Temporal structure in "Michael" : literary fictions as fictions in our lives
著者（英） Kazumi Kanatsu
journal or
publication title
Doshisha literature
number 37
page range 93‑109
year 1994‑03‑10
権利（英） English Literary Society of Doshisha University
URL http://doi.org/10.14988/pa.2017.0000014777
TEMPORAL STRUCTURE IN "MICHAEL"
-LITERARY FICTIONS AS FICTIONS IN OUR LIVES
KAZUMI KANATSU
"The study of the novel as a genre is distinguished by peculiar difficulties." 1 With this statesment, Mikhail Bakhtin embarks upon setting forth his methodology for the study of the novel, in which he doubts the propriety of recognizing the novel as one genre among other literary genres.
His argument is that the novel is the only developing genre, whereas other genres have been completed and in some parts are already dead. In other words, while, through their mutual interaction. "all genres in 'high' literature" become "an organic unity of the highest order" (Bakhtin 51) and organize "the literature of tthe ruling social groups," (Bakhtin 50) the novel parodies these other genres and degrades literature from belonging to the ruling social group to belonging to the individual. As Bakhtin says that "the novel inserts into these other genres an indeterminacy, a certain semantic open-endedness, a living contact with unfinished, still-evolving contempor- ary reality (the open-ended present)" (Bakhtin 52), the parodic function of the novel replaces the "absolute past," which 'high' literature takes as its subject, with "contemporary reality," time in which the author and the readers are living. It is this introduction of the living individual that reduces the literature from being that of the ruling social group to being that of the individual. The novel is the developing genre only because it relates to the present progressive life of an individual.
Parodying of all literary genres took place III the latter half of the eighteenth century when the novel became the dominant genre. As Bakhtin calls a romantic poem "a novelized poem" (Bakhtin 53), Romantic literature
[93J
was not naturally indifferent to the influence of the novelization. The suggestion of novelization in Romantic literature is more agreeable, when we bring to our minds Willams Wordsworth's enterprises in Lyrical Ballads, for exmple, his seeking for subject matter in "Low and rustic life," 2 the adoption of "the very language of men" (Preface 130) and so on. His intention to approximate literature to the actual life of an individual is also discernible in The Prelude in his criticism of the traditional pastoral, one of literary genres which belongs to 'high' literature:
'And shepherds were the men who pleased me first:
Not such as, in Arcadian fastnesses Spquesterd, handed down among theselves, So ancient poets sing, the golden age;
Nor such- a second race, allied to these- As Shakespeare in the world of Arden placed, Where Phoebe sighed for the false Ganymede, Or there where Florizel and Perdita
Together danced, Queen of the feast and King;
N or such as Spenser fabled. 3
Shepherds in the ancient Greek and Latin pastorals and those of Shakespeare and Spenser are fortificed with "Arcadian fastnesses," whose absolute innocence and happiness are derived from the invariability of its
"absolute past." Wordsworth stresses the unreality of the pastoral world and tries to substitute it with the world of the shepherds whom he calls "The un luxuriant produce of life"(l.208) and "Man suffering among awful powers and forms" (l.213), that is, the world of shepherds who are actually living and are struggling among the variavility of progressive time. A story of a shepherd which is inserted after the above cited part of The Prelude, though eliminated in 1816, shows the pastoral world of Wordsworth. The story was originally written for another narrative poem, "Michael." 4 Moreover, from
the subtitle which the narrative poem bears, "A Pastoral Poem," we can see in "Michael" Wordsworth's intention to novelize the pastoral, that is, to replace the 'absolute past' of the conventional pastoral with time in which an individual is living.
