‘Both perhaps present’: contradictions in time, Four Quartets and Twin Peaks
Luc Gerrard
I
This essay will seek to provide a resolution for the contradiction raised in the Bergsonian/Einsteinian debate on time, using literature and film as methods of explanation. Four Quartets is a series of four poems written by modernist poet TS Eliot, published over a six-year period from 1936-42. Twin Peaks is a television series created by postmodern director David Lynch and writer Mark Frost, running for two seasons from 1990-91, and returning for a third season ( Twin Peaks: The Return ) in 2017. If there is only one thing Four Quartets and Twin Peaks share in common, beyond an apparent mutual love for even numbers, it would be an interest in exploring and attempting to reconcile contradiction.
Both texts teem with contradictions.
Not only does Four Quartets begin and end with two powerful contradictions, but each movement of each poem is heavy with them. The opening movement of The Dry Salvages , for example, presents its diction as a mingling of the romantic and prosaic, characterizing ‘the river’ by jux taposing vague, emotional adjectives (‘sullen, untamed and intractable’) with unemotional adjectives (‘ useful, untrustworthy’), and archaic, Biblical phrases (‘the dwellers in cities’) with flat, practical phrases (‘a conveyer of commerce’, ‘the builder of bridges’). This movement also contrasts the personal and the historical, hope and futility, life and death, and old and known symbols (the river for the life of man, the sea for human history) with obscure and unknown symbols (‘the horseshoe crab’, perhap s for the titanic mystery of time passing, etc). Similarly, as its title suggests, Twin Peaks is home to an overwhelming, almost farcical proportion of doubles (or ‘twins’). This gothic motif 1 reverberates through every level of the series: the literal doubles of the two Coopers, Laura/Carrie, and the White and Black Lodges, as well as the allegorical doubles of reality and dream worlds, civilization and nature, and the unique mixture of soap-opera storytelling and surrealism. It is the tension and occasional harmony between all these narrative and non- narrative duelling polarities that is much of the show’s essence.
II
Our understanding of time is also bound by contradiction. This contradiction is one between the ontological status of time, as discovered by modern physics, and the phenomenological status of time, the way in which time is experienced by humans. Stemming perhaps from the ancient metaphysical dispute between Parmenides and Heraclitus (with Parmenides arguing that the universe is constant, unchanging, and eternal, and Heraclitus arguing that the fundamental character of reality is
1 Ledwon (1993).
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