Here and Now
AT THIS POINT, it may seem easier to say what the present is not than what it is. In fact, it may seem easiest of all to say simply that the present is not. If many physicists, neurobiologists, and linguists contend that the respective versions of the present that have been so important in their disciplines do not stand up to scrutiny, then perhaps the present as such could be dispensed with. It would be interesting to see if ordinary standards of punctuality could be sustained without the concept of now. Would simply knowing that one has to be there at noon be enough without adding to one’s arrival at noon the additional notion of now? But this is to suppose that a category of thought has arisen and sustained itself without playing any necessary role in human life, which is a lot to swallow, no matter what logic seems to dictate.
Clearly the present is necessary in some way, or it would not have persisted as one of the longest-running puzzles of human thought. As contemporary artist Harry Dodge puts it in a pamphlet released as part of the Hammer Biennial, “humans need an architecture that pushes later away from now,”1 or to put it more comprehensively, humans seem to need a device to keep the past and the future away. The alternative, as Dodge puts it—that “everything is next to itself. And is happening at once”—is a little hard to take in, much less accept. And yet that does seem to be the implication of much recent art history, which sees art as essentially anachronic, as it is also the assumption of many recent films, like those of Christopher Nolan, and perhaps of the present-tense novels of writers like David Mitchell. One of the surefire devices of contemporary narrative of all kinds is time-travel, a trope that seems to thrive by defying the ordinary restrictions of the present, though it may simply be expressing a principled disbelief in them. What is a time-travel movie but a literalization of Kubler’s metaphor for the present as a screen on which all of time is projected?2
If these contemporary artists, scholars, and writers are confined to the present, then, it is a much different, much larger present than the traditional instant, longer even than the present that James managed to extend, by philosophical might and main, to about a minute. At the very least, there does not seem to be any particular reason to fear the brevity of this present, if it is different from other presents in the past. If anything, the present seems to be getting longer, more capacious, the more we think about it. It is the oldest authoritative version of the present, Aristotle’s, that makes it out to be nothing at all, and one of the most recent, Nolan’s, that expands it to include all time.
It may be, though, that to expand the present is to redefine it out of existence. If it is at all long, it can no longer be the present. This seems to mean that the present is, in its essential brevity, a metaphor for our sense of the passage of time. If we think of time as movement, then there must be some part of it that moves, and this must be distinct from past and future, since these may grow or shrink but do not seem to move. But this sense of the present as sheer movement clashes with another apparently necessary attribute of the present, which is the stillness implied by its constant presence. Perhaps these difficulties arise from the entrenched habit of thinking of the present as a part of something else. Perhaps the present is really something more like the way we encompass within ourselves the whole of time. In this sense, the present would not be the actual part of time but rather the actuality of time. This is perhaps what Dodge has in mind with the idea that “everything is next to itself. And is happening at once,” a notion that sounds a lot like Kubler and the generally anachronic approach to the visual arts in general.
