Telling Time: The Temporal Novels of William Faulkner, Cormac Mccarthy, and Toni Morrison

ISBN-10: 1369796870
ISBN-13: 9781369796872
Series: Telling Time
Language: English
Published: 2017
Author: George Porter Thomas

Description

This study traces a certain cycle of novels within twentieth- and twenty-first century American literature: novels that do not merely talk about time (as all novels do) but talk about how to talk about time. These temporal novels are characterized by a self-reflexive diegesis that frames time in light of the problems it always raises for language and narration: a representation in words and plots of the way that words and plots tend to obscure time itself. I call this metafictional formal pattern temporesis. Arguing that the temporal settings of fiction always take place through a narrative retrospect, I focus on how temporal novels complicate or disrupt familiar understandings of the textualized past: its supposed separation from the present, its involvements with violence and history, its fantasies of recovery and remedy, and its erasures of loss. In this mode of fiction, the past is transformed from a context into a crisis.The novels I read—William Faulkner’s Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and Go Down, Moses; Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and The Crossing; and Toni Morrison’s A Mercy—have often been interpreted by critics as historical novels in either a Modernist or Postmodernist vein. By interpreting these texts as temporal novels instead, and reading them through the work of scholars such as Henri Bergson, Eelco Runia, and Saidiya Hartman, this dissertation casts new light on important themes in American literary criticism and theory: in Faulkner, the “temporal turn” behind his most radical formal innovations of the 1930s and 1940s; in McCarthy, the “temporal mestizaje” which emerges dialectically from the historical conquests that made the US/Mexico border; in Morrison, the paralyzing turn towards absence and disconnection in the representation of slavery that poses fundamental challenges for how we tend to imagine the past as belonging to us. In a coda, I explore the implications of the importation of the idea of temporesis into film, looking at how Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained and Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave frame visually the historiographical aporia of American slavery.