Typology as Narrative Form: The Temporal Logic of Marius

TYPOLOGY AS NARRATIVE FORM: THE TEMPORAL LOGIC OF MARIUS Religious belief, the craving for objects of belief, may be refined out of our hearts, but they must leave their sacred perfume, their spiritual sweetness behind. —Walter Pater, "Coleridge's Writings"1 By Carolyn Williams (Boston University) The central character of Marius the Epicurean remains at his death only passively committed to Christianity, but the novel as a whole is more actively , though ambivalently, engaged. That engagement, like Pater's, is not a direct endorsement of Christianity. Even so, a residual commitment to Christianity remains in the novel's view of historical development and in its narrative form, which both derives from and transforms a characteristically Christian pattern of plotting events in time. Typology provides Pater with a way to incorporate and preserve not the sacred objects of belief themselves, but at least the memory and ritual use of sacred patterns of expression. These patterns become one sort of "sacred perfume" that remains as a refined testament to the continuing presence of an attenuated, nostalgic, secularized and aesthetic form of belief. Typological methods of interpreting history, of interpreting individual experience, and of interpreting texts were prevalent in the mid-nineteenth century, and those methods inform Pater's novel in each of its several dimensions: in its reading of historical development, in Marius' reading of his own experience, and in our reading of Marius. In fact the issue of interpretation in general unites these several dimensions of the novel's form, and its various narrative strategies as well. The narration pointedly establishes an analogy between individual and cultural development. The movements of Marius' individual consciousness are conveyed to us through an "outer" narration, a voiced commentary that represents the development of western culture, from the perspective of late nineteenth-century England: "Let the reader pardon me if here and there I seem to be passing from Marius to his modern representatives. ..." This commentary establishes (and keeps alive in readers' minds through reiteration ) a pervasive historical analogy between the culture of Victorian England in the 1880s and second-century Rome in the Age of the Antonines, but that is only its most obvious point, for the narrative commentary is obsessed with the principle of historical analogy in general, with relations of similarity and difference among all ages of cultural history. Together, Marius and the nineteenth-century commentary engage in exercises of memory and analogy from their vastly different points of time; together, they contribute to a dense layering of temporalities in the narrative. The narration divides its attention in order to have access to all of western history. An important narrative strategy emphasizes these analogies and the resulting shifts between various levels of time: between prospection beyond the tenuous present tense of the action, and retrospection, backward in time, sometimes from Marius' sometimes from the narrator's perspective. Many readers have complained that very little direct dramatization occurs in present 11 12 narrative time; very few words are directly spoken; nothing "happens." Each event is first mediated by the consciousness of Marius and then again by the narrating voice; no event appears sui generis, isolated in its own present. But perhaps as much is gained as lost by this strategy. "Foreshadowing" is a suggestive term for what goes on in the opening chapters, where the triumph of Christianity is premised outright in the opening phrase: As, in the triumph of Christianity, the old religion lingered latest in the country, and died out at last as but paganism—the religion of the villagers, before the advance of the Christian Church; so, in an earlier century, it was in places remote from town-life that the older and purer forms of paganism itself had survived the longest. (I, 3) Paganism, too, it would seem had its own "pastoral" past, before the advent of Christianity, to which we now nostalgically look back. The cultural development of paganism can be seen, in "historic retrospect," to foreshadow the later cultural development of Christianity. That very term "foreshadowing " should remind us that even our simplest critical vocabulary acknowledges the debt of secular narratives to typological conventions ; but the simpler modern term merely represents a residue of the complex system...