Towards the end of Portrait of a Lady, the titular lady, Isabel, pauses at a bench, which strikes her as “an object recognized.” She feels the ghost of the past grip her—“in this spot something important had happened to her.” Then she remembers: sitting on that very bench six years before, she rejected one suitor and received a letter from another. These two interconnected moments shaped the subsequent course of her life (and, by extension, Henry James’ novel). She deems it a “historical, an interesting, bench;” “she felt rather afraid of it.” The bench, for her, has become a motif; it has entered her own personal mythology. Standing there now, “the past came back to her in one of those rushing waves of emotion by which people of sensibility are visited at odd hours.” Time has been subverted. Isabel feels the waves of the past crash at the shores of the present.
***
On the Dinky leaving and returning to Princeton, I see a paper chain of overlapping memories. Poking the curtain of the present, it ripples. Calling my best friend on the way to the city, October break freshman year, telling her I met my soulmate (I hadn’t). Being warned by an acquaintance about a boy I had been on one date with (there shouldn’t have been more). Leaving campus with him three months later: a sinking ship. Getting stranded in Secaucus, one cold night in February, giddy and free. Leaving on impulse a few months ago, balancing Pelican Shakespeare and my laptop on my lap, typing furiously and trying to ignore the growing scratchiness in my throat. Going to Newark, once, twice, with a hollow stomach and light head, rehearsing words that felt heavy. Going to see an old friend for her birthday when the weather was still warm in September, thinking about how much has changed and what hasn’t. Coming back late, after a concert, once, twice—a sparkly feeling of camaraderie.
***
Towards the middle of Kundera’s Ignorance—one of his later works, written in French (rather than his native Czech) and published in 2000—a young girl is “moved by the coincidence” when, walking through the forest with a new lover, he stops in the same place her ex did. She wants the two story lines to cross: “She seeks out these echoes, these co-respondences, these co-responses that make her feel the distance between what was and what is.”
For Kundera, noting these co-respondences is evidence of maturity: the girl, recognizing the “temporal dimension” of her life, “has the sense of emerging from adolescence because of it, of becoming mature, adult, which for her means becoming a person who is acquainted with time.”
This realization is initially thrilling, but Kundera warns us that, years down the line, the girl is no longer amused when the storylines of her life intersect. Later, when she finds echoes of old lovers in new lovers, she winces. This miracle has become routine; coincidences make new experiences feel stale. Romance loses its romance.
Isabel is frightened by echoes of her past; Kundera’s protagonist is bored.
I’ve realized being haunted is inevitable, but being jaded isn’t—ghosts shimmer at the edges.
***
Jacques Derrida’s theory of hauntology comes out of his writing on Marx: He interprets The Communist Manifesto’s declaration that “A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of communism” to mean that communism existed before it was named. Communism was feared before it was formalized; its influence predated its codification. Invoking Hamlet’s famous refrain that “time is out of joint,” Derrida argues for the existence of “spectral moments”—moments that exist outside of time.
Towards the beginning of Portrait, Isabel is informed that her cousin’s old English manor is haunted by ghosts, which can be seen by only those who have suffered. She cannot see the ghosts; having spent her twenty-three years sheltered, she hasn’t lived.
By the novel’s close, she can.
There is a sense of falling in Portrait: Isabel moves from a prelapsarian to a postlapsarian state (as James suggests through a series of not-so-subtle allusions to Paradise Lost). She loses—her innocence, her idealism, phantom paths not taken—in the course of acquiring experience. But she adds layers to her life; she gains perspective—the ability to read herself.
Increasingly throughout the novel, the past comes back to her. She senses the shape of thoughts she cannot pin. Her consciousness is irrevocably burdened.
One way to read James: a catalog of haunted things, places, people.
***
The first time I read Portrait, I was a junior in high school. I liked the shape of James’ sentences and identified with Isabel’s intense longing for freedom and secretly rooted for her and Goodwood (suitor number one). Which is to say, much of it went over my head. Now, reading Portrait (again and again, for my independent work), having apparently discovered life’s temporal dimension (several failed love affairs later), I realize I’m standing at Isabel’s bench.
It has occurred to me recently that one or two years ago, my mind was a very different place to be in, and one or two years from now, it will be more different still. I try to imagine what it will feel like, to be confined by my own future consciousness, and hit a wall.
The more I think about novelistic representations of haunting and time, the more I realize how infinitely many novels and passages there are to choose from. Haunting is universal: any novel that attempts verisimilitude has to interpret life’s temporal dimension. Our lives—our lived, felt realities—are not perfectly linear.
I think the aesthetic nature of these resonances—of perceiving echoes of the past in the present, of noticing echoes of one novel in another—is a bulwark against becoming jaded. These moments make life art: collages of images; tapestries of words. I told a friend recently that I am not looking forward to adulthood because of all the paperwork—but I am excited to feel more layers in things. Maybe having a burdened consciousness is an acquired taste, like black coffee and red wine. Yesterday morning, a Norah Jones song came up on my playlist, and I was transported to the apartment I grew up in—the old-fashioned stereo and the big green couch in the corner and my dad making pasta in the kitchen and summer Sunday afternoons spent running through sprinklers at the Natural History Museum.
***
In Mrs. Dalloway, too, the present is haunted. The novel’s structure is crucial to its effect: much of its action takes place through flashbacks (its “actual” events span a day). The reader follows the middle-aged Clarissa Dalloway and Peter Walsh’s recollections of their youthful romance. Walsh, at one point, feels much the same grief over this haunting as James’ and Kundera’s protagonists do: Loving Clarissa has spoiled his life, he declares to himself.
It strikes Walsh, in other words, that his ghosts are evidence of a life poorly lived. Being haunted by Clarissa—and what could have been—has ruined him.
But he does not seem doomed. “The compensation of growing old,” he reflects, later, was that one tastes “the supreme flavour” of existence—“the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.” The mechanism of consciousness that renders him haunted has added all the beauty to his life. He rehabilitates his cobweb of memories—dusts them off, admires their glimmer.
I think of riding the train into Princeton in a decade or two, turning memories over in the light.
The Nassau Weekly is graced by the return of Sofia Cipriano, which bears a reminder of times past, of pastimes, time’s passage, and how time just won’t stop passing…