You can become a ghost “once you become aware of the operation of a time which is not calendar-time” — or so the narrator of The Alexandria Quartet tells us (667).
At least, one becomes a ghost “in some sort”. Why the qualification? Did he just mean to say one would be like a ghost: remain a person, just have some attributes in common with ghosts? Or did he mean that one becomes one, but of a specific kind: implying that there are other “sorts” of ghost one doesn’t become this way? Or does one become a regular ghost, but transforms in a particular “sort” of way? Let’s investigate, and first ask what, in becoming aware of this “operation of a time which is not calendar-time”, it is that makes us a ghost.
1. Throughout The Alexandria Quartet the world — where all of us live our lives — is symbolized by the eponymous city: when Durrell writes about Alexandria, he characterizes life as we know it, and that includes all aspects of the human condition, from the bodily (including, of course, the sexual) to the spiritual and even mystical, from the ordinary and even boring everyday detail to what happens in the exquisite strata of high society, fabulous wealth, and diplomatic power games. All of this, however, appears in ever changing, kaleidoscopically varying ways, depending on whose narrative is currently in the telling, whose state of knowledge or ignorance is currently assumed; and the vantage point from which these differences can come into view is not itself one inside the world — it lies outside Alexandria, on a remote and barren Greek island, where there is nothing to experience, no space for action, nothing to lose or gain.
Durrell’s narrator writes from this withdrawn vantage point, almost as if from without, not just people’s ongoing affairs, but time itself. He thus finds himself, both in life situation and reflective attitude, in the kind of situation which, within the Jungian tradition, Murray Stein has captured in the idea of a liminal space.1Stein, writing from within the Jungian tradition, has developed a specifically psychological perspective on that notion. This goes further than, say, the notion as used in anthropology.
Liminality is created whenever the ego is unable any longer to identify fully with a former self-image, which it had formed by selective attachments to specific internal imagos and embodied in certain roles accepted and performed. […] now [there is] a sense of an amputated past and a vague future.
Murray Stein, In Midlife, 11.
It is both a place and time apart — away from the city, after all the stories have ended — where nothing is possible except reflection.
The first three novels of the tetralogy are designated “siblings” by the author: all three of them are about the same events, but each as centered around different characters. They are presented by the same narrator, who integrates the perspectives of other characters by means of retelling their accounts, which he draws from letters, diaries, and other written formats. Since the narrator is himself a protagonist in the first novel, Justine, the two follow-ups serve to correct, supplement, and deepen his narrative, as it were “after the fact”. In parallel to this continuous widening and deepening of our understanding, as readers, of what happened during the narrated time in Alexandria (read: in the real world) run the narrator’s reflections, emerging from his withdrawn island situation (read: in liminal space). This running commentary does not just help our understanding of the stories along, but also allow glimpses of the processes that occur, simultaneous with such understanding, in the liminal realm.
One such process is learning that the time in which events unfold in the real world (that is, in the city, Alexandria) — dubbed calendar-time by the narrator — is not the only time there is: “once you become aware of the operation of a time which is not calendar-time you become in some sort a ghost. In this other domain I could hear the echoes of word uttered long since in the past by other voices.” (667) While immersed in liminal space, the narrator has come to perceive this other kind of time — which I shall call ghost-time — very gradually, “learning at last to inhabit those deserted spaces which time misses — beginning to live between the ticks of the clock, so to speak.” (659) This has brought about an understanding of an immense vastness at which, in the manner of a true mystic, it seems he can only gesture: “calendar-time gives little enough indication of the aeons which separate one self from another, one day from another.” (657) And quite possibly it is by the way they speak about time that we can recognize the dull timelessness of ghosts.
In […] psychological liminality, a person’s sense of identity is hung in suspension. You are no longer fixed to particular mental images and contents of yourself and others. […] While the sense of “I-ness” and some of its continuities remain during liminality, the prevailing feeling is one of alienation, marginality, and drift.