It is due to novelization that Wordsworth sounds "one of the characteristic notes of modern literature," 5 as Frank Kermode perceives:
Indeed, it is the very matter-of-fanctness of Wordsworth that so effectively familiarizes us with a dimensionless, limitless world resis- tant to paradigmatic mimesis, requiring the decreation of old forms and old ways of speaking, operating in a temporal mode. He sounds one of the characteristic notes of modern literature, and begins to make the quasi-spatial mode as inappropriate to literature as it was becoming to the sciences." (Kermode 168)
"The very matter-of-factness of Wordsworth" is another expression of his endeavor to insert into literature contemporary reality, passing and living time. Through this novelization, "the quasi-spatial mode" of the old literary forms is replaced by "a dimensionless, limitless world operating in a temporal mode." Wordsworth's matter-of factness plays an important part in the shift of the literary mode, from the spatial one to the temporal, and, as a natural consequence, in the dominance of the novel which is the literature of temporality. Therefore, in this essay, I shall examine the problem of the novelizationundertaken by Wordsworth in the narrative poem, "Michael."
Men, like poets, rush 'into the middest: in medial res,when they are born : they also die in mediis rebus. and to make sense of their span they need fictive concords with origins and ends, such as give meaning to lives and to poems. (Kermode 7)
As Kermode mentions above, glVlllg a plot- a fictive whole with beginning, middle and end- to time which we experience and live in, we can humanize our time and acquire the meaning of our life. 6 When we are living our life, all what we do as a temporal existence is to fictionalize our fluid and changeable time. We accept the meaning of the fictive whole as the meaning of our life. Our need for fictions in our lives justifies our necessity for literature. Upon the presumption of the simple relation between literary fictions and fictions in our life, Kermode correlates various stages in which fictions in our life are complicated with-the development of literary fictions, from apocalypse and tragedy, to novels or philosohical poems of modern times.
In "Michael," the narrative story of a shepherd's life is discernible as a kind of a plot. Almost all of the plot is constructed in a narrative part which begins with the words: "Upon the forest-side in Grasmere V ale / There dwelt a Shepherd, Michael was his name." 7 What is the most distinguished in this part is the chronological or linear order of time which it is based upon, as is seen in the narration of the growth of Michael's dearest son: "While he was a babe in arms ... " (l.153), "the boy grew up / A healthy lad, and carried in his cheeks / Two steady roses that were five years old' (11.177-9), "But soon as Luke, full ten years old ... " (11194), "And now, when he had reached his eighteenthyear, / He was his comfort and his daily hope" (1l.205-6) (italics mine). The incidents of his life are arranged in linear order of time to estabish the causal sequence. Because of this causality, the plot acquires the semantic unity and, at the same time, assumes an aspect of the destined inveitability. For this reason, the peripeteia of the story is introduced as a necessary consequence of a fact that Michael was "bound in surety for his brother's son." (11.210-11) Every consequence of the peripeteiais arranged in linear order again and induces the death of Michael, according to the law of cause and effect. Therefore, the construction of a plot for Michael's life is
to define the causality of his death, in other words, the fate to which he submits himself.
What makes the poem more controversial is its multilayer structure. First of all, we must take notice of the opening narration of the first person speaker, '1.' The plot of Michael's life mentioned above is embeded in this narration. And furthermore, it anticipates the end of the plot. As the speaker, 'I,' says, "Beside the brook / Appears a straggling heap of unhewn stones!"
(11.16-7), the importance of the unfinished sheepfold in the story and the non-existance, the' death, of the man to complete it, are implied in advance.
What is more important in this narration is that the speaker appears as an entity to experience a stream of time:
And hence this Tale, while I was yet a Boy Careless of books, yet having felt the power Of Nature, by the gentle agency
Of natural objects, led me on to feel
For passions that were not my own, and think (At random and imperfectly indeed)
On man, the heart of man, and human life.
Therefore, although it be a history Homely and rude, I will relate the same F or the delight of a few natural hearts;
And, with yet fonder feeling, for the sake Of youthful Poets, who among these hills Will be my second self when 1 am gone.
(11.27-39; italics mine) The past tense and perfect tense are used in the narration to show dimensions of time which have been accumulated in the self of the speaker. And, by telling the story, he dedicates himself to "youthful Poet" of the future. Time that the speaker experiences psychologically expands not only toward the past but also toward future. And, in spite of the expansion, the three elements
of the psychological time, the past, the present and the future, keep their temporal totality without being separated from each other like those of the linear time.
Moreoever, the poem is constructed by one other narration which is also based on psychological time, that is, Michael's narration of his own life.
