Time in Elizabeth Bowen's Irish Fiction

Marcella O’Connor Time in Elizabeth Bowen’s Irish Fiction Master of Arts in partial fulfillment National University of Ireland, Cork School of English October 2011 Professor Patricia Coughlan Professor Alex Davis Table of Contents Introduction . . . . 1 Time and Place . . . . 6 Personal Time . . . . 19 Time as a Thing . . . . 33 Conclusion . . . . 45 Appendix . . . . 52 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor, Professor Alex Davis, for his help, advice, and especially his inexhaustible patience. This thesis would not have been possible without the support of my husband, Keith, and my son, Darrell. I am grateful to all of the lecturers in the School of English as well as my fellow students for making the course enjoyable. Special thanks are owed to Deirdre O’Connor, for organising class tea parties, and Flicka Small, for lending me books. Thanks also to Maisy, Angel, Georgia and the School of Resentment. Finally, I need to thank Mom, Dad, Carol, i Babcia: Dziękuję cie bardzo!  Introduction The twentieth century saw new developments in philosophy and science that changed the way people thought about time. Relativism replaced the Enlightenment conception of time as objective and uniform. In 1921, Wittgenstein wrote in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “We cannot compare any process with the ‘passage of time’—there is no such thing—but only with another process (say, with the movement of the chronometer)” (Wittgenstein 103). When Bergson debated Einstein over the nature of time at the Philosophical Society of Paris in 1922, Elizabeth Bowen was probably not paying attention. “I have never liked scientific people very much,” she wrote after her first school was turned into a museum for Charles Darwin (Mulberry 21). Yet the zeitgeist was unavoidable and many of Bowen’s literary predecessors and contemporaries were paying attention. Marcel Proust, whose À La Recherche du Temps Perdu strongly influenced Bowen’s work, was the best man at Henri Bergson’s wedding. In Virginia Woolf’s fiction, the Enlightenment “Quest for Certainty” (Schleifer ix) gives way to the stream of consciousness style associated with Bergson’s philosophy. This style allowed Woolf to question the self-evident truths that time is always and everywhere the same, succession without content; that time does not affect the events taking place ‘within’ time; and that the individual subject of knowledge and experience is atemporal. (Schleifer 2) In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf blended Bergson and Einstein by working references to scientific discourses into her stream of consciousness: Away and away the aeroplane shot, till it was nothing but a bright spark; an aspiration; a concentration; a symbol (so it seemed to Mr. Bentley, vigorously rolling his strip of turf at Greenwich) of man’s soul; of his determination, thought Mr. Bentley, sweeping round the cedar tree, to get outside his body, beyond his house, by means of thought, Einstein, speculation, mathematics, the Mendelian theory—away the aeroplane shot. (Woolf 27) Despite her wilful blindness with regard to the philosophical origins of her construction of time, Elizabeth Bowen’s artistic project benefited from the modernist climate of artistic experimentation with the concept of time. Moreover, in the context of Bowen’s interest in surrealism, her hostility toward scientists and philosophers was not out of the ordinary—Dali called Bergson a “pig” (Finkelstein 140). If Bowen did not read any turn-of-the-century philosophers, she instinctively absorbed their influence. Most modernist literary experiments with time were “possible only through a conscious misreading of Bergson’s ideas” anyway (Gillies 101). Yet unlike earlier writers who were concerned with philosophy, Bowen’s surrealist leanings meant that ontological verisimilitude was not the objective of representing time in her work. Rather, for Bowen, preoccupation with time stemmed from her interest in the relationship between narrative and identity. Bowen understood the connection between the two: “Isn’t the average thinker simply trying to trace out some pattern around himself? Or, to come on, detect, uncover a master-pattern in which he has his place?” (Mulberry 224). While Bergson strove to transcend constructions of time that are either linear or cyclical, Bowen treated philosophies like a painter’s colour palette, layering conflicting discourses of time on top of each other in her fiction to serve her artistic ends. Like Beckett, Bowen aspired to disrupt meaning: “To the individual, the possibility that his life should be unmeaning, a series of in the main rather hurting fortuities, and that his death should be insignificant, is unbearable” (Mulberry 224). This was perhaps because Bowen’s own identity was problematic. She was born into the Anglo-Irish class, raised between Ireland and England, and came of age during the Irish War of Independence. She described herself as Irish (Glendinning 207), and is mostly constructed by critics as Irish or Anglo-Irish. Some critics, for instance Harold Bloom, construct her as British (Bloom 1). Elsewhere, such as in the Aubane Historical Society’s A North Cork Anthology, she is described in terms of what she allegedly is not: Not Irish (Ellmann 10). Meaning is also disrupted in Bowen’s fiction because her work, like Beckett’s, is a reaction to the trauma of war. Beckett wrote Watt while hiding from the Gestapo and the experience haunts his other work. For Bowen war was “a condition of existence rather than a singular event” (Ellmann 11). Her early experiences were formed by the First World War, which in her fiction “exists not only as a dislocating break with the past, but as the century’s recurring source of the dead, the maimed and the ghostly undead” (Kreilkamp 19). The First World War left her feeling that an entire generation was missing from everyday life. The Irish War of Independence made her status as Anglo-Irish marginal, a situation depicted in her novel The Last September. Living through the Blitz in London was another trauma. As in the work of Beckett, experimentation became necessary to accommodate the experiences of war. A Bowen character voices the problematic nature of attempting to contain the experience of war in a narrative in “Sunday Afternoon” by saying of the Second World War, “There is no place for it in human experience...It will have no literature” (Irish 11). However, there is something else other than trauma that underlies Bowen’s reaction to war in her writing. Her fiction is populated by heroines who long for war. Lois in The Last September is put out that she is not somebody in a historical novel. Maria in “Sunday Afternoon” wants to leave Ireland to spend the Second World War in England, despite being told by a relation, “This is not like a war in history you know” (15). Bowen herself said during the Second World War that she would regret being away from London if anything should happen to it (Mulberry 216). As Hermione Lee has pointed out, in The Heat of the Day, Bowen recalled the Blitz “almost with nostalgia” (Lee 160). In Bowen’s essay “London 1940,” Blitz survivors are reduced to “the risen dead” (Mulberry 22). Yet as the border between life and death dissolved, so did the barriers between individuals. The big city of London was broken down into “village communes” and neighbours wished each other good luck every evening (24). It seems as if the breaking down of these barriers opened up room in the narrative of English identity for Bowen to feel a potent sense of belonging, which was probably similar to Stella’s sense of belonging in The Heat of the Day. Stella is comfortable being one of many “campers in rooms” (Heat 89) in London “for the ‘time being’ which war had made the very being of time” (95). For Bowen, the trauma of war produced a “theatrical sense of safety” (Mulberry 23). This turn of phrase suggests that Bowen had a role to play in the Second World War. This can be contrasted with the condition of the Anglo-Irish in The Last September, who react to the Irish War of Independence by asking, “Will there ever be anything we can all do except not notice?” (82). If Bowen did find a sense of belonging in wartime London, the feeling was temporary. Later, she wrote of London, “It is no doubt an old and interesting city but to me it has come unstuck. Had it not been for the war, it might have happened earlier” (Glendinning 208). As Bowen returned to live in Ireland in real life, it is not surprising that her fiction returned to the question of Anglo-Irish identity in A World of Love. According to Lukács, the novel is “the literary form of the transcendent homelessness of the idea” and it “includes real time—Bergson’s durée—among its constitutive principles” (Theories 121). If this is the case, then Bowen was a natural novelist as she was the personified form of the transcendent homelessness of identity in the modern world. However, Bowen believed that it was not good enough for fiction to express dislocation only: After 1918, the artist, by general assent, took up the attitude of the critical exile, the psychologically displaced person. Therefore, although that literature of contemporary sensation was produced, it was to remain a literature of sensation only—cerebrally brilliant, but skin-deep, ultimately bodiless in that it lacked soul. Between the world’s two wars, that literature ran its course; its failure being that it could not either root down deeply into the imagination or touch the heart (Mulberry 54) For Bowen, a novel had to do more than express the dislocation of the artist; it had to create, through art, a means of overcoming this dislocation: “My writing, I am prepared to think, may be a substitute for something I have been born without—a so-called normal relation to society. My books are my relation to society” (Mulberry 223). This thesis will argue that time is central in Elizabeth Bowen’s Irish fiction because her novels and stories constitute a metafictional account of the dispossessed Anglo-Irish identity in the twentieth century. Within this account, Bowen interrogates the connection between narrative and identity. The relationship of character to setting, and the relationship of character to others, are mediated by the force of time. Because of the problematic nature of Anglo-Irish identity, Bowen drew inspiration from surrealism and warped the experience of time in her fiction in order to disrupt ontological stability in the narrative. Time and Place Henri Bergson believed that “there are no two identical moments in the life of the same conscious being” (Bergson 11) and that “[i]t is our own personality in its flowing through time—our self which endures” (Bergson 8). His philosophy, in which time was figured as sensation and something that existed in flux, was highly influential on the writers of the early twentieth century. Elizabeth Bowen, despite having little interest in science or philosophy, was not immune to the zeitgeist and absorbed elements of Bergson’s philosophy in her writing. Where Bergson’s durée, or “internal time,” differs from Bowen’s is that “it cannot be applied to the world outside the self” (Gillies 102). In this way, Virginia Woolf’s fiction is actually more compatible with Bergson’s philosophy than Bowen’s is. Woolf’s “technique of blurring the distinction