A philosophical work that offers a more systematic explanation of this approach to time is Paolo Virno’s Déjà Vu and the End of History, originally published in 1999 and recently translated into English. Virno’s analysis depends on two different “readings of time.” On one hand, there is the time of past and present, related as cause to effect: “The most immediate of presences always appears to be a consequence, standing out from a now-faded ‘back then.’”3 On the other hand, time can be considered a matter of potential and act. As Virno explains it, the relation between cause and effect obtains “between two different ‘nows’, one succeeding the other,” whereas the relation between potential and act is “between not-now and a single ‘now’, between the never-actual and the present.”4 Cause and effect, for Virno, determine a time-line of strict succession. Since a cause gives way to its effect in giving rise to it, cause and effect inhabit fundamentally separate times, the time of a past now gone and the time of a present in isolation. Potential and act, however, are related to one another simultaneously, since potential does not cease to exist whenever it is actualized. Therefore, according to Virno, “when they assume the features of potential and act, the past and present no longer designate successive moments, but concomitant dimensions.”5 Virno’s best example in this respect is language, since the potential of a language to generate utterances does not diminish in any way as people speak, nor does it reside somehow in the past but coexists with the time of every statement.6
It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that, as Virno describes potential, it gradually comes to be a name for time itself. Potential, as he puts it, is “the non-chronological past of the act.”7 Potential must always come before the act, but not in a strictly temporal sense, since its before is more logical than chronological. For the same reason, there are no temporal distinctions within the past-as-potential: it is all there all the time. At one point, Virno calls it “a not-now devoid of any date.”8 Though it must change, the past-as-potential is also always complete and total, though in a rather paradoxical sense. A particular act never reduces in any way the compass of the potential from which it comes. Potential of the kind Virno describes, which is not a physical quantity, is not converted or used up and so it always remains full and complete. In this sense, then, the past-as-potential is also permanent: “Potential is neither transitory nor retractable: its temporal prerogative is that of permanence.”9
Despite some terminological differences, Virno’s description of the past-as-potential bears a significant resemblance to Bergson’s idea that “the whole of the past goes into the making of the living being’s present moment” and to similar ideas in the phenomenological tradition that follows from Heidegger.10 The basic distinction between a time of chronological succession and one of constant coexistence is fairly clear, though it is hard to tell in Virno, as it is in Bergson, whether these times are ontological or phenomenological. Potential as Virno describes it must be outside the individual mind as it is outside the present, but if so, what is its basis? Virno’s most useful example, language, suggests that potential may be social, though he sometimes speaks of “a general disposition towards articulated discourse” that sounds like an innate capacity.11 In any case, language as “the past-in-general of acts of speaking” is Virno’s model for the past-in-general-in-general, for he maintains that all human acts realize a prior potentiality that never diminishes and never ceases to exist.
The relation between past and present that Virno describes does not itself occur in any measurable time, for the relation between an utterance and the rules that make it possible is not a temporal relation. Figuring the present on this model means that it may imply a vast tract of time, all the time it took to make the speaker as well as the utterance, without distending itself toward either past or future. It does not need to include these because it is these, as the throw of a ball to first base is the act of putting the runner out. The relation of the present to everything else is, appropriately, a present-tense relation, and thus relations need not take the present out of itself at all. Virno speaks quite eloquently about a higher form of déjà vu he calls a “memory of the present,” by which he means a kind of self-reference by which the mind recalls itself to itself. But he might as easily have adapted his phrase to suggest something else, not that we can remember the present but rather that the present has a memory. As the result of all that has happened, the present retains a memory of it, but only as the present. Even if the present is all there is, that doesn’t stop it from being everything.
For a concrete actualization of this version of the present, we might look to a recent graphic novel by Richard McGuire. Here first appeared as a short strip in the comic magazine Raw in 1989, and it immediately asserted an influence so profound that Chris Ware, who is constantly quoted in this respect, has said, “I don’t think there’s another strip that’s had a greater effect on me or my comics.”12 But that original version was quite short, and the new version, expanded to about 290 pages, raises much more complex questions about time and narrative. As the title implies, Here is the story of a place, in particular the house in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, in which McGuire grew up. As an all-purpose deictic, though, the title also implies that it is the story of the place, the place we always are whether we are at home or not. Every two-page spread is focused on the same spot, one corner of the living room of the Perth Amboy house, and different times flit past this fixed optic, rather as if McGuire were illustrating the “Time Passes” section of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. As in that novel, the point of view seems to be that of the house itself, independent of all its human inhabitants. But the view straight into the corner of the room also seems designed to remind us of our own binocular vision, the always centered, always symmetrical view of things we carry with us everywhere, the view that, for all sighted people at least, is the sensory substrate that supports the grammatical notion of here.
