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Playing with Time: James Reaney's The Donnellys as Spatial Form Drama KAREN GRANDY In his 1945 essay "Spatial Fonn in Modem LiteralUre" Joseph Frank observes the way in which the modernist poetry of Eliot and Pound "undennine[sl the inherent consecutiveness of language, frustrating the reader's normal expectation of a sequence and forcing him to perceive the elements of the poem as juxtaposed in space rather than unrolling in time.'>i A reader, or spectator, of James Reaney's Donnelly trilogy' might experience a similar frustration if she comes to the work with "nonnal" sequential expectations. The scenes in the trilogy, like Pound's poetry, do not unroll in time, but are, indeed literally, juxtaposed in space. Ivo Vidan explains that "spatial fonn in fiction is achieved either through a network of recurring motifs ... or through a pattern of forward-and-backward moving in time that plays against the chronological order of events.'" The Donnellys, clearly, has both of these structural elements , as well as others, to be described through this paper, which lead me to label it a spatial fonn drama. I am particularly interested, however, in the idea of a dramatist playing with the patterns of time. In Time in Greek Tragedy, Jacqueline de Romilly states that "there is no tragedy that does not deal with time."4 Reaney employs some interesting strategies in his dealings with time in the trilogy and it is these which I mean to highlight in the following pages. In Time and English Fiction, David Higdon distinguishes between "publicobjective -mechanic-clock time" and "private-subjective-organic-psychological time."5 What I will refer to as simply "clock time" has a prominent place in the Donnelly plays. Reaney himself makes two clock time references in the first sentence of his preface to Sticks & Stones: he cites 1844 as the year of the Donnellys' arrival in Canada and he states that they were "nearly annihilated by a secret society fonned among their neighbours 36 years later" (The Donnellys , I n.Reaney is equally particular about the place: "Biddulph Township 18 miles from London, Ontario" (I I). As the plays progress, we seldom leave that township, but there is a lot of movement, backwards and forwards, Modern Drama, 38 (1995) 462 Playing with Time through time. The primary fictional time spans one hundred and forty years: ' 1834-1974.Infonnation about what time it is, in a particular scene, can come from a number of sources, the most common being an on-stage character. In The St. Nicholas Hotel, Finnegan relates, "1875. Today, Friday, September 20th somebody took that new stage out of my stable, dragged it up the road apiece and sawed it into even more pieces" (The Donnellys, 136). Elsewhere, temporal setting infonnation is worked into the conversation: WILL Oh they got [Mike] fir.;t at the end of that year - just before Christmas, December the 9th, 1879. DONALDSON This is the 12th Anniversary of his death then? (107) The final act of Handcuffs opens with the Chorus' announcement: "February the third, 1974- St. Blaise's Day falls on Shrove Tuesday this year" (The Donnellys , 252). Reaney also makes a number of specific references to dates in his stage directions and prefaces. The stage directions at the end of Handcuffs, Act One, explain that in the fmal scene "two times cross each other - the morning of Friday, 6 February, 1880 and the summer afternoon in 1900" (222). What are the effects of so many references to clock time? On a practical level, they help the audience keep track of where and when 'the characters are. In a work with dozens of temporal leaps, but no marked scenic divisions, the clock time announcements are clues the audience need to help them make sense of the continually changing settings. Given the minimal stage sets, and the fact that the actors play multiple roles, dates are one of the few stable elements with which we can orient ourselves. The continual barrage of dates also serves to highlight the documentary origins of the trilogy. The Donnellys belongs in part to the genre of historical drama (amongst others), and dates are the primary facts of history. Indeed, Mieke...

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