Murray Stein, In Midlife, 8-9.
In contrast, calendar-time can be characterized in terms of human life, and the real world: time, “that ailment of the human psyche” (658), is “only desire expressed in heartbeats” (659).
2. At first glance, what Don DeLillo’s narrator in The Names describes appears to be exactly what I’ve just called “ghost-time”:
I flew a lot, of course. We all did […] growing old in planes and airports. […] This is time totally lost to us. We don’t remember it. We take no sense impressions with us, no voices […] It is dead time. It never happened until it happens again. Then it never happened.
Don DeLillo, The Names, 6, 7.
But only at first glance. For this is different in at least two respects.
First, although disconnected from the living world (which is the city) and perhaps only available for those who’ve (metaphorically) become ghosts, the time in Durrell is nevertheless filled with something equally meaningful: one doesn’t live, but one reflects. In DeLillo’s dead times one’s awareness stops; or if it continues, nothing in it is capable of being recollected. One doesn’t perceive, but one ages (“growing old”); thus in a sense the time of the world (what Durrell’s narrator calls “calendar-time”) still goes on here — and as a corollary, it is precisely not filled with anything like reflection, from which we might carry something of value back to the living world.
And secondly, even though both ideas have in common that they refer to a kind of experience which is apart in space and time, it seems that Durrell’s ghost-time must be continuous, whereas DeLillo’s lost time necessarily appears splintered, in fragments. It could not have its essential characteristic of never having happened until it happens again if it wasn’t just interspersing that other form of time, namely, that of lived lives. (Lives lived in a manner, of course, which precisely brings with it this kind of splintering — a manner which defines that “subculture” the quoted passage indicates.)
3. If withdrawal into liminal space (symbolized by the stay on a Greek island in The Alexandria Quartet) is a journey to the underworld or — to put it less mystically — an immersion in what comes out of the unconscious, then curious effects connected to the passing of time are what we should have expected given a long-standing tenet of the analytical tradition in psychology: that the unconscious is curiously “timeless”. Will this perhaps get us closer to the idea of “a time which is not calendar-time”?
The timelessness of the unconscious was already a principal observation of Freud’s:
Die Vorgänge des Systems Ubw sind zeitlos, d. h., sie sind nicht zeitlich geordnet, werden durch die verlaufende Zeit nicht abgeändert, haben überhaupt keine Beziehung zur Zeit. Auch die Zeitbeziehung ist an die Arbeit des Bw-Systems geknüpft.
Sigmund Freud, “Das Unbewußte” (1915), Sämtliche Werke, 146-147.
But there’s not much development in the idea throughout his work. When it reappears, it happens in nearly identical terms:
Wir haben erfahren, daß die unbewußten Seelenvorgänge an sich »zeitlos« sind. Das heißt zunächst, daß sie nicht zeitlich geordnet werden, daß die Zeit nichts an ihnen verändert, daß man die Zeitvorstellung nicht an sie heranbringen kann.
Sigmund Freud, “Jenseits des Lustprinzips” (1920). Sämtliche Werke, 238.
So the notion of a “timelessness of the unconscious” is understood in multiple ways. Freud cites two more or less clear ones (impossibility of temporal ordering, and invariance over time), and then subsumes the rest under the rather vague formulation “have no relation to time” — in fact, “none at all” (”überhaupt keine”). This latter claim is really too vague to be of any use, so let’s just focus on the two others.
The first, that unconscious contents lack temporal ordering, is frequently taken up by Jung. In the individuation process, just as in the alchemistic stages of the opus, the unconscious presents a ‘simultaneous’ rather than ‘sequential’ arrangement of psychological material.2GW XIV, § 468n10. The second of Freud’s senses is more directly at the base of the early psychotherapeutic approaches in the analytical tradition. Experiences, especially intense and painful ones which repeat over and over again without allowing escape, seemed to be at the root of psychological problems. This is what Wollheim later called the ‘tyranny of the past,’ where past events exert an excessive influence precisely because their memories remain unaltered.3The Thread of Life, 132.