The inevitable partner of that personal here is, of course, now. As here is the name of the place we always occupy, now is what we call the corresponding time. And this turns out to be one of the basic concerns that drove McGuire to expand his original strip. “If you stop to think about this, the ‘now’ becomes heightened,” he told the Atlantic. “We are so rarely ‘in the moment,’ we spend most of our time thinking of the past or worrying about the future. The ‘now’ is the only thing that really exists.”13 Here, therefore, is just as much about time as it is about space, and though it covers a vast tract of time, the way it pictures this time makes it seem a collection of mutually exclusive presents. Joel Smith has referred to the “perpetual present tense” in which Here takes place, and this may seem inappropriate for a book that stretches from 3 billion BCE to 22175 CE, but it is apt in the sense that each time is shown to exist in its own limited present tense.14 Time-travel, in this case at least, just takes us to another now, as spatial travel simply lands us in another here.
Where most graphic novels struggle mightily to justify the form by connecting the adjective to its noun, Here tries to separate them, posing the pictorial against the narrative and vice versa. Apparently on purpose, McGuire breaks most of the rules that Will Eisner set out, when the term graphic novel was still new, for what he defined as “sequential art.” Eisner’s very influential treatise states as a given that visual images operate as a language, so that their order can be superimposed on that of the dialogue and narration to produce what he calls a “visual narrative” that can be read like a book.15 For Eisner, getting this narrative right depends on a sense of timing in which punctuation can exist only against a background of continuity. The major task of the comics artist, therefore, “is to arrange the sequence of events (or pictures) so as to bridge the gaps in action.”16 This is just what McGuire does not do. In Here, the panels float above or below one another, widely separated by date, discontinuous and out of order, connected only by their shared relationship to the same point in space. As it is, that space seems to separate more than it connects. A typical two-page spread suspends two to five different presents in a spatial matrix provided by another present, so that the space between times is not a neutral medium connecting them, the box made by the two pages not a solid backdrop, but just another box.
Here is therefore structured by a tension between these still images and the traces of narration that they seem to contain. The basic model for the book is clearly that of the snapshot. Many pages were, in fact, generated by distributing pictures from the family photo album and then, in a process a bit like rotoscoping, transforming these into loose drawings or watercolors.17 The resulting images retain much of the instantaneous temporality of the snapshot, as indicated by its classic subject matter: the off-balance; the unposed; the casual. McGuire confuses the situation a bit by dating these images only by year, perhaps a purposely anachronistic gesture in a time when every picture taken by phone can be dated to the second. But this gesture does raise an interesting question: how much time is each picture supposed to cover? What does it mean when a moment that can have lasted only a second, like a ladder tipping over, is labeled 2014?18 Is this the typical or the climactic moment of the year? The weirdly related image next to it, of a paint can toppling over in 1990, shows rather vividly how the arbitrarily restricted spatial boundaries of the snapshot have always helped to indicate its similarly arbitrary excision from the flow of time. But if a moment like this is such a tiny piece of time, then why is it named for an entire year? On one hand, this practice gives these ephemeral moments an odd kind of stability, the stability of photographs, in which the moment does indeed last much, much longer than it can have in reality. On the other hand, labeling these instants with the year alone implies an exceedingly long view, far from the time in question, from which a whole year is reduced to “the year Dad fell off the stepladder,” as if 365 days of experience has dwindled to a pinprick. In other words, these inset images raise the question first raised quite self-consciously by instantaneous photography: how long is an instant?
The toppling stepladder, lined up as it is with the falling paint can from 24 years before and the fallen mirror from 65 years before and the ungracious insult from 162 years before, also poses the other major question about snapshots: how do they fit together? In this respect, Here leaves unresolved some fairly major puzzles. It is clear enough that the wallpaper going up in 1949 (56) is the wallpaper coming down in 1960 (55), though it is not the same stepladder (in fact, the house does not seem to be able to hang onto stepladders, since it has a different one in 1998 and yet another in 2014). But is it the same person in both cases? The man who takes down the wallpaper in 1960 seems to be the same man taking the family photo in 1957 (31–32), but the woman in that picture does not seem to be the one who wanders through 1957 just a few pages earlier (7–8). One wears glasses and the other does not, though she is searching for her book. In other words, the compositional fact that the pictures are cut up and scattered unchronologically through the book is matched by a deeper anachronism, in that the stories told in the pictures do not seem to add up. One two-page spread featuring babies in their mothers’ arms seems to imply a series of families, moving into and out of the house, from 1924 to 1945 to 1949 to 1957 to 1988, but the mothers do not seem to belong to the families otherwise identified with those years. In fact, it is hard to tell whether the mothers from 1945, 1949, and 1957 are supposed to be the same or different. Sadly, the wallpaper seems more durable than the people.
