Extensions : spacing postmodern time and distancing postmodern proximity : Elizabeth Bowen, Gianni Vattimo, and the end(s) of modernity

• Main Author: Cummings, Kasey Allain
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/9175

For almost fifty years, readers of Elizabeth Bowen's wartime novel The Heat of the Day have been mystified by this odd culmination of her attempt to write a 'present-day historical novel' recreating the experience of the Second World War in London. The novel was to comprise 'the ideal vehicle for her memory' of the war, in response to the ubiquitous fear of artists and critics alike that the novel creating "a picture [of the war] which [could] not be effaced by tomorrow's newspaper" (Calder-Marshall, et al "Manifesto") would not get written. However, the question remains ~ why is war inscribed in the text as a marginal background event? The peculiarity of the text with its figure-ground shift has frustrated at least as many readers as it has pleased. And yet, over the fifty years of its reception, one discovers an increasing emphasis on the philosophical and allegorical aspects of Bowen's text. And thus, the effect of this history of the text's reception (its Wirkungsgeschichte) can in turn be read as a repetition of the shift or movement detected within Bowen's wartime text itself — namely, the shift from epistemological or modernist questions and concerns to ontological or postmodernist ones. This paper is motivated in part to offer yet another reading of Bowen's mysterious wartime text. Following the conjecture that the Second World War represented an emotional, spiritual, and intellectual crisis for Bowen, this paper reads it as being both a crisis of representation and a 'clarifying moment,' or a moment of disclosure which foregrounds the interpretive aspect of human existence. This reading of the text is then linked with the postmodern philosophical framework prompted by Gianni Vattimo's theory of hermeneutic ontology, following the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. In texts such as The End of Modernity and Beyond Interpretation. Vattimo studies, in his words, "the relationship that links the conclusions reached by Nietzsche and Heidegger in their respective works... to more recent discourses on the end of the modern era and on postmodernity" ("Introduction" to The End of Modernity 1). In an extension of Vattimo's understanding of this relationship then, this paper both spaces postmodern time and distances postmodern proximity through its reading of an existential context shared by the acute triangle of the writers under consideration: Heidegger (1889-1976), Bowen (1899-1973), and Vattimo (1936-). As such, this paper offers a unique contribution to Bowen studies, as well as expanding the critical and methodological approach to war writing as a category. And finally, it contributes to an opening horizon of postmodern critical practices as formulated by Vattimo.