VV(18): The clock inside revisited ...

[Dave Monroe]

"The clock inside the Gare du Nord read 11:17: Paris time minus five 
minutes, Belgian railway time plus four minutes, mid-Europe time minus 56 
minutes.  To Melanie, who had forgotten her traveling clock--who had 
forgotten everything--the hand might have stood anywhere." (V., Ch. 14, Sec. 
1, p. 393)

>From Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, Realism and Consensus in the English Novel 
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1983), Part One, "Perspective and Consensus," 
Chapter Two, "Perspective in Narration," pp. 38-64 ...

"What the faculty of sight is to space, the faculty of consciousness is to 
time.  The rationalizing consensus of realism depends, in fiction, on the 
presence of the narrator.  The realistic narrator's function, like that of 
the implied spectator in painting, is to homogenize the medium.  Like the 
implied spectator, the narrator stands outside the frame of events but in 
the same continuum, that is to say in a time by convention coextensive with 
that of the represented time.... and thus establishes a ... potential for 
agreement among multiple consciousness that the implied spectator 
establishes among multiple spatial points of view.  The linear coordinates 
in fiction (past, present, and future) operate like the spatial coordinates 
in painting (front, side, and back) to homogenize the medium in which 
consensus becomes possible.  It is the agreement, or lack of disagreement, 
among these viewpoints that unifies the field of action and confers the 
illusion of perspective.  The very distinction between past, present, and 
future is only meaningful in the first place because the periods thus 
distinguished are mutually informative.  They are the linear coordinates 
that make possible relative measurement in time." (p. 40)

"The narrative perspective (or 'narrator') coordinates these relative 
measurements into a unified, collective vision.  At every moment in a 
past-tense narration, more than one viewpoint is represented.  Every moment 
is grasped automatically from more than one viewpoint because every moment 
is both 'present' and at the same time already past, already part of a 
recollection taking place some time in the future of the event." (pp. 40-1)

[and note how Ermarth cannot but spatialize the temporal here ...]

"Every 'present' in realism is in this way also past, so at every moment in 
the present story we are continuously aware of the future ....  In other 
words, every event that is happening in realism has already taken its place 
in a pattern of significance, a pattern that at the same time depends upon 
the cumulative, serial development of those events." (p. 41)

"Interest in the revelations of sequence ... thus finds its fullest 
aesthetic expression in the temporal medium of literature and its fullest 
literary expression in the realistic novel ....  The conception of time as a 
common medium in which distinctions between past, present, and future are 
meaningful (i.e., mutually informative) is a conception predicated by 
realistic narrative as well as confirmed by it.  The reader is led to 
discover the systematic rules of transformation that explain how events 
proceed from each other ....  The past has meaning in relation to the 
present and this relation is reciprocal; the present can only be understood 
through the generalizations that emerge serially from the past.... the 
implied consciousness, the narrator, coordinates all moments into a single 
temporal series from a stance outside ...." (pp. 41-2)

"Since any particular manifestation is thus equivocal, a series of them is 
essential in order to read the meaning of any particular ...."  (p. 43)

"... the most important power in this recovery is memory.  Since the meaning 
of any particular case cannot be read at all without comparison with other 
particular cases, and since the only other particular cases are past ones, 
the mnemonic act of recovery is crucial for perceiving the patterns in 
events." (p. 43)

"In all realistic novels one of the chief moral problems characters face is 
that of making proper connections ....  The power to accomplish this is 
often specifically tied to the power of memory." (p. 44)

"Fragmented times become a single Time which, however provisional, 
persistently holds out the possibility of rationalization to the perceptive 
seeker of similitudes.  What the past-tense narration provides is ... the 
persistent claim that, because the medium is constant and the uniformities 
exist, increasingly satisfactory resolutions are possible." (pp. 46)

"... change in realism offers the only way to discover identity or, in other 
words, that form of the whole which emerges serially from different but 
similar cases." (p. 47)

And from Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the 
Crisis of Representational Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1992), Part 
One, "Time off the Track," Section I, "Historical Time as a Thing of the 
Past," pp. 25-45 ...

"In narrative the key feature in this convention is the much discusses, 
so-called omniscient narrator ... 'the Narrator as Nobody.' ... This 
'Nobody' narrator, this implicitly collective historical reflex rationalizes 
consciousness by aligning time into a single horizon." (p. 27)

"Such 'Nobody' narrators literally constitute historical time by threading 
together into one system and one act of attention a whole series of moments 
and perspectives." (p. 28)

Now note Herbert Stencil's "impersonation" here.  Not to mention Thomas 
Pynchon's ...
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