Literature and the Passing of Time: Reflecting on the Temporal Nature of Art.

I’d like to approach our topic from a rather unusual angle – unusual not in the sense that it’s odd or eccentric, because I hope it’s neither, but in the sense that it asks questions about literature and art in general that the philosophy of art seldom asks, and has not asked for a substantial period of time. Fundamentally, what I aim to do is to approach our topic via questions about the temporal nature of art – that is, questions about the relationship between art and time.

A quick point of clarification to begin: when I speak about the relationship between art and time, or the temporal nature of art, I’m not thinking about the function of time within individual works – for example, how the passing of time might be represented within a film or a novel, or the function of tempo within a piece of music. I’ll be speaking, rather, about a work’s external relationship with time – that is, the effect of the passing of time on those objects – literary, visual, or musical – that we today call works of art. If you like, I’ll be talking about the relationship between art and our human past and, in particular, the relentless processes of change and forgetfulness that inevitably take place across the centuries and millennia.

Now, it’s an odd thing, but there are certain truths about art that are so familiar to us that we tend simply to take them for granted without sparing them a moment’s thought. And the relationship between art and time, it seems to me, is one of these. Because we all recognise – don’t we? – that works of art have a special capacity to endure over time – to “live on” or “transcend time”, as we say, while other aspects of human culture, such as social customs and beliefs, gradually die out and fall into oblivion. I don’t mean, of course, that works of art have a special capacity to endure physically because, in fact, they’re often more vulnerable to damage or destruction than other objects; but they can, very obviously, endure in a deeper sense: that is, they can remain vital and alive despite enormous intervals of time while other objects created at the same time are, at best, of historical interest only.

Now, we are certainly not the first to notice this remarkable capacity of art. When the Renaissance rediscovered the works of antiquity, it found itself faced with the very same surprising phenomenon. How was it possible, Renaissance minds asked, that these ancient works, which had been ignored and despised for a thousand years, now seemed radiant with life? How had they transcended this vast expanse of time? What power made this possible? The answer the Renaissance gave – an answer that was to prove hugely influential in Western thought – was that unlike other objects, art in all its forms is immune from the passing of time, impervious to change: art, the Renaissance decided, possesses the special, and quite astonishing, characteristic that it exists outside time: it is, in the terminology that became standard, timeless, eternal, immortal.

Modern aesthetics was not invented until the eighteenth century, as we know, but the Renaissance quickly found its own ways of celebrating this discovery. I remember studying Shakespeare’s sonnets at school and reading lines such as “Not marble, nor the gilded monuments/Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme…” And I recall being told that the idea that art is immortal was just a flight of Elizabethan poetic fancy, a “poet’s conceit”. But that was quite incorrect because there was much more at stake. The idea expressed in lines such as these was a key reason why art in all its forms achieved such high esteem from the Renaissance onwards, and we find the same idea celebrated again and again in other writers of the times such as Petrarch, Ronsard, Drayton, and Spenser. The immortality of art was part of the ideology of the Renaissance, if I can put it that way – as much a part of the Renaissance world-view as, say, belief in the powers of science is for us today.

Moreover, the idea was destined for a long and illustrious life. So influential was it, in fact, that one still finds it centuries later in the poetry of the Romantics. But more importantly for our purposes, it was central to the belief system of the eighteenth-century thinkers who laid the foundations of the discipline we call aesthetics or the philosophy of art. The evidence is there for all to see. David Hume writes in his well-known essay on the Standard of Taste that the function of a suitably pre­pared sense of taste is to discern that “catholic and universal beauty” found in all true works of art, and that the forms of beauty thus detected will “while the world endures…maintain their authority over the mind of man”, a proposition he supports by his well-known dictum that “The same Homer who pleased at Athens and Rome two thousand years ago, is still admired at Paris and London”.[1] And precisely the same idea is endorsed by other Enlightenment figures as various as Winckelmann, Alexander Pope, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Immanuel Kant.[2] In short, where the relationship between art and time is concerned, the Enlightenment ratified the Renaissance view. The Renaissance had concluded that art is timeless, eternal, immortal, and the Enlightenment was in full accord.[3]

Now, as we’re all aware, aesthetics as we know it today has been strongly influenced by Enlightenment figures such as Hume and Kant, and I would argue that much of what is written today in aesthetics and the theory of literature remains deeply beholden to the view that art is timeless, even if that fact is seldom acknowledged. But I only make that point in passing because I now want to relate what I’ve said to the topic of our conference and particularly to the idea of essence, which is one of our chief concerns.