between direct and indirect speech,” as an “attempt to make the transition between speech and thought as fluid and overlapping as they actually are in our subjective experience” (Dowling 14), is more Bergsonian in that Woolf limits durée to the minds of her characters. This stream of consciousness style is exemplified in Mrs. Dalloway: Remember my party, remember my party, said Peter Walsh as he stepped down the street, speaking to himself rhythmically, in time with the flow of the sound, the direct downright sound of Big Ben striking the half-hour. (The leaden circles dissolved in the air.) Oh these parties, he thought: Clarissa’s parties. Why does she give these parties, he thought. Not that he blamed her or this effigy of a man in a tail-coat with a carnation in his button-hole coming towards him. (Woolf 47) According to Bowen, in Virginia Woolf’s novels, the characters “seem to stand still, amazed, while experience ripples past” (“Novelists” 157). Bowen does not employ a stream of consciousness style in her own fiction, but she does endow each character with his or her own durée. Where Bowen really differs from Woolf and other modernist writers, though, is that durée is not limited to the minds of characters but is extended to places. Bowen once declared that she preferred places to people (Halperin 22), so it is not altogether surprising that the locales in her fiction are personified and endowed with individual senses of duration. In Bowen, setting exerts a gravity-like force on the plot: “the locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it” (Mulberry 39). In Bowen, atmosphere is so prominent that her work is comparable to Chekhov’s, since “Chekhov stories deal more with mood than with action” (Hepburn 6). Because she believed in the importance of setting, given that “nothing can happen nowhere” (Mulberry 39), atmosphere in her work stems from the interaction of place and time. The durée of place is so central to atmosphere that it trumps geographical and political borders in importance. Bowen went as far as to claim that a time lag “separates Ireland from England more effectually than any sea” (101). This chapter will argue that each place contains its own temporal atmosphere, that this atmosphere interacts with a character’s experience of time and therefore is a factor in the experience of identity. In The Heat of the Day, Robert’s niece is promised a moment with him and then demands to know what a moment is, saying, “Sixty seconds make a minute, sixty minutes make an hour; but how many moments are there?” (253). Robert’s answer is that it depends on her, which establishes the non-objective and non-uniform quality of time. Elsewhere in the novel, Bowen marks a differentiation between Louie’s personal experience of time and that of her environment: Louie had, in regard to time, an infant lack of stereoscopic vision; she saw then and now on the same plane; they were the same. To her everything seemed to be going on at once; so she deferred, when she did, in a trouble of half-belief to either the calendar or the clock. (15) In Bergson’s opinion, Louie’s inability to separate past and present would have been true to life as he believed that, to live, a being must “refrain from separating its present state from its former states” (Gillies 101). Yet Bowen diverges from Bergson when she describes the durée of places. The park where Harrison waits before meeting Stella is “hourless.” When Robert walks to Stella’s, the area “seemed to have its place in no given hour of time – though across it, in contradiction, St, Marylebone clock began striking eight” (Heat 19). Stella’s environment has its own personal relationship with time and her flat, “redecorated in the last year of peace, still marked the point at which fashion in the matter had stood still” (22). Inside the flat, Stella has trouble defining time: It might have been midnight – might have even been the most extinct and hallucinatory of the small hours. She had by now passed through every zone of fatigue into its inner vacuum, and had forgotten hunger. (39) Throughout the novel, Stella’s sense of dislocation is expressed in terms of time. In the passage above, this sense of being cut off from time is projected onto the physical space around her. Yet despite Stella’s personal feeling of dislocation and the flat’s embodiment of this dislocation, nature continues to be in league with the duration of the larger environment outside the apartment, represented when “petals detached themselves from a rose in the bowl” (53), implying that nature’s time does not stand still even if the characters’ experience of it seemingly does. This fits with Lukács’s idea that, in novels, “time is the resistance of the organic—which possesses a mere semblance to life—to the present meaning” (Theory 122). There is another moment in the novel when Stella’s personal experience of time must defer to the durée of place: “Stella looked at her watch – yes, the sun was right; she had overslept” (Heat 88). This is also in line with Lukács’s opinion that subjectivity “cannot resist the sluggish, yet constant progress of time” (Theory 121). Like Bergson, Einstein and other relativists, for Bowen, time is motion: “Daylight moves round the walls; night rings the changes of its intensity; everything is on its way to somewhere else” (Heat 188). Yet Bergson did not hold with the concept of spacetime and believed that only “when time is no longer spatialized, it may be possible to become aware of life’s true nature” (Gillies 101), whereas, in Bowen, time is often understood in terms of space: A thought that fifty years hence she might well, if she wished, be sitting here on the steps – with or without rheumatism – having penetrated thirty years deeper ahead into Time than they could, gave her a feeling of mysteriousness and destination” (Last 29). The relationship between space and time is a factor in understanding identity, for instance in the way that Mr. Mortmorency in The Last September “was not due to leave the ship in which they were all rushing out into Time till ten years after the others, though it was to the others that he belonged” (29). Because a character’s personal experience of duration has a relationship to identity, a personal durée can interact with other characters’ experiences of time or even with the environment’s experience of time. The Anglo-Irish in The Last September exist in a position that is relative to Ireland and England as when Lois shut her eyes and tried – as sometimes when she was seasick, locked in misery between Holyhead and Kingstown – to be enclosed in nonentity, in some ideal no-place, perfect and clear as a bubble. (89) Ireland and England are like planets instead of countries and time runs relative to each. Inside each country, the experience of time is broken up even further according to location, so that the experience of time in Danielstown and in Anglo-Irish society is different from the experience of time in Catholic Ireland. Before the Naylors have been physically dislocated from their home by IRA arsonists, the Anglo-Irish have already been dispossessed of their place in the official narrative of Irish history. This dislocation is understood in terms of time: In yesterday’s dusk the Square with its flitter of leaves had been all autumnal; smoke was blue in the air and, later, the dark where they kissed had a sharp intimation of autumn. She loved in autumn a stronger, more shadowy keen spring, sweet shocks of good-bye, transition. Summer meanwhile stayed on inside these walls, forgotten. (166) Although summer should be associated with fertility and life, this is an image of stagnation. Summer might represent plenitude, but failure to make the transition into the next season means being forgotten. The stillness of summer in this image is suggestive of a still life painting, an art form associated with death since the first still life paintings decorated the walls of ancient Egyptian tombs. (In French, the art of still life painting is referred to as nature morte, which literally translates as “nature dead.”) In Bergson’s metaphysic, a stable projection of self would be dead “because it ceases to be mobile” (Gillies 105). Similarly, in Bowen, “there cannot be a moment in which nothing happens” (Heat 170). The stillness of the garden implies that it is outside time and therefore dead. This instance of the pathetic fallacy foreshadows the extinction of the Big House. The relative nature of time is further localised in that individual houses or flats can actively shape the experience of time. In The Heat of the Day, Roderick notices “the particular climate in which his mother dwelled” (46), which is related to where she lives: “The room lacked one more thing: apprehension of time. Inside it the senses were cut off from hour and season; nothing spoke but the clock” (53). The interesting thing about this localised relativity is that the difference between houses is a man-made one. In The Last September, time is experienced differently in Danielstown than in the rest of Cork. Physically, the house and objects that warp the experience of time are assembled by people: “Over the mottled carpet curled strange pink fronds: someone dead now, buying this carpet, had responded to an idea of beauty” (Last 98). Man-made landscapes, in their ability to change the experience of time, gain the same legitimacy as natural landscapes. In A World of Love, experience of time is also related to place. The natural landscape surrounding Montefort has its own durée because the valley where it is situated “held waiting in its keeping” (World 48). Furthermore, human interaction with the natural landscape influences the temporal atmosphere; for instance, the “thicket held, though Jane might not know it, signs of its infestation by many childhoods” (46); and the landscape after Jane reads Guy’s letters becomes “poetically immortal” as it has been “pre-inhabited” by Guy’s mind (48). Even rooms themselves are personified and have their own psychological experiences of time. The drawing room “seemed to be waiting, perhaps for ever, for its dismantlement to be complete” (31). Bowen differentiates the way time runs in Montefort compared to how it runs in the world outside. The kitchen contains a calendar for the year before (21). There is a sense that time does not have the same importance in Montefort: the dawdling and often stopping of the cheap scarlet clock wedged in somewhere between the bowls and dishes, spoke of the almost total irrelevance of Time in the abstract, to this ceaseless kitchen. One arrived, at the most, by instinct, guesswork or calculation at which day of the week it ought to be or perhaps was. (21) When Maud and Lilia are given a lift home, the man driving says he didn’t realise anyone was living in Montefort. They then walk down the “extinct avenue” (30). From the perspective of the outside world, time does not just run slowly in Montefort, but has stopped altogether. To the Irish Catholic residents of Cork, the Anglo-Irish only exist in the past tense. This relativity of physical place operates according to the same rules as identity. Narratives of history that are not in line with historical fact can still gain legitimacy and affect characters’ experience of identity. This is especially true in A World of Love. The novel is about an Anglo-Irish family that must face the past in order to