Now the problem is that “ghost-time”, as understood by Durrell’s narrator, is neither of these two. Ghost-time, for to Durrell’s narrator, is different from calendar-time because he “could hear the echoes of words uttered long since in the past by other voices” (667), and learned “to inhabit those deserted spaces which time misses — beginning to live between the ticks of the clock, so to speak.” (659)
But there is no question about the ordering of events in terms of what comes before or after what. And there is no question of eternal, unchanged repetition, either. (Although the form we found earlier in DeLillo might fit that idea more closely.) And apart from these, Freud’s claims are not actually of much help here — for what does it mean that the unconscious “has no relation to time at all”?
4. But if ghost-time is not dead time, and not the timelessness of the unconscious either, then what is it that makes it ghostly — and why is it only accessible in liminal space?
The particular thing that makes the narrator aware of this special mode of time, and prompts him to associate it with ghosts, is that “I could hear the echoes of words uttered long since in the past by other voices.” (667) And the ambiguity in this beautiful poetic phrase is perfectly evocative of ghostliness. What does it allude to? Whose voices are meant (other people’s voices, or even voices “from beyond”)? Does he remember the words in question, as having been said to him, or does he hear them now for the first time? (After all, much of the narrative of the second and third novel are based on accounts of others which the narrator wasn’t aware of when he himself lived through the narrated period of calendar-time.) And would the fact that he hears only echoes mean that perhaps the words have, after all, been spoken long ago, and just by a freaky feature of that other domain their echoes never died away, but keep going on eternally…
This all seems to point to a well-known fuzziness in psychological episodes that refer us to a past which we have experienced ourselves. (Scientifically speaking, it was less well understood at Durrell’s time, but he seems to have had a keen awareness of it, anyway.) The fuzziness lies in the fact that memories are only partly like “recordings”; in part, they are like fantasies: the imagination kicks in every time we make the older experiences present to ourselves, fills gaps, confabulates, suppresses unpleasant aspects, and so on. The respective contributions of what we might call actual recall (of facts, impressions, and emotional tone — as they actually were when we originally lived through the experience) and imaginary additions, deletions, and substitutions are difficult to tell apart. And so the memoria that make up the first novel in the Quartet are, as all autobiographical accounts are, part recording and part storytelling.
This is what makes the project of the narrator possible in the first place: we could never “re-live” our own past if memories were just recordings. Re-livings only become alive because we are in fact living them somewhat differently than the last time: namely, no longer as the person we were, but as the person we are now. At the same time, we arrange them in a narrative structure (we tell them as a story). And there again, if the narrative is to be immersive enough to capture our interest, it must evoke a meaning: it must be meaningful, however, to who we are presently (it may or may not have been meaningful in the same way during the original episode).
Both these characteristics subtly detract from calendar-time: they make it less important exactly when and where things happened. They shift us (in the episode of re-living) into a story-world outside the common spatiotemporal grid. (They do this in the same way an immersive novel or movie, or even a video-game would do.) So the form of time that I (following Durrell’s evocative phrases) have called ghost-time is tied to the workings of the imagination. It’s not exactly that “time” itself which is “invented”, of course: we might better say that it is the time of a part-recalled and part-imagined narrative world.