If an object is timeless, it follows necessarily that it has an essence that is impervious to change. And by essence here we cannot mean the minor, peripheral aspects of the object because that would imply that the important elements were subject to change which is contrary to what we are saying. So a timeless object would have an essence that remained the same across the ages – key elements, if you like, that retain the same significance – the same meaning and importance – across the centuries unaffected by the passing parade of history. Empires could rise and fall, customs and beliefs could change, but the significance of the work – be it literature, visual art, or music – would always stay the same. Or, to use Hume’s example again, the same Homer who pleased at Athens and Rome two thousand years ago, would still be admired in eighteenth century Paris and London – and, presumably, endlessly thereafter.

But there’s a problem, is there not? And we only have to state the matter plainly, as I have just done, to sense that something is not quite right. The problem becomes particularly obvious if one thinks in terms of visual art because much more of it has survived for long periods of time – here I simply mean survived in the physical sense – and the effects of change are easier to discern. Let’s take an ancient Egyptian sculpture such as the four-thousand-year-old image of the Pharaoh Djoser which is now ranked among the treasures of world art. What did this statue mean to the ancient Egyptians? We shall probably never know exactly because it’s so difficult to recover the world-view of ancient civilizations even when, as with Egypt, there is considerable written evidence. But we can feel quite safe in saying that the image was not regarded as a “work of art” in any of the senses that idea has for us today, firstly, because the Egyptian language had no word for “art” and, secondly, because the image was designed for an important religious purpose: it was placed in the Pharaoh’s mortuary chapel next to his pyramid to receive the offerings that would aid him in the Afterlife.

So here’s a major blow to the theory of timelessness: clearly, this image did not always have the meaning and importance it has for us today. But that’s not all, and things get even worse. We today regard the image of Djoser as important because we see it as an important work of art. But not so long ago that view would have been universally ridiculed. As recently as the nineteenth century, Egyptian sculpture was firmly excluded from the rubric art – along with the works of Africa, India, Romanesque Europe, the Pacific Islands, and many others. Objects from cultures such as these might find their way into cabinets of curiosities or, later, into archaeological collections, but at no point in European history had they ever been art. They belonged in the obscure realm of idols and fetishes that had nothing to do with art. So, returning to our example, not only does the Pharaoh Djoser have a significance for us that’s very different from the significance it had for the ancient Egyptians, but there were also long periods of time after the death of Egyptian civilization when, like so many objects from other cultures, it had no significance at all – and when it was certainly beyond the pale of art.

So where does this leave the notion of timelessness – the idea born with the Renaissance, and vital to Enlightenment aesthetics that works of art are impervious to change? And where does it leave the associated notion of an unchanging essence? Clearly, both are left in a parlous state. And lest we are tempted to think that literature is not affected, let’s reflect on Hume’s famous example. Is it in fact true that the same Homer – the same Homer – who pleased at Athens and Rome two thousand years ago, was the Homer admired in eighteenth century Paris and London – or that we admire today? The early history of the Iliad – to take that as our example – is somewhat obscure but we do know some things. We know that it was originally sung not recited, and certainly not read silently from the pages of a book. We also know that the gods and heroes of the story were gods and heroes in whom the Greeks of the time firmly believed – not simply “Greek myths” as the eighteenth century saw them. And there is very little doubt that the modern practice of regarding the Iliad as “literature”, to be placed on the same footing as the epics of other peoples, such as the Gilgamesh or the Bhagavad Gita, would have been unthinkable to Greek communities circa 750 BC – as unthinkable as placing the image of the Pharaoh Djoser in an art museum on the same footing as gods from another culture would have been to an ancient Egyptian. To what extent, then, can one speak of “the same Homer”? How exactly do we identify a “timeless” Iliad that has persisted across the millennia unaffected by social and cultural change? Where is the unchanging essence? And although I’ve chosen examples from the relatively distant past because, as I say, it’s easier then to see the effects of time, we encounter the very same questions, even if in a less obvious way, in more recent works. Is “our” Shakespeare, for example, the same as the Shakespeare of aud­iences circa 1600? He certainly seems to differ from the Shakespeare of audiences from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who usually preferred his plays substantially rewritten, often with different endings – something we would certainly shrink from today.

And lest we think music is an exception, let’s take the example of Mozart. For nineteenth-century music lovers, who saw Mozart through the prism of Romanticism, Mozart could still be admired (unlike most eighteenth century composers) because he was the epitome of classical elegance – of “perfect grace” to employ one the stock phrases, sometimes used by writers in aesthetics even today. But is this our Mozart? “Perfect grace” hardly seems to do justice to the poig­nancy of the slow movements of the piano concertos, the sublime fantasy of The Magic Flute, the driving energy of the Prague Symphony, or the haunting grandeur of the Requiem. A different Mozart has emerged for us, and as he has, so our responses to the Romantics have changed: as Mozart alters, so do Beethoven and Brahms. Music, in short, is as ill-suited to the Procrustean bed of timelessness as the other arts.