Still, there are quite a few segments in the book that suggest some sort of long-term continuity, such as the two-page spread in which a man in 1954 seems to complain about a dog barking in 1986 (59–60). The man fusses about the dog’s barking at the mailman “every day,” and, in fact, this seems to go on for another thirty years, though it can hardly be the same dog. There is another two-page spread in which a game of Twister seems to go on for almost fifty years (209–210). Such instances are apparently meant to depict the timelessness of routine, but they also show the odd paradox of routine, which is just as apt to make time feel long as short. When every morning shower is the same morning shower, time may collapse on itself or suddenly come to seem endless.
Perhaps the most appropriate icon for this whole situation is the arrow, shot in 1402, that takes three pages to advance about two inches from its initial position, and which never does reach its destination. This is very obviously time’s arrow, but it is also a direct reference to one of Zeno’s famous paradoxes. Here McGuire seems to illustrate Zeno’s contention that an arrow cannot advance from any one point in its flight, that it is, in fact, motionless at that point. This is a paradox that pictures are especially good at exploring, for it is impossible to tell from this, or any other picture, whether the arrow is at rest or in flight. McGuire applies some graphical motion blur to the background of his drawing, as if to reassure us that the arrow is actually in motion, but it is the same motion blur in the first and third frames in the sequence, so McGuire is either being a little lazy as a draftsman or he wants to suggest that the arrow is somehow arrested in flight. The frames advance across the page, though not very rapidly, but the arrow remains in the same position in each frame. Even if time does advance, these pictures seem to suggest, we still experience it as a series of present moments, each one essentially static, each with the same basic quality of being now. This is perhaps the most obvious image of time that pictures are meant deliver.
On the other hand, Here is not a single image but a book of images, and it often seems to take pains to remind us of that fact. The basic visual unit of this work is the two-page spread, with the gutter in the middle aligned to and thus standing for the corner of the room. The easy way in which the book becomes a room suggests that the room was always in some sense a book. This is one of many reasons why the e-book version is almost a different work. There are a number of instances in which the materiality of the page is both used and confused, as in those few sequences of superimposition in which a full-page image becomes an inset image on the next page, making it look for a second as if that page had a hole cut in it (7–9). Though the same effect is achieved in the e-book, it is achieved so naturally and instantaneously that the ironic sense of interference is lost, when the page seems to be there and not there at the same time.
Perhaps it is not an accident that there is a book lying on the table in this particular picture. There are, in any case, a number of books in this book, some on the shelves that appear in later years on the wall by the fireplace, some actually being read. This book is probably the most important, though, because it appears at the beginning and the end of Here, as if to establish a frame for everything that happens in between. This book is the focal point of a narrative that encloses all these various images within a story, one that starts as the woman at the beginning wanders into the living room, having forgotten what she is looking for, and which ends almost 290 pages later when she remembers and picks up her book. “Now I remember,” she says, and she seems to mean merely that she has remembered wanting her book, but McGuire may also mean that books are particularly good at reinforcing memory, better even perhaps than pictures, precisely because they can create narratives like this one, about the book. Or he may mean something even broader, that people in general have forgotten books, that they tend now to think of books in a context established by pictures, so that when we see a book we remember, “oh, right, that thing with pages.” Where photography once seemed at odds with the established flow of narrative, narrative, in a weirdly inverted way, now seems to interrupt the stasis of photographs.
