4 - Duration
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 June 2011
Summary
War reconfigures time as well as space. Conflict calls forth an increase in temporal expressions: ‘for the duration’, ‘never again’, ‘back by Christmas’. If the war zone demands a special topography, wartime demands a bespoke narratology, or even, given the importance to it of (lack of) endings, a bespoke eschatology or theology. Wartime is twofold: both the duration of a conflict and how time is experienced within it. Defining the former and characterising the latter are both problematic. To ascribe a start and an end to a conflict is to emplot it, and emplotment is the beginning of interpretation and hence controversy (a point Tolstoy makes repeatedly in his examples of events being quickly rendered into historical accounts). Frank Kermode analyses emplotted time using the simple model of a clock's tick-tock:
All such plotting presupposes and requires that an end will bestow upon the whole duration and meaning. To put it another way, the interval must be purged of simple chronicity, of the emptiness of tock-tick, humanly uninteresting successiveness…that which was conceived of as simply successive becomes charged with past and future; what was chronos [passing or waiting time] must become kairos [the season, a point in time filled with significance, charged with a meaning derived from its relation to the end].
Wartime, in its exceptional fashion, diverges from this. It is both chronos and kairos; moreover, its kaironic qualities are brought about as much by an absence of ending as by a definitive conclusion.
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- Authoring WarThe Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq, pp. 107 - 134Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011