The Value of Time is Never the Hand of a Clock: Marcel Proust’s Time Regained, E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View and A View without a Room
This study aims at a comparative analysis of the last volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Time Regained (1927), and E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View (1908), including its Appendix A View without a Room (1958) to decipher Henri Bergson’s concepts of duration, intuition, elan vital (vital impulse) and Jacques Lacan’s notions of anticipation and retroaction, against the backcloth of modernity and its representations of clock fixated Time. In this framework of analysis, the study draws on Bergson and Lacan’s notions of Time to foreground the inward turn of the characters in the two novels. The article also seeks to find out whether Time is a construct for Lucy, Cecil, and George in A Room with a View and the narrator, Gilberte, Albertine in Time Regained, regarding the gap between past and present. For instance, remodelling, eradication aspects of Time are never negations for the narrator’s creation of Albertine’s image in his memory in Time Regained. Time never eradicates George and Lucy’s shared view that they once achieved in a room in Bertolini Pension in Italy in A View without a Room, despite wartime remodelling of spatiotemporal realms. Ultimately, in both of the novels, the characters experience the social and empirical reality as their present circumstances affect the narration of their past with involuntary memories, producing virtual qualitative multiplicities. Thus, the anticipation emerges within the images of a dark room that resembles the minds of the characters in the two novels.
Keywords:
Time Regained, A Room with a View, Time, Bergson Lacan,
___
- Barthes, R. (1968). “The Death of the Author”, Modern Literary Theory. Ed. Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh. London New York: Arnold. pp. 118-122. google scholar
- Bergson, H. (1965). Duration and Simultaneity. New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company. google scholar
- Bergson, H. (1944). Creative Evolution. Trans. Arthur Mitchell. New York: Random House. google scholar
- Bergson, H. (1991). Matter and Memory. Trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. London: George Allen and Unwin. google scholar
- Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. google scholar
- Canales, J. (2015). The Physicist & the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate that Changed our Understanding of Time. Princeton: Princeton UP, e-book. google scholar
- Cornelli, G. (2016). Aristotle and the Pythagorean Myths of Metempsychosis. Methexis 28 pp. 1-13 Koninklijke Leiden: Brill. doi 10.1163/24680974-02801001. google scholar
- Chehayed, Nibras. (2019). Nietzsche and Levinas on time. Nietzsche and Levinas on time. Continental Philosophy Review, 52, 381-395 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-019-09476-7. google scholar
- Childs, P. (2008). Modernism. New York: Routledge. google scholar
- Derrida, J. (1992). Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Chicago and London: The Chicago University Press. google scholar
- DiFrisco, J. (2015). Elan Vital Revisited: Bergson and the Thermodynamic Paradigm. The Southern Journal of Philosophy Volume 53, March, Issue 1. Doi:10.1111/sjp.12096. google scholar
- Evans, D. (2006). An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. London and New York: Routledge. google scholar
- Forster, E. M. (2000). A Room with a View. Ed. Oliver Stallybrass. London: Penguin Books. google scholar
- Fry, K. (2018) Lost Time and the Heterotopic Image in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz. Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, March 2018, Vol. 51, No. 1, pp. 125-141 Published by: University of Manitoba https://www. jstor.org/stable/10.2307/90021829. google scholar
- Gallop, J. (1985). Reading Lacan. London: Cornell UP. google scholar
- Griffin, F. (2013). In Search of Lost Time in Psychological Space. American Imago, Vol. 70, No. 1 (Spring), pp. 69106 The Johns Hopkins University Press https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26305042. google scholar
- Jacobson, L. (1965). “Translator’s Preface” to Henri Bergson’s Duration and Simultaneity. New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company. google scholar
- Johnson, C. (1993) System and Writing in the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. google scholar
- Jones, D. (2007). The Eleatic Bergson. Diacritics. Vol. 37, Number 1, Spring, pp. 21-31 (Review) John Hopkins University Press. Doi: https: //doi.org/10.13.53/dia.0.0017. google scholar
- Joyce, J. (1992). A Portrait of the Artist as a Youngman. London: Penguin Books. google scholar
- Lacan, J. (2006). Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton. google scholar
- Lawlor, L., and Valentine M.L. (2021). “Henri Bergson”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
- Lewis, M. (2008). Derrida and Lacan. Edinburg, UK: Edinburgh University Press. google scholar
- Macfarlane, R. (2009). William Golding: The Mandate of the Novel. Ed. Adrian Poole. The Cambridge Companion to English Novelists Cambridge: Cambridge UP. google scholar
- Marchesini, P. (2018). The End of Time or Time Reborn? Henri Bergson and the Metaphysics of Time in Contemporary Cosmology. Philosophy and Cosmology. Volume 21, pp. 140-152. google scholar
- Moran, B. (1999). Edebiyat Kuramları ve Eleştiri. İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları. google scholar
- Proust, M. (1931). Time Regained. (Stephen Hudson trans.) www.feedbooks.com, http://gutenberg.net.aup pdf. google scholar
- Sherry, V. (Ed.) (2016). Introduction: The History of Modernism. The Cambridge History of Modernism. New York: Cambridge UP. E-pub. E-Book. google scholar
- Watt, A. (2011). Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. google scholar
- W.P. (1888). “Clocks” The Connoisseur. Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 12-15, 17-18. google scholar
- Başlangıç: 1954
- Yayıncı: İstanbul Üniversitesi