The setting of readings from Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis as the first assignment of a course on Reading and Time authorises a free form of enquiry that makes a virtue out of lack. Mimesis lacks the usual accoutrements that one would expect of such a momentous endeavour as proclaimed in the book’s subtitle: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. The reader is forced to dive into unknown waters without any appraisal of depth or temperature. There are no definitions offered; no goals provided and no summary given. Auerbach was--blessed?--by the fortuity of a lack of resources imposed by the constraints of war (WWII). Isolated in Turkey, he had to make do with a severely limited library and restricted communication with the outside world. In any case: "the great majority of the texts were chosen at random, on the basis of accidental acquaintance and personal preference rather than in view of a definite purpose" (Auerbach 556). This is not the place to discuss the book except to say that, despite, or because of the various contingencies, it has been hailed as a very important book notable for its scope and historical richness.
Like Auerbach, we are plunging into the course without the aid of definitions as to what the concepts of ‘time’ and ‘reading’ may mean in this context. Perhaps a good place to start is where reading and time converge: in language. To harness the creativity of fortuity, pace Auerbach, I propose to venture (randomly) outside the mainstream to look at the limitations of language through the eyes of a theoretical physicist, David Bohm, as interpreted by Will Keepin [scroll down to "Holomovement and the Implicate Order," and the section "Thoughts About Thinking"]. Bohm can help us realise that language has a tendency to reduce the flow of reality to static fragmentation. For Bohm, there are no objects, only "dynamic processes." To quote Keepin on Bohm: "nouns do not really exist, only verbs exist." Armed with this knowledge, one must banish all hope of fixed or universal ideas: "the movement of thought is a kind of artistic process that yields ever-changing form and content. He intimates that "there can no more be an ultimate form of such thought than there could be an ultimate poem."
What are we if not thought which is language which is of time (the past)? But we are part of the process, whether we know it or not and are located somewhere within the (non-linear) flow of history. Can we free ourselves from the shackles of time sufficiently enough to have the agility and lightness of mind that is able to clearly perceive the processes of reality: eg, the process of the convergence of reader and text. There is implied in such a process an ongoing (re)construction and reinterpretation of history as represented by the text. Gone is the possibility of an objective, birds-eye view--blinkered as we are from our position within the dynamic process.
In an essay on "Nature Morte: Inscape, Perception and Thought," F. David Peat, a former physicist-colleague of David Bohm, comments on Cezanne’s response to the problem of how viewers decode representations of objects on the canvas:
Cezanne danced between observation and object, object and representation, representation and potential viewer. By constantly asking questions about the act of perception he forced us to engage his canvas and never find rest in a single all embracing reading.
Finally, and again at random, I would suggest as a starting point for research, the ideas contained in the essay, "Literature and the Middle Time," by Gerald Seaman which addresses "time as a conceptual and historical problem, in literary, religious, and practical terms."
Bruce Stapleton