5. What metaphysical status would follow from all this for this ghostly type of time?Is it real? Is it an illusion?
Both Durrell and his narrator (in the earlier pieces) insist on the reality of the city. The author prefaces Justine with a conventional note on its fictionality, which says that “[t]he characters in this story […] are all inventions together with the personality of the narrator, and bear no resemblance to living persons” — and then adds in a twist: “Only the city is real.” (14)
To be real, here, merely means to be not invented. One can tell stories about the world even if those stories involve invented characters, and even though they are told from the perspective of an invented narrator — still they are stories about the world which we all (invented and actual persons alike) inhabit. They express insights about experiences shared by all persons (invented and actual ones), they just elect to demonstrate those insights using the invented sort. (That is true, to varying degrees, of all fiction: Hamlet, say, expresses something important about psychological dynamics we may find in many people who actually lived, too — and yet Hamlet is an invention, and so are his words and actions.) Still this is a different contrast, and thus a different sense of “real” than would be the contrast between reality and illusion. For if time and experience in the real world are fundamentally illusionary, then so they are for all alike: the actually living and the invented characters.
Again, the narrator starts Balthazar saying, paradoxically: “The city, half-imagined (yet wholly real), begins and ends in us, roots lodged in our memory.” (209) Thus being (partly) imagined and being real do not seem to be mutually exclusive; and it is an interesting further question what the relationship is meant to be between its character as imagined and its roots in memory. Does the city emerge from “real” memories by a process in which the imagination has a function? Is it, then, the anchoring in memory which ensures that the city is also real? Or are we rather supposed to think that this is what makes it in the end an unreliable deal, being based on memories which are bound, inevitably, due to human nature and the unreliability of our minds and souls, to depart from any reality they might have had in the first place? And if it is the latter: is this already the nucleus of the insight which will grow in the narrator, during his time in liminal space, and finally result in the recognition that time and experience in the world — that is: the city — are an illusion?
6. When Durrell’s narrator refers to time as something that characterizes the life of people in the city, he calls it calendar-time, but he also circumscribes it, more concretely, as “desire expressed in heartbeats” (659). This latter expression binds it, on the one hand, to life functions and perhaps the most clearly perceivable rhythm in them (i.e., that of the heart), and on the other, to desire as primary motivator in living activity. This is how time functions in the real world (that is: in the city).
Then there is a second way in which time can function: but this can only be experienced in liminal retreat, in the reflective space in which the narrator finds himself as he formulates the novel. There, on the Greek island, “you become aware of the operation of a time which is not calendar-time” (667) — and again, more concretely, which is not time expressed as life’s functions and motivations (heartbeats and desires). I have called this ghost-time, which isn’t Durrell’s term, but inspired by his claim that “once you become aware of [it] you become in some sort a ghost” (ibd.).
So according to Durrell’s narrator, there are two “times”, one of which belongs to the real world, i.e., the city. Is calendar-time therefore “real” time, in virtue of being the time that runs in the city? We might say so, but we would be seriously at odds with Durrell’s narrator’s views then. Of the two “times”, it’s ghost-time (not calendar-time) which is half-imagined and rooted in memories — and this is exactly what Durrell’s narrator, with respect of the city, insists on calling “real” — not “unreal”:
The city, half-imagined (yet wholly real), begins and ends in us, roots lodged in our memory. (209)
There is no way around it: in the terminology of the narrator, ghost-time must be on a par, reality-wise, with the city. And yet it is something that can be observed only outside it, in liminal space (that is, in the world of the Quartet, on the Greek island).
Perhaps, then, we should be looking at it the other way round: the city is real, but calendar-time (the time of events in that real city), is unreal, whereas ghost-time (the form of time the narrator discovers while in liminal space) is what is actually real. Since calendar-time is the time of events as experienced by the characters and, crucially, also as remembered by the narrator, it belongs to what is invented (not to what is real) about the city:
[t]he characters in this story […] are all inventions together with the personality of the narrator, and bear no resemblance to living persons. Only the city is real.” (14)
(We might presume the same about place and the causal nexus regarding all those events.) The time that runs in the city, then, fades away (or can be seen through, at least to some degree) once you retreat from the world into liminal space, which means, in less fancy terms, the reflective mode of the psyche. Behind it emerges a web of memories and narratives that are temporally related with each other, but in a different way; and to the degree you live inside it, you’ve become some sort of a ghost.
