Lecture 18: Living in a Block Universe

English 140
Summer Session B, 2012
UC Santa Barbara

No matter how many times we reopen King Lear, never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert's father's timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. Thus X will never compose the immortal music that would clash with the second-rate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit murder. Under no circumstances will Z ever betray us.

Humbert Humbert in ch. 27 of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita

Into the future

Clare: We are making a killing in the stock market these days. (300; ch. 15)

[Clare, on giving Kendrick advance information about his child:] It seems not fair that we’re exploiting this.

Unsporting, you mean?

Uh-huh. (314; ch. 16)

[Mrs. Cooper]: Sir, Alba’s father is dead. (387; ch. 28)

Kimy smiles. That don’t happen so much these days. Now he’s a grown-up, when he comes. But he don’t come as much as he used to.

I’ve never seen him go forward like that, into the future.

Well, you don’t have so much future with him, yet.

It takes me a second to figure out what she means. When I do, I wonder what kind of future it will be, and then I think about the future expanding, gradually opening enough for Henry to come to me from the past. (309-10; ch. 16)

Richard gets it. It’s a pleasure to see him comprehend, to see him realize that someone needs him, that only he can give his only granddaughter the training she will need.

I’d be delighted, he says, and Alba’s future unrolls in front of her like a red carpet as far as the eye can see. (405; ch. 29)

[Henry:] My heart contracts; something’s going on that I don’t get, a little of my future seeping into now, but now is not the moment to investigate. (438; ch. 34)

The color blue (II)

Henry: A week later our bedroom windows are full of abstract blue translucent shapes that the sun throws across the room onto the walls, making a sky for the bird shapes Clare has painted there. (286; ch. 15)
Clare: I often invoke the memory of Henry’s face above me, surrounded by blue sky, and the feeling of being permeated by him. (429; ch. 34)
Henry: I wake up early, so early that the bedroom is blue in the almost-dawn light. (498; ch. 42)
Henry: The blue is deepening over the horizon and the tide is receding. I stand up and offer Alba my hand, pull her up. As she stands brushing sand from her nightgown she stumbles toward me and says, Oh! and is gone. (531; ch. 46)

Different models of time in the novel

  • Time is experienced as:
    • Individual narrative timelines for each character
      • These converge on and diverge from each other, and are never represented as traveling uniformly forward for very long.
      • Still, part of our interpretive process for the novel involves some degree of reconstructing Henry’s story, Clare’s story (and, to a lesser extent, Gomez’s story, Charisse’s story, Ingrid’s story, etc.).
    • The overall forward narrative arc of the novel, which integrates the individual narrative timelines into an overarching whole.
  • Time as a place into which one can travel, into which one can be flung, in which one has a location, etc.
    Richard, to Henry: it’s good to know she’s [Annette is] there, somewhere. (227; ch. 10)
    Henry: I’m more … aware when I’m out there. (431; ch. 34)
    She’s gone back, I say to Clare. She holds my eyes in the rearview mirror for a few moments. Back where, Daddy? asks Alba. Back where? (445; ch. 34)
    I will know: somewhere out there I am dying. (469; ch. 37)
    I have the feeling, very familiar to me when I am out of time but almost never otherwise, of being buoyed up by time, floating effortlessly on its surface like a fat lady swimmer. (518-19; ch. 45)
  • A block, in which everything happens at once, despite everyone’s individual experiences of it in narrative sequence:

    Clare: Out there, somewhere, Henry and I are making love on a green blanket in a meadow, and Gomez is looking at me sleepily and reaching for me with his enormous hands, and everything, everything is happening now, but it’s too late, as usual, to change any of it, and Henry and I unwrap each other on the studio couch like brand new never before boxes of chocolate and it’s not too late, not yet, anyway. (433; ch. 34)

    • This model of time is often invoked implicitly and signaled by the use of the present verb tense to discuss the past or future:

      But – I pause to absorb what he’s just said. But then … what happens?

      Henry shakes his head. I don’t know. Probably what we thought might happen … happens. (467; ch. 37)

  • What Goes Around Comes Around (ch. 41)

    Then I could shoot myself, she says.

    That could also happen.

    But does it?

    I don’t know, Ingrid. You get to decide.

    Bullshit, Henry. Tell me, Ingrid commands. (494)

    It was my fault, Henry says. If I hadn’t been there …

    Could you have stopped her? I ask.

    No, I tried.

    Well, then. (496)

A few comments about identity

Clare: I sip my coffee and try to feel time revert, try to erase the difference between now then. It is only my memory that holds me here. Time, let me vanish. (533; ch. 47)