Looking back upon his past sixty years, Michael tells how he relates to his forefathers and to Luke:
Even to the utmost I have been to thee A kind and a good Father: and herein I but repay a gift which I myself
Received at other's hands; for, though now old Beyond the common life of man, I still Remember them who loved me in my youth.
Both of them sleep together: here they lived, At length their time was come, tht;y were not loth To give their bodies to the family mould.
I wish that thou should'st live the life they lived:
But 'tis a long time to look back, my Son, And see so little gain from threescore years.
(11.361-73; italics mine) What he has done in the narration is to locate himself in a stream of time, from the past to the future, and to confirm his own temporal unity. The narration of Michael as an entity to experience the time is embedded in the preceding narration in linear time. In his narration, Michael repeats again the stories which have been already told: the peaceful life of Michael and Luke, the sudden unhappiness which' they suffer and his decision to overcome the difficulty.
The narrative poem, "Michael," consists of these three narrations: one narration in linear time and two narrations in psychological time. The narrations in psychological time hold the narration in linear time between
99 them and these three draw concentric circles round the narration of Michael as the center. [cf. figure 1) Whenever beginning, middle and end of the narration in linear time are anticipated and repeated by other two narrations in psychological time, the fictive concordance of the story is destroyed from inside and outside. We, readers, identify the disconcordance with that of time as the result of the interaction between linear time and psychological time.
[Figure 1)
Michael,
time
the narration
1ll
linear time
the first person speaker, T
1ll psychological time
The disconcordance of time is exactly what we suffer in our experience of real time. 8 Therefore it is necessary to examine how the interaction between linear time and psychological time relates to our real life. Linear time is dispersed into three aspects of time; the past, the present and the future. The causality which connects these three gives the time a semantic unity. On the other hand, in psychological time, these three elements of time are integrated into the present of the subject who experiences the time. The temporal totality allows psychological time to be free from any causality. As a result, psychological time can hold potentialities to be able to produce every meaning in its temporal unity, instead of causal inevitabilities of linear time.
Within the sphere of psychological time, we can accept the inevitability of our destiny and exercise our free will to determine ourselves. Therefore, Michael's decision to overcome his difficulty is possible when, in his
narration, he grasps a stream of time that he, his parents and his ancesters have devoted to the land. It is in his narration to Luke that Michael completes the acceptance of his plight and the determination of himself as follows:
- It (the land) looks as if it never could endure Another Master. Heaven forgive me, Luke, If I judge ill for thee, but it seems good That thou shouldst go. (11.379-82)
But as Michael's decision results in his son's absconding, it produces the causal inevitability of his death. As soon as we make a dicision according to our free will, the decision is translocated into linear time and begins to have a meaning. In the interaction between linear time and psychological time, we can see the displacement of our two selves which are divided into inevitabilities and potentialities. The displacement of two selves is indeed what we do in living our life. The division of the self provides a fundamental cause for the disconcordance of time which we experience.
Furthermore, we can have opportunities in the poem to involve ourselves in the interaction between two times. One of these opportunities is offered in the lack of substantiality of Luke. Though he is a significant character, he never spea,ks a single word. But, we can make up for the lack by listening to Michael's narration in his place. In addition to our vicarious experience of Luke's perceptions through Michael's narration, the description of the opening landscape enables us to participate in the story-telling more actively:
If from the public way you turn your steps Up the tumultuous brook of Greenhead Ghyll,
You will suppose that with an upright path Your feet must struggle; in such bold ascent The pastoral mountains front you, face to face.
But courage! for around that boisterous brook
The mountains have all opened out themselves, And made a hidden valley of their own.
(11.1-8; italics mine) In the narration of the speaker who calls us "you," we have a view of the landscape. In other words, we perceive the landcape through'the perception of the speaker. With the mediation of the landscape, the readers and the speaker can hold one vision in common. Through this vision, we can occupy one place inside the speaker's mind. Our involvement in the story in these ways makes it possible for us to participate in Michael's acceptance of difficulty and his determination of himself. We can locate ourselves in the interaction between linear time and psychological time and recognize it as the displacement of our own divided selves.
