Temporal and visual narrative structures in Bely, Nabokov, Robbe-Grillet, and Resnais

Tetyana Lyaskovets, Purdue University

Abstract

The dissertation brings together Russian, American, and French authors Bely, Nabokov, Robbe-Grillet, and Resnais as well as the media of novel and film to highlight the ways, in which these authors conceive of time. Bely, Nabokov, Robbe-Grillet, and Resnais counter a one-way directionality of the clock time, which demands an absolute distinction between the past, the present, and the future, by offering models of time that collapse these temporal distinctions. They do so in search of timelessness as a means to reconcile the human condition of mortality. By challenging the conventional one-way thinking of time as history, these authors locate the subject in what Bergson calls duration, that is a personal experience of constant becoming—an overlapping of the past and the present. While our intellect functions chronologically, intuition and art allow us to experience consciously the simultaneity of the past and the present. The French thinker Gilles Deleuze develops the Bergsonian idea of time’s non-chronological nature by claiming that art collapses the virtual and the actual in such a way that makes the difference indiscernible. This collapse happens when a character sees but does not act, thereby recreating the logic of Bergson’s duration. The Russian philosopher Florensky also discusses intense looking that immerses one spiritually into timelessness. To understand just how Deleuze’s modification of Bergson applies to narrative structure, we need to realize there is another form of escaping the irreversible succession of clock time. It is the creation of what Joseph Frank calls “spatial form”—patterns, or mental maps, that juxtapose the fragments and function as spatial-visual metaphors within a novel. To achieve meaning, these maps make the reader collapse the past experience of the characters with a present episode. These cross-references within the text demand a simultaneous apprehension of otherwise sequential episodes and thus utilize the logic of visual arts. For the analysis, I have chosen texts that thematize a split between linear chronological time, embodied in a clock, and duration by presenting the latter through a highly subjectivised experience of seeing: Bely’s Petersburg (1913), Nabokov’s The Eye (1930), Otchayaniye (1936) (Despair (1937), and Speak Memory (first published in one volume in 1951), and Robbe-Grillet and Resnais’ film Last Year at Marienbad (1961). In the course of a textual analysis, I demonstrate how structures of narrative visuality—the collapse of the actual and the virtual and the spatial form of the novels—reproduce time that emerges in the works of the four important authors in 20th century Russia, France, and America. Bely, Nabokov, Robbe-Grillet, and Resnais use time to organize visual representations, and they use visual representations to define time. They create the described spatial-visual narrative structures to answer the conundrum of time posed by Bergson, Florensky, and Deleuze.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Ross, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Comparative literature|Romance literature|Slavic literature|American literature

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