move into the future. Yet, at the end of the novel, Antonia makes use of a lie to help the other characters move on. This ending suggests that facing the past has more to do with constructing a narrative to cope with history than with accepting historical fact. A character in A World of Love claims to be bored of the past since so much of it can be made up, saying, “It’s not even history” (63). Bowen believed that the historic past “must be created—i.e. created in terms of art” (Mulberry 56). Yet even if historically inaccurate narratives can become legitimate, not all narratives are equal. In the twentieth century, fascism was often associated with a “pseudo-revolutionary destruction of the past” (Studies 4). In Bowen, this destruction of the narrative of history is synonymous with the destruction of identity and is coded in the destruction of buildings and furniture. After Henry’s flat is bombed in “Sunday Afternoon,” an Anglo-Irish character implies that it would have been better for Henry to die with his possessions, asking, “Can you really feel that this is life?” (Irish 13). The character is really asking if it is possible to have a story without a setting. This idea is one that many postmodern authors writing after Bowen, such as Kundera, fixated on: “What would Hamlet be without the castle at Elsinore…without the text of his part?” (Kundera 163). When Maria tells Henry of her plan to leave Ireland for London, he tells her, “when you come away from here, no one will care any more that you are Maria. You will no longer be Maria, as a matter of fact...You are you only inside their spell” (Irish 17). The connection between loss of identity and fascism is implied when Henry says, “You’ll come round my door in London—with your little new number chained to your wrist” (17). In this story, identity is created by other people, like Proust’s assertion that “our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of other people” (In Search I 20), but it is also dependent on location. It is only in the house itself that “the suspended charm of the afternoon worked” (Irish 16). At the end of the story Henry purposely refers to Maria as Miranda. With this reference to Shakespeare’s The Tempest Ireland becomes Prospero’s enchanted island. It is conventional to interpret Prospero’s magic as artistic ability. Specifically, it stands in for, “theatre, illusionism...Baconian science and Neoplatonic philosophy, the empirical study of nature leading to the understanding and control of all its forces” (Orgel 20). In his last soliloquy, Prospero says, “Let me not...dwell / in this bare island by your spell” (5.1.323-26). The reference to The Tempest in “Sunday Afternoon” suggests that leaving Ireland and the loss of his personal things are, for Henry, a loss of identity. This loss of identity is irreversible as the Anglo-Irish in Ireland have lost the art of constructing a relevant identity for him. By following Henry to London, Maria is abandoning her Anglo-Irish identity for the kind of generic non-identity that characterises the modern world. Yet this exodus of the Anglo-Irish from the enchanted island is presented as inevitable. The Anglo-Irish who remain in Ireland describe their lives as seeming “unreal” and tell Henry, “it is something that you should be alive” (Irish 10). Henry furthermore feels that despite the trauma of the Blitz, he cannot stay away from London for long, but saying this offends the other Anglo-Irish characters because “[t]heir position was, he saw, more difficult than his own” (12). In The Heat of the Day, the connection between spacetime, narrative and identity becomes even more pronounced. The novel implies that Robert’s motivation for becoming a fascist has to do with his early life in a middle-class home. The house is “rootless, lifeless, empty of feeling. Though antique in appearance, the place is not actually old” (Gill 59). The fake nature of the house is supposed to explain Robert’s propensity for spying. The fact that the house is rootless and without history leaves Robert vulnerable to being attracted to fascism. The house being “materially a void,” and Robert being located in a middle class which is “middle of nothing” (Heat 109), mean that he has nothing to lose in the destruction of the narrative of history. This is contrasted with Roderick, who having inherited Mount Morris, has something better than “freedom in nothing” (168). This classist element of The Heat of the Day is one of the few places where Bowen’s Weltanschauung can be glimpsed through the story and is based on her belief that property and social position kept the Anglo-Irish from misusing power and that “[w]e have everything to fear from the dispossessed” (Bowen’s 455). She justified this attitude by thinking of Ascendancy as something that “cannot be merely inherited or arrived at; neither birth nor careerist achievement quite accounts for it; only by character is it to be maintained” (Mulberry 175). It is almost as if loyalty to the class system is the same as or even more important than loyalty to the nation. The fact that Robert is a traitor who spies for the Nazis rather than the communists probably has more to do with Bowen’s belief that there was a “crypto-fascist” element to Irish neutrality (Ellmann 152) and that Irish nationalism veered toward “nazionalism,” as Sean O’Faolain put it (Glendinning 189) Elizabeth Bowen’s own “spying” for the British government, where she reported on the attitude of the Irish toward neutrality, would not have been considered treacherous in her own opinion because she considered fascism the enemy of both countries. . Roderick, being a soldier, is ostensibly fighting over physical territory like other soldiers. Yet this is never shown directly in the novel. The war happens in the background. For Roderick, the war is simply a present that he must get through in order to get to Mount Morris. For Roderick, “the place was his future” (Heat 187), making it seem like he is fighting more for his own personal narrative than for Europe. Mount Morris is also a “historic future” (47), so survival will mean a return to traditional roles. In the novel, Ireland does not have the same relationship with time as England. Stella’s view of Mount Morris is that “by geographically standing outside war it appeared also to be standing outside the present” (47). In another instance, Mount Morris is said to be “outside time” itself (156). Although it might seem like “the idea of Ireland operates in this wartime novel as a metaphorical locus of loyalty and stability” (Walshe 105), for Stella, when travelling over to sort out paperwork, Ireland is an afterlife. The caretaker looks like Dante (Heat 157). Outside, “the current of time flowed” (164), as if the Styx runs through the property. In Ireland, Stella thinks that “the dead could be imagined returning from all wars” (170). This can be read as being part of a discourse of timelessness similar to Spengler’s wherein “[m]en now dead will be the playfellows of your grandchildren” (Lewis 7). It can also be read as another image of Ireland as an underworld. The idea of timelessness is introduced again when Stella is walking around the property: “The seeming of this to be for ever was astonishing—until a leaf fell slowly, veering towards her eyes as though she had brought time with her into the woods” (Heat 170). While in the house in Ireland, Stella begins to understand that Cousin Nettie went crazy from being “pressed back, hour by hour, by the hours themselves” (166). Stella herself begins to experience a “disassociation” in Ireland related to time: “Her watch told her the hour, but then so did instinct – what she was forced to grope for, as though for her identity, was the day of the week, the month of the year, the year” (169). Since identity is equated with time, the reader assumes that wartime London provides Stella with a sense of belonging required to feel fully alive that is lacking in Ireland. The only thing that sustains Stella in Ireland is news of the war, which is like a lifeline connecting her with England. This is not too surprising as Bowen once wrote to Virginia Woolf, “if anything happens to England while I’m in Ireland I shall wish I’d never left, even for this short time” (Mulberry 216). The attitude that being part of an end of history is preferable to remaining in the limbo of dislocation surfaces in The Last September when Laurence says, “I should like to be here when this house burns” (44). When Stella returns to London, the train station is described as Hades (Heat 174) and Robert addresses her with the words, “You must be dead” (175). Yet returning to London restores Stella to life. Wartime London opens up a kind of life in hyperreality for the characters in which problematic pasts and uncertain futures make the present moment seem more vivid. The trauma of air raids at night warps the characters’ experiences of the concepts of night and day: “the night behind and the night to come met across every noon” (86). This trauma exaggerates the characters’ experiences of being alive so much that Bowen writes of the first air raids, “Never had any season been more felt” (85). Ireland is associated with death to such an extent that when Cousin Francis leaves Ireland and dies in England, “[h]is actual death returned him to life again” (62). When Stella is leaving his grave for town, she is said to be heading toward “a scene of less future” (69). Since Roderick’s future is the house in Ireland, and since the novel ends without making it clear whether or not he will survive the war, there is a sense that Ireland represents a kind of social Thanatos. However, the death-instinct in Bowen does not necessarily have an exclusively negative connotation. Just like in the poem “Thanatopsis” by William Cullen Bryant, death is seen as the great equaliser: Thou shalt lie down With patriarchs of the infant world--with kings, The powerful of the earth--the wise, the good, Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past, All in one mighty sepulchre. (Lounsbury 36) Furthermore, among the overlapping discourses of time in the novel are several representations of cyclical time. Stella’s deep sleeps are “periodic trances, her spirit’s passing into another season” and “birth sleeps, each time, of some profound change” (Heat 169). In mythology, characters like Persephone, from Greek mythology, and Inanna, from the Sumerian tradition, must journey to the underworld to represent the rebirth of agricultural cycles. If Stella’s journey to Ireland is read as a katabasis, then the Second World War is like a winter that characters like Roderick must simply survive through. War, like death, is an equalising force that makes “personal identities dissolve” (Ellmann 154). The condition of the English is suddenly similar to that of the Anglo-Irish dislocated by the War of Independence. This equality among identities in England had the capacity to open up a sense of belonging for the dispossessed Anglo-Irish. Many Roman still life paintings featured the motto “omnia mors aequat” or “death makes all equal.” In Bowen’s Irish fiction, the personification of objects and the application of durée to place mean that there is very little separation between animate and inanimate. There is furthermore little to separate life from afterlife or real life from art. While in Ireland, Stella realises “that her own