However, the division of the self is not all what we experience in reading the poem, The interaction between two times ends in the death of Michael.
His death as destiny is recognized in the psychological time of the first person speaker, 'I,' in his last narration which begins: "I have conversed with more than one who well / Remember the old Man, and what he was / Years after he had heard this heavy news," (11.451-53) His death which is anticipated by the speaker in the beginning of the poem is confirmed again by the same speaker. Terefore, three voices heard in three narrations of the poem are recognized as the single voice of the speaker. And, as soon as we begin listening to three voices as a sigle one, we are left alone in the same landscape as the one at the opening of the poem. What plays an important part in the landscape is the "brook of Greenhead Ghyll." The poem begins with the description of the river: "If from the public way you turn your steps / Up the tumultuous brook of Greenhead Ghyll" and ends with the same one:
" ... the remains / Of the unfinished Sheepfold may be seen / Beside the boisterous brook of Greenhead Ghyll." (11.479-81) The sound of the river is
heard also in the beginning of the stanza in which Michael begins to tell his story to Luke: "Near the tumultuous brook of Greenhead Ghyll, / In the deep valley, Michael had designed / To build a Sheephold .... " (11.321-23) The river is flowing while the story is being told, was flowing while Michael lived and will flow on after the story is told over. We indentify the sound of the river with these three voices which are integrateed into a single voice.
Moreover, the river symbolizes the complicated time into which the past, the present and the future coalesce as a temporal whole. Consequently, accepting the landscape of the "Greenhead Ghyll," we can realize the oneness of the self beyond the differences between linear time and psychological time.
So far, I have analyzed tthe temporal structure of "Michael" as containing three times; the linear time, the psychological time and the time symbolized by the river. The interaction of the former two times is regarded as a poetic expression for the displacement of two selves which are divided into inevitabilities and potentialities. The interaction is a poetic equivalent of our preoccupation in life, to fictionalize time which we experience. Then, what meaning does the third one, the symbolic time, have in our life? I think it necessary to conclude the investigation of the temporal structure of
"Michael" with inquiring into the question.
The symbolic time is a solution of the disconcordance which originates from the interaction between linear and psychological time. The true nature of the symbolic time will be made clear by scrutiniztng how the divided selves of Michael achieves its oneness in this poem. First of all, two figures of Michael-Michael as the subject of actions, breathing the air of fields, climbing a series of hills and helping animals, and, as the reflection in the nature "like a book" -are discerned in the following lines:
And grossly that man errs, who should suppose
That the green valleys, and the streams and rocks, Were things indifferent to the Shepherd's thoughts.
Fields, where with cheerful spirits he had breathed The common air; hills, which with vigorous step He had so often climbed; which had impressed So many incidents upon his mind
Of hardship, skill or courage, joy or fear;
Which like a book, preserved the memory Of the dumb animals, whom he had saved, Had fed and sheltered, linking to such acts The certainty of honourable gain ....
103
(1l.62-73; italics mine) Each represents one of Michael's selves committed respectively to psycho- logical and linear time. The figure of Michael in psychological time assumes temporality because of time which it experiences subjectively. On the other hand, the figure of Michael in linear time carries with it the recognition of spatiality. Spatiality is perceptible not only because the deep relationship between Michael and nature is told in the narration, but also because of its poetic style which Thomas MacFarland calls "the limpid style," 9 that is, the simple and direct style in which subject precedes verb and verb precedes object. The tone of the style "flows as naturally and as unremitting as a mountain stream"(MacFarland 250). The figure of Michael in linear time is described in this poetic style which represents the spatial homogeneity in nature.
The oneness of these two selves causes Michael to know the pleasure of love:
Those fields, those hills - what could they less? had laid Strong hold on his affections, were to him
A pleasurable feeling of blind love,
The pleasure that there is in life itself. (1l.74-7)
But, the pleasure of love is possible only when Michael's self is completely translocated into the spatial form. To be preserved in the book of the nature, the house where he lived and the oak under which he often sat with his son are given a proper noun each, "the EVENING STAR"(1.139) and "the CLIPPING TREE." (1.169) Dimensions of time are excluded here. Upon the exclusion of temporality, the oneness of Michael's two selves depends.
