Anachronies and Their Effects:
Nostromo and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
This paper was written as an assignment for ENGL431: MODERN BRITISH NOVEL, Dr. Craig Barrow, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, 7 Oct. 1987.
Every student of literature is familiar with the term in medias res. Homer begins the Iliad in the middle of the action with the quarrel between Achilles and Agamennon, and then goes back in time to narrate the events leading up to that moment. Wuthering Heights begins with Lockwood's introduction to the characters inhabiting Wuthering Heights and then proceeds, through the narration of Mrs. Dean to go back in time to the events that created them. These anachronies, or discordances, between the natural sequence of events of a story and their narration are part of the "traditional resources of literary narration" (Genette 36).
These traditional uses of anachrony usually cause the reader little discomfort. Occasionally, however, a narrator may use anachronies in a unique way that disrupts the reader's sense of order. Such is the case in Joseph Conrad's Nostromo and James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
In Nostromo, time twists backwards and forwards on itself through a combination of analepsis (a backwards leap in time) and prolepsis (a forward leap) (Genette 39,40). Part I can be divided into two main sections: the riot following Ribiera's flight from Cayta (Conrad 25-41) and an analepsis reaching back eighteen months before to the Sulaco dinner party at the coming of the railroad (Conrad 41-116). Within this analepsis is a complicated analepsis on the history of the mine with the narration shifting among the point of view characters (Conrad 44-105).
An ellipsis follows, with Part II also in two main divisions: the first, opening some six months after the dinner party with the Monterist revolt and the dispatching of Barrios to Cayta (Conrad 117-184), and the second, the dispatching of the silver with Decoud and Nostromo after the riot narrated in chapter two and following (Conrad 184-248). Part II closes with Decoud on the Great Isabel and Nostromo swimming for shore (Conrad 246-248).
Part III is composed of four main sections: a return to the moment when Nostromo and Decoud left the harbor and proceeding through the coming of Pedrito and Sotillo and the events immediately following (Conrad 249-377); prolepsis to the new Sulacan republic as given in an iterative monologue by Mitchell [Genette defines the iterative as an event narrated once - Mitchell's recounting to various traveller's the history of the founding of the republic - what occurred on a number of occassions (Genette 116)] (Conrad 377-390); a return to Barrios' coming to Sulaco (Conrad 390-400); ellipsis to the new Sulacan republic and its labor troubles (Conrad 400-448).
The overall pattern of these shifts in time results in the reader seeing the end of a government followed by the events leading to its decay. The effect of this is to undermine the worth of the government as it develops, and to suggest a relativity of values of the participants in creating the new governments.
While the major movements in time within the novel produce this relativity of values, Conrad uses the smaller movements within the novel as a means of creating dramatic suspense and as a replacement for the traditional place of summary. For instance, Conrad first narrates Nostromo's and Dr. Monygham's discovery of Hirsch and then leaps back in time to the situation surrounding his death (Conrad 340-360). Later in the novel he relates Nostromo's finding of the dinghy adrift on the Placido, and the discovery of the missing ingots and then leaps back in time to Decoud's suicide (Conrad 391-399). Conrad thus disrupts our usual sense of suspense as a cause and effect occurrence and fills in gaps in the narrative while maintaining the reader's sense of drama.
Conrad's use of the iterative mode for all intrusions by the narrator (c.f. Part I, chapter one) further develop the reader's sense of the relative values of the characters. By removing the narrator from any definite time in relation to the narrative and by making the narrator distinct from the point of view characters he uses to develop the action, Conrad places the narrator above the events of the novel, maintaining his authority without lending its weight to any of the point of view characters within the novel.
If the difficulty in following the narration in Nostromo lies in Conrad's relativising time by the shifts backward and forward that direct attention away from the historicity of events to undercut the political beliefs of the characters, the difficulty in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man lies in the timelessness created by Joyce's isolating of events from the stream of time. While Joyce includes a few analepses [internal repeating analepses (Genette 49,54-56): tram scene (Joyce 77,219), memories of Clongowes (Joyce 92); internal completing analepses (Genette 49,62-67): heresy in essay (Joyce 78),series of analepses on university companions (Joyce 177+), opening night of the national theatre (Joyce 226)], for the most part, the narrative proceeds linearly.
What Joyce does, however, is to create a narrative that is discrete; scenes are juxtaposed without narrative connections or without summarizing the events between. Story events are not narrated contextually in relation to each other but by a series of ellipses.
Part I opens with Dedalus' narration of his early childhood: his father telling him a story, dancing as his mother plays and his aunt and uncle watch, his aunt's two brushes - one for Parnell and one for Davitt, his childhood romance with Eileen Vance and the adults' reaction. Obviously these events occur over a period of time, but within the narration they are presented as a succession of paragraphs with no time indicators. Even the fact of their being early childhood memories is never explicitly stated but is inferred from the content, diction and perspective of the narration.
Joyce uses two devices for indicating ellipses. The first, three asterisks, appears at the end of this opening segment prior to the recounting of his fever at Clongowes (Joyce 8). Joyce uses this device thirteen additional times to introduce the following episodes: the Christmas dinner (Joyce 27); the unfair pandybatting at Clongowes (Joyce 39); the move to Dublin (Joyce 65); the Whitsuntide play (Joyce 73); the trip to Cork (Joyce 86); the essay prize money (Joyce 96); the announcement and sermons at the retreat at Belvidere (Joyce 108); his repentance and confession (Joyce 136); the offer to join the Jesuit order (Joyce 153); his vision at the sea (Joyce 164); the villanelle (Joyce 217); the swallows in March (Joyce 224); and the diary entries (Joyce 248).
The second device Joyce employs is the chapter divisions. These divide Stephen's life into broader areas which can be defined both by chronology and by subject: early childhood and Clongowes - his innocence (I); interval between schools and first years at Belvidere - his sexuality (II); the retreat - his religious awakening (III); his final years at Belvidere and entrance into the university - his realization of his vocation, language (IV); his final days at the university - his flight/self-imposed exile (V).
The purpose of narrating Dedalus's life as a series of discrete scenes appears to be two-fold. In his first draft of A Portrait of the Artist, Joyce wrote "(T)he past assuredly implies a fluid succession of presents, the development of an entity of which our actual present is a phase only" (Scholes 60).
Joyce gives us a series of portraits of Stephen Dedalus, a mental picture album, as the narrator looks back at his life from his earliest memories onward. The focus becomes, not the events themselves, but the developing sense of the mind of Stephen Dedalus.
Secondly, the narration of these scenes in this manner seems to be related to Joyce's concept of art as it is outlined by Stephen in Part V. In his conversation with Lynch, Stephen says
The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. . . . The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion. . . is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing (Joyce 205).
By separating the scenes in the novel from the flow of narrative continuity, Joyce creates a static portrait outside the movements of time, a still-life.
At the same time, the juxtaposed scenes of this novel resonate within the reader's mind creating, not a flat picture, but a holographic montage of interconnecting images calling for a continual effort by the reader at untangling this complex web of associations. These open-ended scenes and the changing meanings resulting from the transfer of their images in varying contexts create an art that seeks "to liberate from the personalized lumps of matter that which is their individuating rhythm, the first or formal relation of their parts" (Scholes 60).
Conrad, Joseph. Nostromo. New York: Signet, 1904.
Genette, Gerard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. New York: Cornell UP, 1980.
Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: Penguin Books, 1964.
Scholes, Robert and Richard M. Cain, ed. The Workshop of Daedalus, Collected and Edited by Robert Scholes and Richard M. Cain. Evanston, IL: Western UP, 1965
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