Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 14 Number 1, April 2013
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Hägglund, Martin. Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2012. 197pp. ISBN: 9780674066328. Hardback Price: £36.95.
Reviewed by
Comenius University in Bratislava
Marcel Proust (1871-1922), Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) and Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), the Trinity of European Modernist literature, have been given new critical appraisals in Martin Hägglund’s Dying for Time (2012). It is often understood and taken for granted even among scholars of European Modernism that Proust, Woolf and Nabokov wrote out of the fear of dying and out of the desire for immortality, with a mission in mind to create timeless moments which transcend death and which lead towards eternal life divorced of mutability. Hägglund, an intellectual champion of Jacque Derrida’s Deconstruction, who has in 2008 established himself in his ground-breaking Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life, challenges and deconstructs in this recent published “deconstructionist sequel” to his previous book such mainstream reading and analysis of the concepts of time, death and desire in Modernist literature through his original theoretical framework of “chronolibidinal analysis”.
At the heart of chronolibidinal analysis is the notion of chronolibido, a theory of the relation between time and desire. Chronolibido entails the intertwined relationship and pulling tensions between “chronophobia”, the fear of death or the fear of losing “timely” life, and “chronophilia”, the desire for and the attachment to “timeless” life. Hägglund emphasises time and again that the fear of death is never a result of a metaphysical desire to transcend life and rise above mutability. On the contrary, one’s fear of death is always a result of one’s intense attachment to life, which one can lose at any given moment. Since one knows that one can lose life and one’s time on this earth at any passing second, one comes to cherish and invest wholly in one’s timely condition of being. As Marcel Proust aptly points out, “Les vrais paradis sont les paradis qu’on a perdus” [the true paradises are the paradises that one has lost], one comes to regard one’s existence or state of being as paradise only when the paradise in question risks the possibility of being permanently lost. Virginia Woolf reaffirms Proust’s notion of paradise as well as the ambivalence of chronolibido through her conceptualisation of the “moments of being”, which Woolf regards as highly intensified moments on both mental and physical levels precisely because she believes these fleeting “moments in time” are moments that perpetually resist one’s attempt to transfix them, and not, as often (mis)understood, because she seeks to pickle and preserve these lived and living instants in the preservation jar of immortality. This urge to transfix time despite knowing that such a venture is never possible can also be seen in Vladimir Nabokov’s emphasis on the necessity of memorisation, of remembering the past and recording the present in one’s attempt to leave traces of temporal displacements for future (im)possible projects of “timely” re-membering and emplacement of memories, through the act of writing.
What appears to be a desperate urge to render timelessness to timely life on the part of Modernist writers is a reflection of their desire to live on as mortals. To reread and rethink the canonical works of Proust, Woolf and Nabokov through the framework of chronolibidinal analysis is to unravel the desires embedded within these over-analysed modernist texts as well as to unveil the hidden double bind of time and desire. Through this reading, it is demonstrated in Hägglund’s book that chronophobia is integral to chronophilia, as chronophilia is integral to chronophobia. In his engagement with Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, Hägglund also exposes the downside of the psychoanalytic “logic of lack” which is flatly based on the notion that philia can only cure phobia. Chronolibidinal analysis, on the contrary, demonstrates that philia and phobia, like life and death as well as fear and desire, are two complementing aspects which constitute the same chronolibidinal condition.
Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov opens up a new possibility of reading Modernist desires for “life in death” against the grain of a plethora of critical writing which has established Modernist texts strictly as end products of the desire for immorality. Hägglund demonstrates that Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf and Vladimir Nabokov transformed the art of the novel in order to put on centre stage the complex experiences of living “in time” and the desire for mortal life, which is never “out of time”.