life could be a chapter missing from this book need not mean that the story was at an end” (Heat 167). This conflation of life and art is a self-reflexive strategy that emphasises the relationship between identity and narrative. Though Stella might be able to accept that her own life is a missing chapter, the act of writing fiction was, for Bowen, an attempt to create a narrative that could house the dispossessed Anglo-Irish identity. Personal Time According to Lukács, in epics like the Odyssey, “heroes do not experience time...Nestor is old just as Helen is beautiful or Agamemnon mighty” (Theory 121). If epics concern characters’ struggles against fate, as represented by the gods, in Bowen the gods are wiped out and replaced with time. The sky in A World of Love is godlessly “uninhabited” (43) and Antonia has an “unequal battle with the day” (22), which fits Lukács’s theory that the action of a novel “is nothing but a struggle against the power of time” (Theory 122). Bowen’s characters’ battles with time are really a struggle for a place within a larger narrative. Identity is something that can be possessed by an individual or controlled by others as much as land or material wealth, which is why so much of Bowen’s work concerns control of time. Individual characters try to control time as do larger groups. This chapter will argue that in Bowen’s Irish fiction, a character’s relationship with time is central to his or her identity and dictates how he or she relates to other characters. The relationship between time and character is an aspect of Bowen’s metafictional account of Anglo-Irish identity. This identity was always contested territory in Irish history, but became especially problematic when the Irish War of Independence started, and remained ambiguous in status for long afterwards. Because of this, Bowen’s fiction must also confront ideas of “non-identity or non-being” (Bennett 114). A character’s relationship to time is treated like a personal trait, so that The Last September’s Mrs. Trent is described as “a punctilious person [who] wore a wrist watch” (205), and Lois is “in such a hurry, so concentrated upon her hurry, so helpless. She is like someone being driven against time in a taxi to catch a train” (82). A World of Love opens with Jane wearing an Edwardian muslin dress, reading letters by an obelisk. The cut of her hair is “anachronistic over the dress she wore” (World 10) and “what was classical in her grace made her appear to belong to some other time” (10). These details recall Proust’s idea that life is “careless of chronology, interpolating so many anachronisms into the sequence of our days” (In Search II 253). Jane’s physical self is described in the language of Bergson’s “becoming” as her face is in “transcendency” to womanhood (World 10). In The Heat of the Day, Stella has a fine wrist bone to match her fine wrist watch and a “not-young face of no other age” (239). She and Robert are described as having never been their ages (190). Despite apparently having this paradox in common with each other, their relationship is said to be based on the fact that their watches are always out of sync (93). A character’s relationship with time can even manifest itself physically, for instance, when Roderick’s eyes are described as looking “anachronistic” (48). Furthermore, each character has different ways of measuring time aside from their watches and clocks and, at one point, Robert describes himself as being “one tie nearer the grave” (97). A dinner guest in A World of Love declares, “I’m my own calendar” (64). In Bowen, time occasionally crosses the threshold of force or experience and actually becomes a character in itself. In The Heat of the Day, Stella realises that she and Robert had never been alone in their relationship because “time sat in the third place at their table” (187). The trauma of the Blitz causes people to personify different times of day: “War had made them idolize day and summer; night and autumn were enemies” (5). Maud, from A World of Love, worships Big Ben and listens to the radio “to hear the ether quiver with His strokes” (22). Because “He” is capitalised in a Biblical manner, Bowen goes beyond personifying the clock and deifies it. Beyond this, characters’ relationships with time are more than just personal, or as Bowen writes in The Heat of the Day: “The relation of people to one another is subject to the relation of each to time” (187). In A World of Love, Fred is “scalded for time” (20). This exacerbates tension in his marriage since he and Lilia never go out because “Fred grudged the time” (28). Lilia’s own withdrawal from family life is illustrated by her mechanical “clockwork breathing” (32), which suggests she is only going through the motions of living and that she is a cog in Antonia’s plan. Fred attempts to channel his frustration at Antonia’s control of the house by gaining some control of the land, with the result that “the farm ran by the watch strapped inexorably to Fred’s wrist” (21). In this way, a character’s own personal attitude toward time is a reflection of the role he or she plays in the narrative. In The Last September, Livvy’s father attempts to control the father-daughter relationship with timing: “The worst she had seen him do, when Livvy was late, was to take his watch out and stand with his thumb on the lid – not looking at it, as though he could not abide the thought of Time” (110). Lois sums up the Anglo-Irish culture of polite society in terms of time when she says, “When you have to think so much of what other people feel about you there seems no time to think what you feel about them” (97). Her failure to fall in love with Gerald is, on one level, a lack of a common relationship with time. While time is against Lois and is something she thinks of as being out of her hands, Gerald has an obsessive-compulsive attitude toward time, which fits with his role as a British soldier trying futilely to control the narrative of Ireland’s relationship with Britain. When he and Lois are discussing their relationship, He looked at his wrist-watch. They had been a short time together, almost twenty minutes. ‘Were you happy?’ he said accurately. He would have liked to be sure of this, and of several other matters. (191) Lois recognises this tendency in Gerald, and when she learns of his death, she asks the messenger at what time it happened. On another level, the relationship between Gerald and Lois is destined to fail because of their differing relationships with history. If it had been set in an earlier era, their romance would have resulted in a perfect Act of Union marriage. The marriage between an Englishman and Irish woman to represent the political merging of the two countries is a common trope in Anglo-Irish novels of the early nineteenth century such as The Absentee and The Wild Irish Girl, but The Last September is set during the break-up of the Union between Ireland and Britain. The English suitor in Ireland must be obliterated. The Anglo-Irish partner, belonging to a class that has become irrelevant as Ireland and Britain no longer need a go-between, must be left to become a genetic dead end. Lois seems to stumble upon this knowledge without realising it when she says, “But as a matter of fact, I have no future, in their sense. I have promised to marry Gerald” (175). As the novel progresses and the Anglo-Irish characters move toward being written out of history, their experience of time becomes more condensed, so that for Lois: The unbelievable future became fixed as the past under the flutter and settle down of a flock of comments, which, as she turned in imagination back to the house and steps and saw lips forming themselves in unconscious readiness, seemed already uttered. (166) In sentences like these, past, present and future run together. According to Beckett, “[h]abit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit” (Beckett 19), and in Bowen, habit is the ritual that forms identity. To be without identity is to be homeless, which is why Lois could not explain the magnetism they all exercised by their being static. Or how, after every return – or awakening, even, from sleep or preoccupation she and those home surroundings still further penetrated each other mutually in the discovery of a lack. (Last 166) In Beckett, habit can “empty the mystery of its threat—and also of its beauty” (Beckett 22). In Bowen habit is identity, identity is comfort and “[t]here is nothing I like better than feeling one of a herd” (Mulberry 21). In Bowen, habit has a more romantic connotation than in Beckett, but the threat is just as insidious. The Anglo-Irish in The Last September continue to perform the rituals of identity in a state of denial even as their roles are being written out of history, making habit like an opiate that blinds them to reality. Because the Anglo-Irish are like the walking dead, the passage is similar to a sentiment expressed in Mrs. Dalloway: “Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame” (Woolf 48). In The Heat of the Day, Stella and Harrison have a similar time-related misalignment to Lois and Gerald which precludes the possibility of any romantic relationship between them. While Stella and her environment seem to stand still in relation to clock time, Harrison “was as a rule punctual, wheeling in on the quiver of the appointed hour as though attached to the very works of the clock” (Heat 20). After propositioning Stella in a business-like manner, he even explains his lack of romance in terms of time: I don’t understand fine feelings – if that’s what you mean. Fine feelings, you’ve got to have time to have: I haven’t – I only have time to have what you have without having time, if you follow me? (28) To which Stella replies, “One has got, I’m afraid, to waste just a little time” (30). Even after the death of her long-term boyfriend, Robert, Stella reconsiders a relationship with Harrison. However, his lack of timing makes this impossible in the end. Even though Stella’s relationship with Robert is somewhat more successful, misalignment when it comes to timing is ultimately the thing that leads to Robert’s death. When explaining why he failed to tell Stella the truth about his spying sooner, Robert explains, “One cannot time feeling” (189). From the beginning, there is a sense that their relationship is temporary singularity and only allowed to exist in the temporal plane created by wartime. When they first meet, a bomb drops near-by, leaving a clock “shock stopped” (93). War makes the future more uncertain and the present therefore more important: War time, with its makeshifts, shelvings, deferrings, could not have been kinder to romantic love. The two discussed any merging of their postal addresses not more seriously than they discussed marriage – happy to stay as they were, afloat on this tideless, hypnotic, futureless day-to-day. (95) It is the difference in their relationships to the future and the larger narrative of history that dooms their romance. Robert must die as the war draws to a close because his vision of the future, in which his spying serves a legitimate purpose, becomes out-of-sync with the reality that is coming into being. In addition to personal relationships with time, Bowen’s characters form age-related alliances and relationships. Their relative relationships to the larger narrative of history create generational tribes. For