Time and Narrative in Temporary Kings

*Spoilers ahead*

In my post about the previous volume in the Dance to the Music of Time series, Books Do Furnish a Room, I briefly discussed the nature of Powell’s presentation how times and culture shifts over the half century that the story spans.  I found myself meditating on that subject all the more in the most recent volume, and the penultimate of the series, Temporary Kings. 

As usual, Powell gives his readers no exact dates to pin down the time frame of the story he is telling.  During the set of books that cover the years of the war, we were given a few hard events that allowed us to place the action of the books within a particular year, but beyond that, we are always left to surmise what time has passed and what year we are in.  We are told in Books Do Furnish a Room that Fission, the magazine at the center of the novel, appeared soon after the end of the war and ran for two years, so it is clear to us that the events take place sometime in the last half of the 1940s.  Early in Temporary Kings we learn that the writer X. Trapnel has been dead some ten years and that it had been a few years before his death since Nick, our narrator, has seen him.  That puts us sometime in the 1960s, but where exactly, we don’t know.  What I find so interesting about this vague portrayal of time is that it runs completely contrary to how I anticipated the series progressing.  I knew when I started A Question of Upbringing, that the series would take us a half century down the road, that we would be moving from pre-war England through the war and into the Modern era, quite possibly all the way into the 1970s.  This knowledge set up expectations that this change of culture and the world would be at the heart of what Powell is showing us. 

There are admittedly many ways to tell a story that leisurely covers a 50 year period, but the examples available to me before A Dance to the Music of Time have always played up history over character, like Forest Gump moving through key historical events, showing us a version of history and the American culture and counter-cultures that Gump lived through.  None of that takes place for Powell.  We get no major political figures or geo-political events around which our humble characters dance.  Even during the war, we are kept in England and experience the war from a very different angle than the history books.  If history is told as the great actions of great people, then Powell’s account of this eventful period attempts to capture something very different from the history that is taught in schools.

To be sure, Powell’s characters exist in a specific time and culture—he is not avoiding those environmental factors at all.  There is a great deal of politics and cultural trends, but they infuse every scene rather than take center stage themselves.  We see the forces of culture and counter-culture sliding up against each other, sometimes smoothly and sometimes with great friction, but always through the interaction of characters thrown together by fate and Powell’s loose plotting. 

Two things are achieved by this subtle and powerful approach.  The first achievement is that Powell captures life and time as it is lived.  The political and cultural events of the world are things that have meaning only through the lens of hindsight.  We never know what will be the issues of the history until the facts are gathered and an overarching narrative is stitched together by historians.  What we experience is a whole host of currents and issues that may strike our fancy but that are always second to the pressing matters of life, the bills that need to be paid, the care of loved ones, and the gossip of our friends and relations.   Life is intensely personal and fluid.  History is an inhuman construct in its way.  Powell touches upon this very notion in Temporary Kings, when Nick considers Gwinnett’s efforts to make meaning out of all the stories surrounding Trapnel: 

Enormous simplifications were possibly necessary to carry a deeper truth than lay on the surface of a mass of unsorted detail.  That was, after all, what happened when history was written; many, if not most, of the true facts discarded.

Powell walks a fine line, and walks it beautifully, between giving us the “mass of unsorted details” and the “enormous simplifications” necessary to have his tales carry both life and meaning.

The second achievement is the emphasis of continuity rather than change as time is experienced in life.  Any student of history could tell you about the great social changes between the 1920s and the 1960s, but Nick’s constant narrative voice and refusal to present a pre-packaged view of cultural changes drives home how life as lived is a continuous experience, with very few moments changing everything.  Nick, now in his 50s sounds the same as he did in the first volume, which is exactly how we feel our own lives.  The face in the mirror might warp with gravity and time, but inside we feel like the same people we always were.  And when we meet up with old friends, we quickly see past their physical changes to find the same soul interacting with us in the same way.  When Nick meets up with Moreland, now also in his 50s, Nick gives us a brief description of Moreland’s aging but then gets right on with the conversation and story, and we are right back with Moreland as we were six books ago.  The characters that keep moving in and out of Nick’s ken are the same to us as ever, and as the world changes all around us, it is that continuity that becomes the focus rather than change.  Characters’ political beliefs may alter or hold steady, but they themselves are a mark of sameness.  It is a remarkable achievement to present a kind of anti-history that does nothing to deny the movement of time while simultaneously showing that its power over us is minimal.  Lives may come and go (and there is certainly a high body count over the course of the eleven novels so far), but life is the same as it ever was.

To shift gears to the specifics of Temporary Kings, yet another fantastic volume, I want to spend just a moment looking at a theme unique to it: reliable and unreliable narrators.  While first-person narratives are notorious for their unreliable narrators, Nick has our confidence in every way.  He is impartial with no ego in the tale, since he avoids his own personal life almost entirely.  Up to this point, nearly every account given in the novels has been witnessed by him first hand or told to him, which he retells directly to us.  By contrast, there are two points in Temporary Kings in which the narrative has to be cobbled together by Nick from the telling of multiple other witnesses.  First, we have Pam’s nude appearance in Bagshaw’s home, and second is the drama following the Seraglio performance.  Nick goes to great lengths to tell us journalistically what happened, admitting where the narrative is weakest and where strongest.  This journalistic effort is echoed by Gwinnett’s attempts to gather the tales and experiences of Trapnel through all the accounts of those that knew him.  Gwinnett says in his letter to Nick early in the final chapter of the novel that “he still believed in ‘aiming at objectivity, however much that method may be currently under fire.’”  Apparently there was a time in the early 1960s in which subjective narratives were much preferred to objectivity, perhaps arguing the objectivity was unattainable to begin with.  This is one of those moments that the general cultural issues are treated by Powell as specific and personal.  Why Powell chooses this narrative objectivity as his theme for this novel is unclear to me, but it seems tied up with Pamela Widmerpool.

In many ways, Temporary Kings is about Pamela Widmerpool.  She is at the heart of both questionable narratives, and even at the heart of Trapnel’s narrative with which Gwinnett is struggling.  Pam is a character unlike any other in the novel, and one of the few personalities that Nick can’t seem to crack.  Is her role as a “modern” woman important?  Is her mythical nature important?  It is interesting that she is both thoroughly modern and mythically timeless, like the tale of Candaules and Gyges.  Gwinnett refers to her as “the castrating woman,” and Moreland tells the urban legend of the women who literally castrate a man.  She is someone onto whom others place their feelings and ideas.  Nick observes that she seem to exist solely in the world of sex, but notes that her behavior makes other people see her that way.  He makes no claim about what her world actually consists of.  She is both of the moment and a legend, part human and part cautionary tale.  And under all that, there is something tragic about poor Pamela, more misunderstood and tortured than just about any other character in the series.  It is unclear to me what, if anything, Powell is getting at with her character and her role in the breakdown of objectivity, but it feels packed with meaning to me.

I am excited to read the final book in the series, Hearing Secret Harmonies, and although the book wasn’t published until 1975, I am reading it next to keep up the momentum of the story.  I will return to 1973 and Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow after I conclude this series.