This frame story, this two-part narrative about forgetting and then remembering, establishes a theme that runs throughout the book. The passage of time, the loss of it, is often signified in these pages by the loss of objects. One sequence starts with the loss of a wallet, an umbrella, then a mind and self-control, as if to explain all this forgetfulness; first the car keys and then the car itself, a dog, eyesight, hearing, and then in a visual and aural rhyme, an earring (134–142). At the end of this sequence, the reader is plunged back into 1 million BCE, where it seems everything is lost but an empty featureless ocean, and then even further back to 3 billion BCE, where there is nothing but gas. The general loss behind all these particular losses is identified in a small box from 2014: “Where did the time go?” (41).
Against this sense, expressed by someone in 1986, that “the older I get the less I know,” many of the figures in the book attempt to tell stories. There is a very long sequence from 1989 involving a joke about a doctor, the point of which is apparently the grim brevity of life, and which is so funny it nearly ends the life of one of the listeners (11–27). There is the courtship story told on the same couch in 1988, which ends with the triumphant punch line “and the rest is history” (79–87). And there is the Native American vignette from 1609, in which the plea “tell me a story” may just be a ploy of the woman to hold off the advances of the man (154). In any case, it is a plea that is so basic it can be expressed, in her language, in a single word.
Together, these vignettes suggest a basic human desire for narrative, of which the physical book is just one manifestation. And yet McGuire himself has offered another interpretation of the climax of his narrative. According to this interpretation, when the woman finally remembers and reaches down for her book, she does not complete a narrative arc but rather finds herself truly in the present for the first time. As he puts it, “the book ends with a moment of recognition of the ‘now.’”19 Scattered and abstracted as she wanders through the room, the woman finally comes to herself when she sees the book. “Now I remember” thus means something like “I remember now,” or “I have recaptured the present from which I had been displaced.” Thus it is not necessary to read the book, but just to find it, and the moment in which the character picks up her book coincides, not so ironically, with the moment in which we put ours down. The purpose of this narrative, in other words, is not to overcome or extend the present but rather to place us more firmly in it. It is, as Virno might put it, to remember the present.
McGuire thus upends the traditional relationship between narrative and the present, one that has been a fixture from Lukács to Jameson, and he also adopts an uncommon position in a more general argument about the present. For it is a fixture of much current lamentation about the contemporary world that it has lost its grip on the past and the future and spends too much time in the present. But it must also be the case that our present is much larger than any in the past, simply because it includes that past. By now, that inclusion is largely literal, since the recording technologies of the past two centuries have surrounded us with images and sounds from other times. The structure of Here implies that this has turned the present into a vast screen onto which the past and the future are projected, not in sequences, by and large, but rather in bursts and fits of reverie. The whole of time is always available, always present, and equally present, since we don’t have to go through the intervening years to get to any particular point in time.
By organizing his book as he has, McGuire implies a basic commonality between the punctual moment in which the woman, finding her book, says “now” and the vast stretch of time extending from 3 billion BCE to 22175 CE. For the way that Here is organized suggests that all these times are equally present within or around the house in Perth Amboy. Time is a vast, potential fund of moments, any of which can be actualized in any order, since we do not have to go through recent times to arrive at ones farther past. All the nows are still here. What links them together is that elementary sense of presence we get by looking at where we are now, which is where we will always be, as long as we are.
And yet McGuire’s book also raises uncomfortable questions about how long that may be. The point of view on which the pages depend is extended in both directions beyond the time of human habitation, so that technically speaking, there is no one to see the gas clouds in which the planet begins and ends. What sense do the dates make at these extremes? What would the present mean then, before and after there is anyone to experience it? McGuire’s book, like Mitchell’s novel and Nolan’s movies, thus seems to participate in a contemporary vogue for the postapocalyptic that may be quite closely related to a general uneasiness about the category of the present. The timelessness so frequently evoked by books and movies beyond the end of history seems the inverse of the inextensive moment of time in which we are said to live. Or is it the fatally ironic fulfillment of that time, the emptiness of that brief instant extended into infinity as a kind of fairy-tale punishment? For some contemporary writers, filmmakers, and artists, such prefigurations are also refigurations, alternate metaphors for time and the present. Extending the present beyond the end may be a way of suggesting that it is already extensive, as long as we avoid the traditional metaphors that pin it down.