Colonel Pole in The Heat of the Day, time becomes the possession of Roderick’s generation when he says, “He and his generation will have no use for that. All they will want is to travel light. After all, the future is in their hands” (78). In other instances, cohorts are situated within a cyclical narrative of time. In the story “Sunday Afternoon,” Henry is caught between two potential love interests who are both out of reach because of their ages relative to his. Mrs. Vesey is too old and her niece, Maria, is too young. Since nobody at the gathering is Henry’s age, situated “between two generations, he felt cast out” (Irish 15). Early in the story, the cyclical nature of this difference is established when Henry finishes talking to Maria and realises that everything said “had fallen off her – in these few minutes by herself she had started in again on a fresh phase of living that was pure and intact” (13). Their relative location to each other within a larger life cycle is parallel to the cycle of seasons. When Maria waits for Henry on the street to speak with him alone, the sexual tension between the two is in conflict with their age difference, represented by the image of falling flower pollen. The stamen has “moulted” onto Maria’s hair (15), suggesting that she is in season, but Henry blows the pollen off his notebook, which suggests impotence. To Henry, Maria voices the relative nature of the problem thusly: “The trouble with you is, you’re half old” (17). Aside from forming the basis of generational identity, a character’s relationship with time is a matter of tribal affiliation. In The Last September, the English, Irish and Anglo-Irish are all so out of sync that when the British explain that they have come to Ireland to defend the Anglo-Irish, to the young Anglo-Irish, “this all had already a ring of the past” (118). The English in Ireland hang onto their habit of being early risers, a fact which the Anglo-Irish use to construct a difference between themselves and the English. Lady Naylor notices about the English “a disposition they had to be socially visible before midday” (193). The Anglo-Irish assume that they are aligned with Irish Catholics because they share a similar culture of time-keeping. However, the novel is about the historical moment of separation between the Irish and Anglo-Irish, so it is significant that when one of the Anglo-Irish characters, Laurence, is robbed by IRA rebels, his watch is one of the things taken from him. It might seem like common sense to think of the Irish War of Independence as a war over past agrarian injustices and inequalities and therefore a war over land and wealth. However, in Bowen, land and wealth (which are physical, albeit hypothetical, objects for the rebels to fight for) are secondary to the much more abstract and immaterial concepts of history and identity. When Laurence is robbed by the rebels, they only asked for his shoes and the loan of his wrist-watch. Placing him with his face close up to the wall they advised him for life’s sake not to look round or stir for twenty minutes. ‘How shall I know?’ said Laurence, ‘you’ve got my watch.’ (189) This incident suggests that history, represented by the watch, is the object contested by the rebels. Furthermore, by robbing Laurence in the first place, the rebels reject any idea he has of himself as an Irishman. Therefore, identity is also contested. In another passage in the book that foreshadows the robbery, when Laurence cannot sleep, he is “alarmed by the tick of the watch under his pillow, slowing down as at the mortal sickness of Time” (107). Here Bowen’s construction of time is cyclical like the rotating hands of the watch, but it is a cycle that is slowing down for Laurence because his identity is being erased from the official narrative of Irish history. The “mortal sickness of Time” (107) is similar to Beckett’s idea that “Memory and Habit are attributes of the Time cancer” (Beckett 18). The habit-ritual of Laurence’s Anglo-Irish identity is as impossible for him to dispose of as his memories. The Anglo-Irish denial over what is at stake is clear when: Three days after, the watch was posted back to his Uncle Richard; it was in excellent order and ticked as it was taken out of the package. ‘Which just shows,’ said Uncle Richard, holding the watch to his ear with satisfaction. (Last 189) The Anglo-Irish are doomed to stagnate rather than survive when they face the forces of history with this denial. However, the novel leaves no sense that there are other options available to the Anglo-Irish as a class. Events that occurred generations before the novel opens, such as The Act of Union, determine the outcome of the novel. There is a marked lack of human agency in The Last September that is both historical and personal. Since Bergson did not hold with the idea of determinism, this is one element of Bowen’s construction of time that diverges from Bergson’s philosophy..Laurence does not even have enough agency to choose an identity for himself. When Gerald assumes that Laurence shares his opinion of the British Empire, Laurence says, “But I’m not English” (93). The Naylors passively choose to align themselves with the Irish by keeping guns stashed on a neighbour’s farm a secret from British soldiers, but the Irish Catholic characters override their agency by deciding to designate them as not Irish. If history is contested and rewritten in The Last September, in The Heat of the Day it is the individual characters’ fight for the future that overshadows the European territory being fought over by soldiers in the background. Robert justifies his spying for the enemy by explaining, “This war’s just so much bloody quibbling about something that’s predecided itself” (Heat 273). For him, the future is already set. This kind of determinism is addressed earlier in the novel when one character reads newspapers and concludes that “evidently one thing must have led to another” (145). Robert fights for a narrative of the end of history when there will be no more countries, saying, “What country have you and I outside this room? Exhausted shadows, dragging themselves out again to fight - and how long are they going to drag the fight out?” (258). For Robert and Stella, the idea of a country is a matter of time as much as it is of space. Stella says to Robert, “No, but you cannot say there is not a country!” (265). Yet, “[o]f that country, she did not know how much was place, how much was time” (265). Robert’s teleological construction of time is so ingrained in him and the future so certain that he says to Stella, “Don’t quarrel now, at the end, or it will undo everything from the beginning. You’ll have to re-read me backwards” (261). This sentiment is what Kierkegaard would have called “a backward-looking position,” which he believed was actually an atemporal position as one must be outside of time in order to live forwards while understanding backwards (Schleifer 76). Because Stella lives in the present, the future is unknowable and uncertain. Like others who remain in London during the war, for Stella, the “vacuum as to future was set off by vacuum as to past” (Heat 90). When dealing with the future in the form of her relationship with Robert, Stella experiences a sense of dislocation: but no kind of sleep could account for the distance she felt between herself and yesterday – and, indeed, between herself and today. Nothing she saw or touched gave token of even its own reality; her wrist watch seemed to belie time; she fancied it had lost hours during the night, (92) In contrast to Robert, Stella’s conception of time seems cyclical. The consistency of the cycle of seasons is often a comfort to her. Other characters find a sense of comfort in paying attention to the cycles of nature, such as the migration of birds, which becomes important because “they keep on doing what they always do” despite the war (148). When Roderick visits Cousin Nettie in a home for the mentally disturbed, the owner advises him not to discuss the past as patients find it upsetting. Roderick explains that he has come to discuss the future, which also alarms the owner. The only safe territory during war is the present moment. Despite the fact that so much of Bowen’s fiction contains ghosts, A World of Love is said to be “as close to being a ghost story as her novels were ever allowed to come” (Lee 184). It might seem obvious that a piece of fiction with ghosts in it would be considered supernatural, but Bowen had reservations about the supernatural and used the tropes of gothic and horror for other purposes. Of Henry James, whose work influenced her own, she wrote, “Henry James inspired, and remains at the head of, a whole school of moral horror stories…it is the stench of evil, not the mere fact of the supernatural, which is the genuine horror” (Mulberry 112). In The Heat of the Day, ghosts are “yesterday’s living” who still pervade the city (86). Instead of being immortal souls without physical bodies, ghosts represent Blitz-survivors’ feelings that there are people missing from their daily routine and that they “stamped upon that routine their absence” (86). These ghosts are like the kind found in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw in that they are psychological projections of the living rather than the souls of the dead. The absence of yesterday’s living has its own presence. Furthermore, the presence of the living creates its own absence, as when waiters in an underground restaurant are described as ghosts (186) or when the train station is equated with Hades (174). War, by draining life from the living and making the future uncertain, synthesises the concepts of life and death and blurs the line between the two. Bowen writes of her own experiences of London in 1940, “We people have come up out of the ground, or out from the bottom floors of the damaged houses...Standing, as might the risen dead in the doors of tombs” (Mulberry 22). Even after the Anglo-Irish identity is written out of the official narrative of Irish history in The Last September, the absence of the class exerts its own force on the imaginative landscape of Ireland as “the Anglo-Irish could be said to exist ‘under erasure,’ which is Derrida’s term for the uncanny afterlife of that which is crossed out” (Ellmann 10). In The Last September, this presence of absence is slightly different from the ghostly presences that fill The Heat of the Day or A World of Love. Instead of ghosts, photographs of dead First World War soldiers look down from the walls so that “[y]ou could not stoop to put down a cup on one of the little tables without a twinge of regret and embarrassment, meeting the candid eyes of some dead young man” (Last 71). It can be further argued that the Anglo-Irish in the novel are ghosts themselves and are haunted by the living participants in the Irish War of Independence. This reading can account for the odd episode when Mrs. Montmorency, ostensibly daydreaming, is said to be floating above the company, staring into a portrait and that she “could perform at any moment, discomfitingly, these acts of levitation” (28). Later, Lois goes for a walk in the dark and is convinced she is going to see a ghost. Instead, a rebel passes her in the dark without seeing her. She is “blotted out in the black” (34). This turn of phrase suggests a narrative being edited and is reminiscent of an