In Search Of Lost Time?

A major feature of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca is the way that time is presented. What stands out is the sense of present events always occurring in the shadow of Rebecca’s death. The story’s focus on this is a clue, teaching the reader to interpret the present in terms of the past. To make sense of the story, that’s where one’s attention has to be. When the narrator describes an event, a scene, a conversation, one must always make meaning of it in terms of the past. Nothing is context-free. Everything Maxim says and does is colored by Rebecca’s death and his role in it. Everything the narrator does is colored by her being married to Maxim and not being in on the mystery (till later).  Till she knows the truth (as recounted by Maxim) she interprets his aloofness as coldness toward her and their marriage. Of course, here she interprets the present in terms of the present, thereby violating the rule of the story. And she’s wrong.

After the revelation, the narrator writes: “We can never go back again, that much is certain. The past is still too close to us. The things we have tried to forget and put behind us would stir again, and that sense of fear, of furtive unrest, struggling at length to blind unreasoning panic…might in some manner unforeseen become a living companion as it had been before.”

This is a bit enigmatic, no? Despite the story being all about coming to terms with the past, (or not), the narrator is saying that she and Maxim must avoid the past, forget it or else it might overwhelm them. We the readers must follow a different path; to read Rebecca is to enter the past.

But along with these wise reflections, we must confront another level in the story of how time is handled—the level of writing, full of cues.

Ah!

The story’s present, which evidently is meant to have occurred some twenty years after the events leading to Maxim’s confession and the destruction of Manderley, are written in a distinct style—distinct from the remote past. The story’s present is reflective and slow, making considerable use of the depiction of the narrator’s internal thoughts. There is no dialogue: the dramatic scenes are told in narrative summary. This section begins with that marvelous first line that encapsulates so much: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” The style of this whole section is right there, the repetition, the dreaminess, the attention to the past.

There follows a description of the dream, told in gorgeous prose with considerable description. The narrator writes: “Then, like all dreamers, I was possessed of a sudden with supernatural powers and passed like a spirit through the barrier before me…The beeches were white, naked limbs leant close to one another, their branches intermingled in a strange embrace, making a vault above my head like the archway of a church.” And again: “The house was a sepulcher, our fear and suffering lay buried in the ruins. There would be no resurrection.”

There is use made of the conditional tense: “The room would bear witness to our presence…And Jaspar, dear Jaspar…would be stretched upon the floor, his tail a-thump when he heard his master’s footsteps.” The sense is that if the dream were real, the narrator and Maxim would be able to return. But: “We can never go back again, that much is certain.”

The narrator continues by describing: “Once, there was an article on wood pigeons.” This article, in a magazine, threatens, as she reads aloud to Maxim, to bring back too much of living at Manderley, and the narrator falters and stops.

This entire section is written in a dream-like imperfect tense. Their life in exile occurs as an on-going process, one without firm markers of time. “The scrubby vineyards and crumbling stones became things of no account…”  And the last line of the curious epilogue (which we will comment on later): “And before us, long as the skein of wool I wind, stretches the vista of our afternoon.”

In general, time has different meanings. There is time as a measurement, scientific time that is used as a sort of absolute yardstick. A day has twenty-four hours, an hour, sixty minutes. However, real humans experience the passage of time in different ways; time is subjective.

“Durational time, or duration, refers to the subjective experience of time as a continuous flow of lived experience, rather than a static, measurable quantity. It emphasizes the qualitative, interconnected nature of conscious moments, where the past, present, and anticipated future are experienced as a unified whole, distinguishing it from clock time or spatialized time, which treats time as a series of discrete, separate points.”

Writing from the story’s present, the narrator says: “Of course we have our moments of depression, but there are other moments too, when time, unmeasured by the clock, runs on into eternity…”

Later, the narrator comments on an incident experienced between she and Maxim: “It was ours, inviolate, a fraction of time suspended between two seconds.”

This is not scientific time, best B.

Once Rebecca’s boat is discovered with her corpse inside, the narration assumes a distinct form. Maxim confesses that he murdered Rebecca and scuttled the boat. Time—still quite subjective—speeds up, but its tense is strictly the simple past. “I’I don’t want you to bear this alone,’ I said. ‘I want to bear it with you. I’ve grown up, Maxim, in twenty-four hours. I’ll never be a child again.’

He put his arm around me and pulled me to him very close…I stood there with my face against his shoulder. ‘You’ve forgiven me, haven’t you?’ I said.” (he forgives her).

Yes, there is considerable quoted speech, my friends, which—as we said last time—turns every utterance into an event. For over a hundred pages, this style continues, making a sort of one, long running scene as the narrator struggles to support Maxim’s alibi. This creates considerable tension, as the reader does not know the outcome, and there is a shocking development that ironically, saves Maxim.

There is more to cover—a curious epilogue that returns us to the first time period and to its different style. Let’s cover it next time.

Till then.

#Rebecca #DaphneDuMaurier #AlanBray