Now perhaps someone might say: “Does any of this matter? Can’t we just ignore it?” Unfortunately, I don’t think we can. Because we are still faced with the simple, intractable fact that, to use the terms I used earlier, “works of art have a special capacity to endure over time, while other things such as customs and beliefs die out and fall into oblivion.” For most of European history since the Renaissance, explaining this special power posed no problem because one could simply turn to the concept of timelessness. But if we jettison this explanation – and I’ve been seeking to persuade you that we should– what do we put in its place? Is there some other way of explaining how the Pharaoh Djoser, the Iliad, Shakespeare’s plays and so many other works from the past have “lived on” – bearing mind that, as we now see, they have not been impervious to change?

I believe there is an alternative explanation but since my time has nearly run out I will need to describe it in a very abbreviated way. Fortunately, one useful way of approaching the matter is through the idea of essence that is one of our conference’s central concerns. When we think of an essence we usually tend to think, as I suggested earlier, of something that is proof against change – something that resists when all else is transitory. Hence our readiness to link the idea of an essence of art to the notion that art is timeless: it would be the essence of a play, a painting, or a piece of music that escapes the vicissitudes of time and change.

But suppose we think of the essence of art in a different way. Suppose we think of it as the characteristic that enables a work to endure not by retaining the same meaning and importance across the ages but, on the contrary, by assuming different meanings and different kinds of importance – “living on”, that is, not by being impervious to change but by responding to change by being reborn with new and different significances.

We can immediately see how well such an explanation would fit the kinds of facts I’ve been discussing, and why it would make sense where, as we have seen, the notion of timelessness fails to do so. Consider my Egyptian example again. We saw how badly the timelessness explanation – perhaps I might call it the Humean explanation – how badly this explanation fared in the face of the fact that the original meaning and importance of the image was so different from its meaning and importance today – and the additional fact that there were long periods of time when it had no meaning or importance at all. Transformations of this kind – and this Egyptian example is only one of hundreds I could have used – are simply impossible to square with the proposition that art is impervious to time. But if art endures through change – by means of change – these problems immediately disappear. Because then we can simply say this: For the ancient Egyptians, the image was a powerful expression of a religious truth. When Egyptian civilization disappeared, so did the religious significance of the image and for four thousand years it simply lay gathering dust. But unlike the customs and beliefs of ancient Egypt which have disappeared forever, the impressive image of the Pharaoh Djoser has been able to revive, to take on a new meaning and a new importance – a meaning and importance today as what we call a work of art. Like so many other works of genius from earlier cultures, from Mesopotamia, to Buddhist India, to Mesoamerica, to Romanesque and Byzantine Europe, it has shed its original significance and, after a period in oblivion, returned to life in modern Western civilization as a work of art, surviving not because it retains its original significance, as Hume would have us believe, but because it has a power of metamorphosis – a power to live again, albeit with a significance of a different kind.

My time is nearly up so I shall conclude very quickly. I should stress that the explanation of art’s power to endure that I’ve just outlined is not my own invention: it is a key element of André Malraux’s theory of art which he explores in works such as The Voices of Silence – though in much more depth and detail than I’ve done today. But my purpose in discussing Malraux’s theory of metamorphosis has not been to proselytize for his theory of art – worthy cause though that would have been – but, above all, to draw attention to the neglected issue of the relationship between art and time and, in doing so, suggest how that affects the question of “essence”. As long as we think of the essence of a work of art in the terms implied by Hume’s dictum – that is, as a significance impervious to time – we are, I believe, condemned to divorce ourselves from the world of art as we now know it and find ourselves clinging to a theory that has outlived its usefulness. There is often a tendency, I might say here, to read the works of the Enlightenment founding fathers of aesthetics as if they were quasi-sacred texts – writings that one can approach as a respectful exegete but not challenge in any fundamental way. But we need to remember that Hume, Kant and their contemporaries did not live and write in a cultural vacuum; much of their thought reflects the times in which they lived, and their thinking about the relationship between art and time is a direct inheritance from the Renaissance – an inheritance that doubtless seemed convincing enough in the eighteenth century when the world of art was far narrower than ours, but an inheritance that, as we have seen, makes no sense at all today. It is highly unlikely that the Iliad chanted in Greece over two thousand years ago is “the same Iliad” that pleased an eighteenth century philosopher and belle-lettrist such as Hume, just as it is highly unlikely that the statues of Egyptian pharaohs, or the saints in the porches of mediaeval cathedrals, or Shakespeare or Mozart, meant the same when first created as they mean to us today. Large numbers of works of literature, visual art, and music have endured – unlike the customs and beliefs that were current at the time of their creation; but they have endured not because they are timeless but through a process of metamorphosis; and their “essence” is not a power to retain an unchanging meaning through time but a capacity to re-emerge with new meanings – transcending time not through immortality but through transformation and resurrection.  

A paper  delivered at a conference entitled  21st Century Theories of Literature: Essence, Fiction, and Value, University of Warwick 27th to 29th March, 2014. 

Pharaoh Djoser. c. 2630 BC