earlier Anglo-Irish novel, Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. In Sterne’s novel, blank pages are left for the reader to draw how he or she imagines the widow Wadman (Sterne 376). There are also marbled pages for the reader to interpret the “moral” of the story (181-82) and a black page after Yorick dies (29). Sterne’s experimentation points to a tradition of Anglo-Irish writers being aware of the fact that the “meaning” of a text is dependent on the interpretation of the reader. In The Last September, the reader’s attention is drawn to Lois’s status as a fictional character while simultaneously referring to the Anglo-Irish being blotted out of Irish history like personified examples of Heidegger’s sous rature. Lois feels compelled to say something as “not to be known seemed like a doom: extinction” (Last 34), but says nothing. She also resists telling anyone that she “had just surprised life” (34). If the rebel is “life” then Lois is the opposite. She does not tell any of the other Anglo-Irish about the incident as their denial about the political situation outside the Big House would make these kinds of incidents “impossible to speak of” (35). In this way, Bowen remakes the Anglo-Irish gothic tradition she inherits from writers like Sheridan Le Fanu. For Bowen, the “realest” plane of Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas is the psychological one (Mulberry 108), therefore, “there is no supernatural element in the ordinary sense...The genuine horror is in the unnatural” (112). For Bowen, the decay and downward social mobility of the Anglo-Irish gothic genre would have had parallels with her class’s decline after the Irish War of Independence. Bowen further wrote of Uncle Silas that, “Proust has pointed out that the predisposition toward love creates its own object. Is this not also true of fear? (112). In A World of Love, ghosts seem to be a psychological phenomenon brought into being by predisposition toward love. Ghosts represent a time disjunction and Guy is “a ghost not only of the past but also of the future” (Bennett 117). In the middle of the novel, Jane is at a dinner party at Lady Latterly’s castle, and, after a few drinks, sees Guy among the dinner guests. Instead of being an unreal object, Guy becomes the most real person at the party and the other guests become “the poor ghosts on whom the sun had risen” (World 65). Jane makes a cryptic comment about an empty space at the table and Latterly says, “don’t be occult!” (66). When her mother addresses the empty place at the table, Latterly says, “Well, I can’t stand Mammy being Lady Macbeth.” (66). Bowen also writes that “Even Shakespeare had stalked in” (67). These continued allusions to Macbeth imply that the ghost of Guy is a psychological projection rather than a supernatural entity. If the ghost of Banquo is a projection of Macbeth’s guilt over an act of murder in the past, Guy is a projection of Jane’s sexual frustration and her future capacity to become a sexual being. This is echoed later in the book, when Jane is on her way to the airport to meet the man who will become her lover. The heat that pervades the novel is on the verge of being broken by rain and “the air by assuming a false tense glint was turning the grass livid with thwarted longing” (136). At the dinner party, the relationship with time, space and identity is reiterated in the line: “there was something phantasmagoric about this circle of the displaced rich. Reason annihilated itself when these people met” (67). The lack of local identity in this class of people disrupts their experiences of time. Critics have pointed out that “A World of Love is metafictional in the strong sense” (Bennett 106). The first sentence refers to The Heat of the Day (Bennett 106) and the novel is in some ways a rewriting of The Last September. In The Last September, the Anglo-Irish class dies and fails to pass its genes onto the next generation. In The Heat of the Day, all of Ireland becomes an afterlife and England becomes the main source of identity. A World of Love is a gothic in reverse. The Anglo-Irish identity comes back to life and is ready to move on. Jane is Anglo-Irish via an English mother and a father who is half Anglo-Irish and half Catholic Irish with some “foreign blood” (World 15) mixed in. At the end of the novel, she falls in love with an American, which implies that the extinction of the Anglo-Irish in The Last September can be reversed if the Anglo-Irish produce cosmopolitan, modern, hybrid offspring. Time as a Thing Despite Bowen’s experiments with constructions of time, Anthony Burgess concluded that “[t]he novel as surveyed by Elizabeth Bowen had no doubts about the nature of sanity” (Burgess 222). This stands in contrast to Bowen’s own description of her work as a “rising tide of hallucination” (Glendinning 181). The twentieth century saw the “desertion of realist modes of writing by novelists and critics” since such modes were “inadequate to the representation of a deeper reality” (Joannou 86). Beckett suggested this when he described his art as "[t]he expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express" (Beckett 103). Perhaps because Bowen adapted older literary genres, such as the gothic and the comedy of manners, to suit her artistic mission rather than abandoning these influences, many critics failed to see the surreal element of her work. Instead, Bowen, along with other female novelists, was seen as a writer of sensibility who produced books disdained by certain male critics for the “narrowness” of their scope (86 Joannou). Yet Bowen engaged with experimental art and praised another Anglo-Irish novel, Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, for being “surrealist in its association of images” (“Novelists” 125). More recently, critics like Keri Walsh have recognised the surreal influence in Bowen’s work. Bowen’s tendency to personify furniture is well-noted, with critics suggesting that in her fiction “consciousness escapes into the object, leaving human beings as vacant as the landscapes that threaten to devour them” (Ellmann 7). Bowen goes even further into surrealist territory by using time to bridge the gap between the material and immaterial. In her Irish fiction, time can become a physical thing and experiences of time can become warped, as if physical. In this way, her fiction can be compared to Salvador Dali’s painting “The Persistence of Memory” (see appendix), which depicts clocks melting into a desert landscape. The painting is Dali’s reaction to Einstein’s General Relativity and seeks to undermine “our belief in a natural, rule-bound order of things” while “evoking the seemingly universal human preoccupation with time and memory” (Harris 20). The image of the melting clocks is similar to the grandfather clock in The Heat of the Day that is described as being so old that “time had clogged its ticking” (102). This chapter will argue that Bowen’s experiments with time cast doubt on the ontological stability of the narrative and that this doubt becomes a self-reflexive strategy for interrogating the instability of identity. In The Last September, Bowen often warps the border between the material and immaterial: “the bottom dropped out of the past” (64). She also frequently inverts material and immaterial, such as in the sentence: “This gold weather had all the delights of a new perception, it made Danielstown real as a memory” (54). Memory, the immaterial concept, is taken for granted as the more “real” idea in the equation. The physical object of Danielstown requires a mind to perceive it in the right circumstances in order for it to attain the same level of reality as the immaterial, pointing to a tendency toward idealism in her work. In another instance, Bowen writes, “And indeed Lois and Hugo both felt that their pause, their talk, their passing had been less than a shadow” (Last 65). This is an allusion to Macbeth: Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. (5.2.23-7) Bowen’s slight modification of the sentence implies that physical acts of the living are inferior to mental acts. Since Shakespeare’s words equate living with dramatic performance, Bowen’s allusion also signifies that her Anglo-Irish characters no longer have roles to play in Irish society. The Heat of the Day is similarly self-reflexive. While walking through London, Stella is said to have “crossed over the borderline into fiction” (Heat 92), as if the border between real life and art is as permeable as the boundaries between life and death in the novel. Characters often draw attention to their status as fictional creations. Roderick asks Stella, “You do really think I’m a person?” (290). In his childhood home, Robert says, “I’m hit in the face by the feeling that I don’t exist—that I not only am not but never have been” (112). When Stella is thinking of Robert, Bowen writes, “And was, indeed, Robert himself fictitious?” (92). When Roderick hears of Robert’s death, he remarks that Robert didn’t seem to be living anywhere. Bowen breaks the spell of the narrative and forces the reader to consider that the characters are the objects of her imagination and that the “people in these novels are being thought” (Bennett 15). This idealism combined with the self-reflexiveness of her fiction often cause critics to ascribe solipsism to Bowen’s work and to align Bowen with Berkeley, despite a lack of evidence that Bowen ever read Berkeley. The grounds for aligning Bowen with Berkeley seem to be based on her status as an Anglo-Irish writer: The philosophy of Berkeley, the Anglo-Irish Bishop of Cloyne, which questions the existence of a material world independent of our sense-impressions, seems to reflect the political predicament of the ascendancy: divorced from the daily life of Ireland, sequestered in a time-warp, and consequently doubting the reality of the surrounding world. (Ellmann 47) Although some of Bowen’s techniques might superficially seem like the product of subjective idealism, her fiction is more surreal that solipsistic. Surrealism differs from subjective idealism in that surrealism became embroiled in the crisis of materialistic Marxism, but this kept surrealism from falling into subjective idealism, forcing it to a sharper awareness of the toughness of the obstacles that ordinary circumstances oppose to the flight of the fantastic. (Carrouges 9) Bowen’s belief that identity is something that can be imposed on or taken from an individual by others is not compatible with solipsism. Her preoccupation with dreams has more in common with surrealism than subjective idealism, as in the short story “The Happy Autumn Fields.” The story begins with an Anglo-Irish family walking their estate, then switches to London during the Blitz where a woman dreams of the Anglo-Irish family. The descriptions in the story lend it an “unearthly atmosphere reminiscent of the canvases of Dali, René Magritte, and Dorothea Tanning” (Walsh 142). If it can be argued that Bowen’s Irish fiction merges “surrealist techniques with an Anglo-Irish Gothic tradition” (Walsh 129), this could be considered a natural development as modernism and the Gothic are both concerned with the “fraught relationship between past and present” (Wurtz 123). According to Luke Gibbons, Ireland experienced “traumatic dislocations” in the nineteenth century, such as the Great Famine, with the result that “Irish