Malkina, Time and Space

Cormac McCarthy, The Counselor. (Picador)

Time and space.

Like everyone of us who are trying to resist the attrition of everyday existence in our electronic world, in this screenplay Cormac McCarthy has strived to draw a grain of a sense out of the fragmentation of time and space of our epoch.

The motion picture is well different from the screenplay and when you see the movie by Ridley Scott you realize that there is a really scanty amount of motion. We see facts in our minds while reading the screenplay and we see facts by our eyes in the superb sequences of the film, but the sense of the facts we see is to be found in the dialogues between the characters, in their comments and remarks about what is happening or has happened or about what is going to happen.

In a way, we may notice that this style of narrative is not so different from the style of Greek tragedy, in which you do not see facts happening on the stage, but you listen to reports by messengers and occasionally by the main characters.

And like the age of Greek tragedy, our age is an age of great transition.

Time is scattered and fragmented, space too.

A dreadful space, an unknowable reality which could even be a scarcely existing reality, just like the unreal reality of the Internet and of social networking, and in this film the enemy is everywhere and nowhere, like the Cloud. 

All that happens is not clearly intelligible.

Malkina is pregnant (in both senses) with the only remaining possibilities of meaning: love of nature, i. e. pets, and a child. At least, these are the only possibilities to draw out a sense of life that the present no-future mess has left to many people. (jessel)

Oedipus, Time and Space

Sophocles, Oedipus Rex.

I think we can acknowledge that Western culture has been raving about Oedipus for more than a century. From Sigmund Freud to René Girard, the myth of Oedipus is an issue one cannot refrain from.

It might thus be of some interest looking for an explanation of this long lasting success.

If we take into account what Harold A. Innis writes in Empire and Communication and in Minerva's Owl about the problem of the time and space balance, and also what he writes about the peculiarity of the flowering of drama during only a short period, when the oral tradition was in difficulty both in ancient Greece and in Shakespeare’s England, we may perhaps read Sophocles's tragedy with different eyes compared to both Sigmund Freud and René Girard, even though in this explanation René Girard's arguments maintain a definitely stronger standing than Freud's.

Besides the tension between the oral tradition and the written word, I think that it could be possible to find in Oedipus Rex a display of the difficulties in balance between time and space. The story of Oedipus's life dwells in the unchanging firmness of the oracle, likely a feature of the emphasis on time typical of the oral tradition. But every effort to change Oedipus' fate is worked out in space: in a struggle against fate Oedipus is sent away, and in a struggle against fate he comes back to Thebes. But finally the moment arrives for the Messenger and the Herdsman, to unveil Oedipus' life's mistery, so that time and space mingle, bringing to a total mess, namely the blasting out of the loss of differences about which René Girard writes in Violence and the Sacred.

As Harold Innis has shown and predicted in A Plea for Time and The Problem of Space, in our age time has been destroyed and it is now increasingly difficult "to achieve continuity or to ask for a consideration of the future". Marc Augé in Où est passé l'avenir? also points this out, though never mentioning Innis, and we may well wonder whether this is a merely pitiful feat or if he simply never read Innis, which would be even worse.

I think it is quite useless to emphasize the demolition of space which has been caused by the telegraph at first and by the Internet afterwards. The general disruption of the meaning and of the anyway questionable reality of time and space in our everyday lives is quite apparent and may thus have been a high-yielding ground, albeit unconscious, for Oedipus' unruly  popularity.

Besides, we could consider Freud's view of the Oedipus' myth a more or less direct result of the collapse of the temporal horizon of our times, a result strenghtened by the associated loss of structure of thought, which gave birth to the discovery of the unconscious which Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media hypothesizes as an outcome of the invention of photography, in its  being structureless and instantaneous. Just in the way in which the Oedipus' Complex is an instant living by itself, out of any developmental structure of the individual along his/her existence, another achievement of the Hypostatic Fallacy that Charles K. Ogden & Ivor A. Richards exhaustively interpret in The Meaning of Meaning. (quint)