It is not until the peripeteia that the excluded temporality is recovered.
Then the oneness of Michael's self is again divided into two times, which begins to displace each other. The division of two selves reaches the peak when LuKe, the direct object of Michael's love, absconds from England.
The sheepfold on which Michael and Luke swore their everlasting love is left unfinished:
And to that hollow dell from time to time Did he repair, to build the Fold of which His flock had need ....
... and' tis believed by all
That many and many a day he thither went, And never lifted up a single stone. (11.460-66)
But we cannot find any exercise of Michael's will in the failure to complete the sheepfold. Even after he knew Luke absconded, Michael went to the dell to build the sheepfold. But, he "never lifted up a single stone." Besides, the whole story about the sheepfold is only "believed by all." It seems that the speaker avoids admitting the exercise of Michael's will in the matter. The construction of the sheepfold is neither abandoned because of Michael's dissa.pointment, nor suspended because of his death. No conclusion is brought to the sheepfold. Therefore, being free from the power of time to change, the sheepfold is kept in the time when Luke and Michael swore their love and, is projected toward the everlasting time.
It is only in the everlasting time that Michael's two divided selves can
105 coexist and achieve oneness without excluding their temporality or without being translocated !nto the spatial form. The everlasting time emerges from the break in the interaction between linear time and psychological time. The everlasting time possesses potentialities to determine the self as in psychological time, but, it never descends to linear time to produce a meaning. Everlasting time can be a matrix of the dynamics to inaugurate the displacement of two selves. The dynamics is amplified as our ceaseless necessity for fictions in living our life. A "comfort in the strength of love"
(l.448) is another expression of everlasting time. With the comfort the poem gives us, we, who are originally temporal beings, can be cognizant of our being and awake to the depths of our existence.
Time in the depths of our existence cannot be perceived in our consciousness like linear time and psychological time. Accordingly, the time rejects being verbalized and is expressed only by a symbol in which spatiality of linear time and corresponding temporality of psychological time can coexi~t without excluding each other. The symbol is thus expressed in the landscape of the flver:
The Cottage which was named the EVENING STAR Is gone- the ploughshare has been through the ground On which it stood; great changes have been wrought In all the neighbourhood: - yet the oak is left That grew beside their door; and the remains Of the unfinished Sheep-fold may be seen Beside the boisterous brook of Greenhead Ghyll.
(11.476-82; italics mine) Not only the "Greenhead Ghyll," but also "the unfinished Sheep-fold" and two proper nouns, "the EVENING STAR" and "the CLIPPING TREE," the erased one and the remaining one as the trace of the interction between linear time and psychological time, symbolize the time into which the past, the
present and the future integrate. We conclude our reading the poem with accepting the symbolic landscape which is temporal as well as spatial and with interpreting in the landscape what is "I am." 10
The investigation of the temporal structure in "Michael" has shown us three conceptions of time: the linear, the psychological and the symbolic.
Each of them has an equivalent in our life. The former two represent all our preoccupation in l~fe, that is, rewriting in fictions by two selves polarized into inevitabilities and potentialities. Symbolic time, which emerges from the break in the interaction between linear and psychological time, is a poetic expression of the dynamics to support the displacement of these two selves, in other words, our desire for fictions or for life. Through reading the narrative poem, we can experience the interaction between linear and psychological time. The acceptance of the landscape which signifies symbolic time enables us to penetrate into the depths of our being.
All that this narrative poem offers to us in the end is nothing but the landscape of the Creenhead Chyll. The substantiality of Michael is always denied because he is described as the dead man from the beginning of the poem and because even his own voice in his narration is originally the voice of the first person speaher, '1.' Despite these facts, the figure of Michael is, for readers, more realistic and more living than shepherds in traditional pastorals. This is only because in the figure of Michael we can recognize the most purified temporality of our own being. Devising the complicated temporal structure in "Michael," W ordsworth intends to novelize pastorals of 'high' literature and to approximate literary fictions to fictions in our life.