literature in the nineteenth century (especially in its romantic or gothic register) often evinces a ‘proto-modernist’ outlook” (Gibbons 6). In The Last September, the Anglo-Irish characters all have relationships with the future that are as problematic as their class’s relationship with the past. Even when Anglo-Irish characters do not describe themselves as futureless, their present tense distorts the timeline of the narrative, such as when Marda explains, “When you are engaged you live in the future, and a large part of the future is improper till it has happened” (Last 101). In this way the idealism and self-reflexive elements of Bowen’s work seem more like Breton’s decision to “concede to the dream what I sometimes refuse to reality” in The Surrealist Manifesto (Breton 67). There are many reasons why Bowen engaged with surrealism without becoming a full-fledged member of the movement. Her social conservatism, dislike of atheism, and her preference for novel-writing would have made the movement unattractive for her, therefore her “exploration of surrealist aesthetics in her short fiction led her to critique and even modify tenets of the movement” (Walsh 128). Furthermore, although the surrealists fetishised Ireland and thought that “the Celtic imagination was naturally surrealist” (Walsh 126); Irish and Anglo-Irish writers have always had more problematic relationships with these kinds of stereotypes. In John Bull’s Other Island, when Doyle is faced with the possibility of returning to Ireland, he says, “Oh, the dreaming! the dreaming! the torturing, heartscalding, never satisfying dreaming, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming!” (Shaw 19). Similarly, in Ulysses, Stephan Dedalus says, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” (Joyce 32). If Bergson imagined time as an unwinding spool of thread, Bowen’s construction of time would be better imagined as several spools of thread. Things that never happened have a presence in her plots and seem to branch off from the main plot. In The Heat of the Day, Stella says of the dead, “If they still had to live, who knows that they might not have disappointed themselves?” (84). Ernestine, when obsessing over her dead dog, says, “I often think that if Hitler could have looked into that dog’s eyes, the story might have been very different” (119). Roderick, when drafted into the army, experiences the “end of a phantom year at Oxford” (95). Sometimes these alternative planes of time intersect with the main timeframe, such as when Nettie is said to run into her own ghost (209). In A World of Love, Bowen’s experiments with time become even more complex. In The Last September and The Heat of the Day, there is a lack of human agency, but in A World of Love, determinism is questioned. Lilia, Fred and Jane seem to think that Antonia’s meddling in the past caused their current situation. Yet when Maud asks Antonia if she caused her, Antonia replies, “We’re the instruments of each others’ destinies” (World 113). There are alternative histories running parallel to the main story as Lilia is unable to recall if Guy’s letters were addressed to her and has to consider that they could have been written for someone else. Characters imagine various alternative scenarios to explain how the letters came to be in the house in the first place. In addition to alternative histories, there are alternative presents. Jane’s vision of Guy and her potential affair with him is one alternative present. When Antonia remarks to Fred that Guy should be Jane’s father, this constitutes another alternative. When Antonia feels as though she is doing the living for Guy, this is a third alternative. This feeling is said to be a product of Guy’s death in battle as Bowen writes, “Our sense of finality is less hard and fast: two wars have their raised query to it” (44). For Antonia, it is difficult to “see a young death in battle as in any way the fruition of a destiny, hard not to sense the continuation of the apparently cut-off life” (44), so her inability to comprehend Guy’s death causes her to accommodate it by living as if he is living through her, as if “these years she went on living belonged to him” (45). Although the Second World War has been over for years at the opening of the book, there is a sense that the older generation of Anglo-Irish characters are still experiencing the consequences of the war and are living permanently in a situation that they think of as temporary. At the beginning of the story, Jane finds some letters from her mother’s dead fiancé, Guy. The letters are headed by the names of the days only and are displaced by their lack of envelopes and addresses, meaning they are dislocated from any sense of space and time. The “datelessness” of the letters means that Jane cannot put them in any order (34), an idea which echoes the larger plot because the novel “both explores and embodies the effects of Guy’s love letters in relation to the future and in relation to future readers” (Bennett 105). The plot would not be possible without this lack of identity because when Jane finds the letters, “her sense of their remoteness from her entitled her to feel they belong to history. Honour therefore allowed her to make free of them” (World 33). The letters’ lack of identity creates blank space for Jane to project onto. The question of to whom Guy wrote the letters looms over Fred, Lilia, and Antonia. They believe the narrative of the past that they accept is what binds them to their present situation. The story of their past is that when Guy died, Antonia felt the need to look after Lilia, even though Lilia and Guy had not married. She also felt the need to take care of Fred, who was the illegitimate child of an uncle, but who grew up with Guy as almost like a brother. Antonia has furthermore inherited Montefort, a place she has a sentimental attachment to, but no ability to run. Trying to solve all of her problems at once, Antonia sets up Fred and Lilia and allows them to live in the house for free as long as Fred runs the farm and hands over half the profit and as long as she is allowed to come and go. The absence of formal relationship roles—such as landlord and tenant—coupled with the formality of the match between Lilia and Fred, leave the characters feeling stifled, but not stifled enough to attempt to change the arrangement. Fred’s work on the farm is described as “limbo” (95). As Jane is searching through the trunk where she finds the letters, “the wreckage left by the past oppressed her” (27), which refers to the mess in the attic and her parents’ relationship with Antonia. When the love letters open up the possibility that Guy had another lover besides Lilia, the accepted narrative of the past seems fraudulent, causing the characters to reassess the legitimacy of their current situation. The past is the centre of gravity that holds the present together. Lilia and Fred are no longer sleeping in the same bedroom and Lilia and Antonia do not get on very well, but the situation remains in place because “Antonia’s half of the past fitted into Lilia’s” (51). When Guy appears to Jane at a dinner party, the time of the novel’s fabula runs in reverse. Male guests age backwards so that “it was now possible, looking round to distinguish each man from the others by revivification of some unequivocal quality he and he only had had when young” (68). If there can ever be an objective form of reality in this scene, “by this time in the evening, even counterfeit notions of reality began to wobble” (67). When Antonia collects Jane from the party and Jane brings up Guy, Antonia experiences time flowing in reverse as well. Standing outside Montefort in the night, she does not so much remember her childhood with Guy as she seems to experience their childhood as if it is still happening on some other plane. Bowen expresses this with the seemingly paradoxical, “All round Montefort there was going forward an entering back again into possession” (77). As Antonia has this experience, time becomes a physical thing, once again reminiscent of a Dali painting, that can be moulded: “time again was into the clutch of her and Guy. Stamped was the hour, as were their others” (77). Antonia’s and Guy’s past seems to have left a physical impression in the spacetime of the present so that “[a]ll that they had ever touched still now physically held its charge” (77). Yet, as Antonia is having this experience, Bowen writes, “Ghosts could have no place in this active darkness” (77). This is a refutation of the supernatural idea of ghosts and implies that Antonia is projecting her memories onto the landscape. The backwards movement of the fabula means that the reader cannot “confidently incorporate it in his or her reconstruction” (McHale 64) of the plot. Much modernist fiction deals with “the unreliability of characters’ visions or accounts of the external world” (McHale 64), such as The Good Soldier. The narrator is unreliable, which means the unreliability is epistemological rather than ontological, so that by the end of the novel, the reader is able to reconstruct the “real” story. Much of Bowen’s fiction can be similarly reconstructed, despite the surreal elements, if the reader simply chooses to not take the surreal things literally. However, A World of Love resists this kind of reading. In this way, Bowen’s late work is similar to Beckett’s as it straddles the distinction between modernism and postmodernism: When ontological doubt, uncertainty about what is (fictively) real and what fantastic, insinuates itself into a modernist text, we might well prefer to consider this the leading edge of a new mode of fiction, an anticipation of postmodernism. For the ontological stability of external reality seems basic to modernist fiction. (McHale 65) It is only when the characters have resolved their issues with the past (by accepting a narrative of their own personal history that is not entirely historically accurate) that the fabula moves forward into the future, represented by Jane’s trip to Shannon airport. The road to Shannon even “looked like the future” (World 146). As they drive away from Montefort, Bowen writes, “This was an echo, a second time” (139), implying that the moment is parallel to Fred and Lilia’s wedding. In the car, the driver asks Jane if the family has died out. Jane replies, “There are no more men” (145). This is almost like the genetic dead ends in The Last September. Yet whereas the Anglo-Irish dead end is absolute in that novel, A World of Love, by ending in the airport with Jane falling in love with an American, suggests that the future for the Anglo-Irish identity is international. This is a reworking of The Turn of the Screw. The degeneration of social class in James’s novella is represented by the affair between lower class Quint and the lady Miss Jessel. Quint also wears his employer’s clothes while Miss Jessel never wears a hat, further emphasising the blurring of social class lines. Bowen deals with similar gothic tropes such as “irregular lines of legitimacy and inheritance; miscegenation; victimized young women; animated ancestral portraits; sudden outburst of violence; and, always, the imprisoning mythologies of the past” (Kreilkamp 17). Yet in A World of Love, the horror of class degeneration and miscegenation becomes a story of the survival and evolution of the Anglo-Irish class. In Montefort, time