, or in, the disposal of’.
8. dime = a silver coin of the USA, of the value of 10 cents; a petty sum of money’ and of the same time ….
9. cash = money, in the form of coin, ready money; and dime/cash and time/space (motif).
10. naturalistically = relating to the natural order of things, as opposed to a logical order .
11. blinkpoint = viewpoint, a mental position or attitude from which subjects or questions are considered; and Blickpunkt (German), point of view.
12. spatialist = an adherent in spatialism, one who is concerned with spatial qualities or relations.
13. Schott = Scott-Moncrieff, the English translator of the Proust’s ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’. Apart from the Bergsonian ‘sophology of Bitchson’ several references are made to Proust.
14. sophhology = sophologia (Greek) study of wisdom; wise speech.
15. Bitchson = Bergson, Henri (1859–1941), French philosopher, much savaged by Wyndham Lewis in ‘Time and Western Man’ (the savaging is irrational and anti-Semitic). Lewis said Joyce was of the ‘time’ school of Bergson-Einstein-Stein-Proust. (Lewis (of Henry Bergson’s philosophy): ‘Bergson had said that the intellect ‘spatialized’ things. It was that ‘spatialization’ that the doctrinaire of motion and of mental ‘time’ attacked’); son of a bitch.
16. dime urge = Demiurge, God the Creator in Platonic philosophy.
17. for its nonce = for the nonce, for the particular purpose, for the time being; and nonsense.
18. fiery goodmother = fairy godmother, a fairy who acts as godmother or protector to a mortal child: and also transference, a benefactress; and red-haired.
19. Miss Fortune = misfortune.
20. recherche = exotic, exquisite, extremely choice or rare; and Proust, Marcel (1871–1922), author of ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’ (‘Remembrance of Things Past’).
21. brush = a quick light touch, a fleeting momentary contact.
22. D.B.C. = Dublin Bread CO. It had restaurants in Stephen’s Green North, Lower Sackville Street, and Dame Street; in ‘Ulysses’, Haines and Mulligan meet in the Dame Street DBC; ‘We call it D.B.C. because they have damn bad cakes’, says Mulligan.
23. behavioristically = related to behaviorism (the characteristic behavior of a defined organism under defined conditions).
24. pailletés = palette, the set or selection of colours used by a particular artist or for a particular picture; and pailleté (French), spangled.
25. homoid icing = homicide, the action, by a human being, of killing a human being; and icing, a flavoured sugar topping used to coat and decorate cakes.
26. by chance = without design, casually, accidentally; and chance, that occurs or is by chance, casual, incidental.
27. ridiculisation = ridiculize, to make ridiculous; and radicalization.
28. whoo-whoo = exp. of sudden excitement, astonishment or relief history; and who.
29. hairs theorics = history and theorics, theoretical statements or notions.
30. Winestain = Albert Einstein (also seen as a representative of modern ‘time’ philosophy in ‘Time and Western Man’ by Lewis).