"Michael" presents a key issue of literature of the following ages, that is, to portray the agony of an individual who experiences time divided and surpassing each other and to expiate time itself with the literary creativity. 11
NOTES
• This is the revised paper which I read for Japan Association of English Romanticism held on 17 October, 1993 in Ryukyu University.
Mikhail Bakhtin, "Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel," Essentials of the Theory of Fictions, eds. Michael l Hofmann and Partick D.
Murphy, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1988), p.49.
2 William Wordsworth, "Preface to Lyrical Ballads", The Prose Works of William Words worth, eds. W.lB. Owen and lW. Symser, (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1974), Vo!. I, p.124. All the s\lcceeding references to "Preface to Lyrical Ballads"
will be to this edition. Hereafter it will be abbreviated as Preface and page numbers will be given in the text.
3 Jonathan Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams and Stephan Gill eds., The Prelude, 1799, 1805,1850, (New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company, c 1979), p.276. All references to The Prelude are from this edition. Hereafter it will be abbreviated as
The Prelude and line numbers will be given in the text.
4 The Prelude, p.278 n3.
5 Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 168.
6 Cf. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, c1984), Vo!. I.
Paul Ricoeur gives the same suggestions as to our need for fictions in living our life. In his study of narrative aad time, he discusses the relation between "the hermeneutic phenomenology of time" and "the disciplines concerned with historical and fictional narrative," (86) in order to verify the following presupposition: " ... time becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after the matter of a narrative: narrative, in turn, is meaningful to the extent that it portrays the features of temporal experience."(3)
7 William Wordsworth, "Michael, A Pastoral Poem," The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, (Oxford: The Clarendon, 1952), Vo!.
n,
p. 81, 11.40-1. All the succeeding references to the poem will be to this edition. Hereafter line numbers will be given. in the text.8 We can obtain an illuminating explanation of this disconcordance in St.
Augustine's intense speculation on his own living time, in his Confessions, Book
XI (Everyman
s
Library, trans. E.B. Pusey D.D., London: lM. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1913). He adopts a figure of three times, out of whose concordance the disconcordance emerges again and again, as follows; " ... 'there be three times; a present of things past, a present of things present, and a present of things future.' For these three do exist in some sort, in the soul, but otherwhere do I not see them; present of things past, memory; present things present, sight; present of things future, expectation." (273) These three times concentrate into "a present" of the soul, as three different aspects, memory, sight, and expectation. But once we try to measure the dimension of unity, it is measured as the expansion of the mind; "It is in thee, my mind, that I measure times." (273) In the expansion of the mind, the temporal unity is dispersed into three different times and assumes an aspect of disconcordance.
9 Thomas MacF arland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin; Words worth, Coleridge, and Modalities of Fragmentation, (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton Unversity Press, c1981), p.249.
10 Cf. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. l Shawcross, (London:
Oxford University Press, 1962), Vo!. 1. To know what is "I am" is the act of self· consciousness which is "for us the source and principal of all our possible knowledge." (186) Coleridge says that we "begin with the I KNOW MYSELF, in order to end with the absolute I AM"(186) in which the absolute truth manifests itself.
11 Cf. M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalizm, Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, (New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1973), pp.418-9. "The Romantic Moment ill which, as Frank Kermode puts it, chronos suddenly becomes kairos, has had an enduring and multiform literary life .... And the Moment of consciousness, the abrupt illumillation in an arrest of time, has become a familiar component in modern fiction, where it sometimes functioBs, like Wordsworth's spots of time, as a principle of literary organization, by signalizing the essential discoveries or precipitating the narrative resolution. We recognize the familiar traits not only in Proust's moments privilegies, but also in Henry lames's act of imagination which 'converts the very pulses of the air into revelations' ; in Joseph Conrad's 'moments of vision' that reveals 'all the truth life' ; in Virginia Wolfe's 'moments of vision,' the 'little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck
109 unexpectedly in the dark'; in Thomas Wolfe's attempt 'to fix eternally ... a single moment of man's living ... that passes, flames and goes' ; in William Faulkner's 'instant of sublimation ... a flash, a glare.'''