stagnates and the characters treat it flippantly, even keeping a calendar for the year before in the kitchen (World 21). On the way to the airport, time suddenly becomes important and comments are made about the importance of being on time for the plane. However, just when it seems as if the novel reconciles the contradictions between the chronologies of fabula and syzette, Bowen writes, “you do not wait for what has already happened. But were there not those who said that everything has already happened, and that one’s lookings-forward are really memories?” (147). The overall arc of the plot can almost be interpreted as moving from present to past to future. The novel opens with Jane reading the letters near the obelisk that stands outside Montefort. The obelisk, a symbol of ancient Egypt, aligns Montefort with the past. The novels ends with Jane at an airport, which is a symbol of the future and internationalism. However, the obelisk could also be read as a symbol of internationalism and modernism as many Egyptian obelisks have been moved to cities around the world. Other Egyptian symbols crop up in the book. A drunken guest at Lady Latterly’s party is said to be “composing a hieroglyphic on the lace cloth” with rose petals (68). Elsewhere, flowers are arranged to look “pyramidal” (117). Obelisks in Egypt were traditionally positioned near gateways. The opening and closing of the gate on the “extinct avenue” (30) to Montefort is frequently commented on by the characters. The obelisk makes it a gateway to a place where time operates differently. If the Montefort obelisk represents the future and modernity, then the movement of the plot from Montefort to Shannon Airport is less about a move from past to future and more about a change from stagnation to motion. Clair Wills argues that the novel is about the vanishing of the Irish from Ireland brought on by emigration and that the ending “dovetails with Bowen’s own increasing orientation to the United States in this period” (Wills 148). If the reader accepts this reading, then it can be imagined that Bowen is acknowledging a shift from Ireland’s economic integration with the British economy toward economic investments from the United States. This is not out of the question as Bowen was commissioned to write the television series Ireland: The Tear and the Smile for CBS a few years later (although they did not use her script). The Egyptian references recall the proverb, “Man fears time, but time fears the pyramids.” Toward the end of the novel, Fred explains why an ancestor built the obelisk by saying, “Chap put it up in memory of himself” (World 137), but the name of the ancestor is forgotten. This could be another self-reflexive gesture. If the obelisk is the ancestor’s futile attempt to conquer time by erecting something in the tradition of the pyramids, then the novel is Bowen’s self-depreciating take on art as “the sole means of rediscovering lost time” (In Search II 258). Taken together, Bowen’s Irish novels are a metafictional account of Anglo-Irish identity in the twentieth century. Bowen thought of identity as narrative and therefore the borders between fiction and real life are permeable in her work. On the one hand, in her fiction there is an “inexorability with which she brings her characters toward their fate” (Glendinning 121), which means that identity, like everything else in her work, is never purely a matter of individual will. On the other hand, there is strain of optimism and will to survive that runs through her work. A World of Love especially shows a certain knowingness and irony in the act of novel-writing in the face of such determinism, but underlying this irony is a hint of the expression of a grand idea that justifies setting up art in the face of inevitable progression of time. Conclusion In 1993, The Aubane Historical Society published A North Cork Anthology. Elizabeth Bowen’s name was included and then crossed out to make the point that she was (according to the editor, Jack Lane) not Irish and did not belong. In the debate that ensued in the pages of The Irish Examiner, Martin Mansergh defended Bowen, saying It is generally accepted today that, within the limits of nationality defined by law, and she always qualified as Irish on that count, people should be free to decide their own identity, not to have it posthumously confiscated from them by political ideologues. (Lane 15) Yet even if Mansergh’s sentiment should be the case in an ideal world, no one understood better than Bowen that identity is something that can be confiscated by others, posthumously or otherwise. If Lane wanted to exercise power by dictating the identity of a dead Anglo-Irish woman, Elizabeth Bowen did him one better by writing A World of Love, a novel in which the identities of the Anglo-Irish are dictated by a dead man. In The Heat of the Day, Bowen writes, “in the beginning was the word; and to that it came back in the long run” (145). Although all the characters in the novel are dislocated by the upheaval of war, there are degrees of dislocation. Stella and Louie seem to be equal at the beginning of the novel, despite their class differences, as both have been disinherited—Stella by divorce and Louie by the bomb that destroyed her parents’ house. Yet there is a sense that Louie is more tethered to English identity than Stella because of her obsession with the newspapers: “Once Louie had taken to newspapers she found peace” (145). In the novel, the destruction of the narrative of history is coded in the destruction of buildings. As the narrative of history is being destroyed, the newspapers work to assimilate the facts of war into a new narrative, in which the headlines decide “for you every event’s importance by the size of the print” (145). Louie overcomes her dislocation by identifying with this new narrative: Dark and rare were the days when she failed to find on the inside page of her paper an address to or else account of herself. Was she not a worker, a soldier’s lonely wife, a war orphan, a pedestrian, a Londoner, a home and animal-lover, a thinking democrat, a movie-goer, a woman of Britain, a letter-writer, a fuel-saver and a housewife? (146) Because her life fits into the newspapers’ narrative, Louie is able to “bask in warmth and inclusion” (146). However, Louie still feels bad “about any part of herself which in any way did not fit into the papers’ picture” (146). Since Stella’s life does not fit into the papers’ picture, her dislocation is more permanent that Louie’s. In Bowen’s fiction, identity is a matter of narrative and there is little to separate life and art. This fact might tempt the reader to reduce identity in Bowen’s work to a matter of performativity. However, this would be an oversimplification as Bowen’s characters have no agency in choosing their identities. It is true that the Anglo-Irish in The Last September perform their Anglo-Irishness. They perform the rituals of their identity even as it is being written out of history. However, the performance is dictated by time and place and is further reinterpreted by others. The inhabitants of Danielstown see themselves as Irish, but the Catholic Irish in the novel align the Anglo-Irish with the British. In this way, The Last September is part of a long tradition in Irish literature of depicting the performance of identity as dependent on time and location. In The Absentee, the Anglo-Irish Lady Clonbrony performs Englishness and, despite being born in England, is mocked by her peers. In John Banville’s The Untouchable, the character Victor identifies with British culture because of his Protestant Northern Irishness. However, his English friends refer to him as “the Irishman” (Banville 10) and taunt him with, “How English you’re coming to sound, Vic...quite the native” (84). While The Absentee and The Untouchable touch upon the problematic nature of the Anglo-Irish performance of British identity in England, The Last September depicts the problematic nature of the performance of Anglo-Irishness in Ireland. Despite the denial on the part of the Anglo-Irish in The Last September in relation to the Irish War of Independence, there is no denial about the collective power over individual identity. The Anglo-Irish never define themselves in terms of what they are, but instead attempt to define themselves in terms of what they are not: Not English (Last 93). Yet, even this definition of themselves in terms of what they are not is over-ridden by the Catholic Irish, who construct the Anglo-Irish as not Irish. The novel is a work of fiction, but the crossing out of Bowen’s name by the Aubane Historical Society demonstrates that Anglo-Irish identity is still contested territory and that control of identity still boils down to the written word. Although the Anglo-Irish are considered Irish in present-day Irish culture, alternative narratives are still being generated. The Aubane Historical Society seems to believe that Bowen could have chosen to be Irish by conducting herself in a manner that nationalists would approve of. However, although Bowen acknowledged that her class and status constituted a barrier between her and the rest of Catholic Ireland, she also acknowledged that “a barrier has two sides” (Mulberry 30). Living a crossed out life motivated Bowen to construct narratives. In a letter to V.S. Pritchett, she wrote, “It could be that your and my non-writing lives are simply margins around the non-stop story, that we are focused internally on writing” (Mulberry 224). In this sentence, Bowen understands her own life as a kind of narrative. She also wrote, “You and I, by writing a story, impose shape” (Mulberry 224), which implies that the inclination to writing is an instinct toward bolstering an inadequate sense of identity in real life. However, despite her need to impose shape on her life, Bowen was not willing to simply write a fictional account of her class in which the Anglo-Irish were not marginalised. Instead, her Irish fiction acknowledges the dominance of the narrative that excluded her class from Irish identity. It is this that accounts for the experimental constructions of time in her work. The performance of Anglo-Irish identity became especially problematic in Bowen’s lifetime. Therefore, in order to construct a narrative to contain the Anglo-Irish identity, she had to imagine Ireland as a non-place with no time. Her direct experience of being part of a class that was erased from the narrative of history made it necessary for her to explore non-identity in her work as well as identity. From non-identity, ghosts, with their ability to transcend time, were a natural progression. The surreal elements of Bowen’s fiction may occasionally seem strange, but disruption of ontological stability in the narrative was necessary because, in Bowen’s opinion: “The novel lies, in saying that something happened that did not. It must, therefore, contain uncontradictable truth, to warrant the original lie” (Mulberry 35). Although Bowen could not literally create a space for the Anglo-Irish in Ireland, to do so artistically had its own satisfaction and if the results were surreal, that was even better as Bowen believed that “the very arbitrariness of art brings an odd peace” (Mulberry 224). Works Cited Banville, John. The Untouchable. London: Picador, 1997. Print. Beckett, Samuel. 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