Four Quartets and Twin Peaks
change/flux), the famous conflict between Nobel Laureates Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson can be understood as an encapsulation of our conflicted comprehension of time.
Einstein’s proposition of the special (and then general) theory of relativity, in presenting a merging of space and time into the four-dimensional structure of spacetime, 2 presented a threat to Bergson, who believed that this was only another example of humans attempting to map their spatially biased thinking onto a universe that fundamentally cannot be understood in spatial terms. Bergson argued that when we try and spatially quantify something that is fundamentally a continuous process, we only end up distorting the phenomena we are trying to study. But Einstein’s model of time, seemingly vindicating a Parmenidean viewpoint, contests that time is not a continuous process at all: that the passage of time is only an illusion, that time is fixed . And though Einstein’s theories have been (almost) universally authenticated by the scientific community, the contradiction that arises between the fact that time is ontologically fixed and the fact that humans experience time as fluid is one that still poses a substantial philosophical question. It is possible to reconcile this contradiction, and the rest of this essay will use literature (here defined as any written work of art) and film (here defined as any audiovisual work of art produced by a camera) to help illustrate this resolution.
III
Time in literature and film is also defined by a contradiction between flux and fixity. Time in both is simultaneously fluid and fixed but, interestingly, in inverted ways.
Time in literature is fixed because words in themselves are still and static in nature: written words, like photographs or paintings, cannot change or shift, and therefore, like photographs or paintings, can be understood as akin to still points in time. This common-sense interpretation of the temporal status of literature, however, be comes confused when we factor in the reader’s experience of words. Time in literature is fluid because the human experience of words is fluid. There is no fixed movement of time in literature because we read written words at our own pace. Despite certain techniques that writers can employ to attempt to speed up or slow down our experience of these words (alliteration, asyndeton or polysyndeton, etc), reading time is ultimately in the control of the reader. Time in literature is both fixed and fluid, but despite appearing more fixed is in fact defined more by fluidity. This can perhaps be better understood when viewed through the example of Four Quartets . Four Quartets at first apparently puts forward an argument in favour of viewing time as predetermined, therefore fixed. The inverted last words of Mary Tudor which open East Coker point seemingly to this rigid determinism: ‘In my beginning is my end’, inherent in life is the fact of death. Other lines point towards a belief in eternalism, the philosophy of time which Einstein endorsed, the belief that past, present, and future all exist (as opposed to presentism, in which only the present exists). 3
However, other significant factors in these poems proceed to undermine these initial signs emphasizing fixity, and ultimately Four Quartets leans more to a perspective emphasizing fluidity.
2 Ismael (2021). 3 Emery, Markosian & Sullivan.
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