What does it mean to experience time? Is it a linear journey from past to present, or is it a complex and intricate web of memories, feelings, and experiences?
Our guest today is the inimitable Céleste Callen, from The University of Edinburgh, who delves into her thesis that explores subjective temporal experience in Dickens’ fiction, through the lens of Henri Bergson’s philosophy of time.
This episode explores Bergson's seminal works: Time and Free Will & Matter and Memory and Dickens' Christmas Books: A Christmas Carol, The Chimes, The Haunted Man and his first person narratives David Copperfield & Great Expectations ...
Readings in this episode are from the wonderful Sophie Reynolds and Peter Bray
If you like to make a donation to support the costs of producing this series you can buy 'coffees' right here https://www.buymeacoffee.com/dominicgerrard
Host: Dominic Gerrard
Series Artwork: LĂ©na Gibert
Original Music: Dominic Gerrard
Thank you for listening!
What does it mean to experience time? Is it a linear journey from past to present, or is it a complex and intricate web of memories, feelings, and experiences?
Our guest today is the inimitable Céleste Callen, from The University of Edinburgh, who delves into her thesis that explores subjective temporal experience in Dickens’ fiction, through the lens of Henri Bergson’s philosophy of time.
This episode explores Bergson's seminal works: Time and Free Will & Matter and Memory and Dickens' Christmas Books: A Christmas Carol, The Chimes, The Haunted Man and his first person narratives David Copperfield & Great Expectations ...
Readings in this episode are from the wonderful Sophie Reynolds and Peter Bray
If you like to make a donation to support the costs of producing this series you can buy 'coffees' right here https://www.buymeacoffee.com/dominicgerrard
Host: Dominic Gerrard
Series Artwork: LĂ©na Gibert
Original Music: Dominic Gerrard
Thank you for listening!
Celeste, welcome to Charles Dickens' A Brain on Fire. It's so great to have you here.
Speaker 2:Hello Dominic, it's wonderful. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:Not at all, and you've sent me your thesis, which you just submitted at Edinburgh University, which is about well, would you tell us what it's about?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's looking at Dickens' fiction through the lens of Henry Berkson's philosophy of subjective time. That's the main summary of it yeah.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. For a long time, I've been quite obsessed with Dickens' use of time and time travel happening in his stories and all of that. So I've been wanting to well, wanting to do this episode for a long time, and so I'm glad to have met you to be able to have this conversation. But I suppose the very beginning thing that we need to do people listening to this podcast will have obviously heard of Dickens, but for those of us that don't really know about Henry Berkson, would you give us a little bit of a background to him?
Speaker 2:Of course. So I encountered Berkson at school, actually in France, because I grew up and went to school up to the equivalent of the A level in France, so the French baccalaureate. Because, just for short kind of summary, but my dad is French and my mum is English, so that's why I go up in France and we really focus on philosophy at school, and so at first I was terrified about all this philosophy and learning about all the complex theories and ideas, but it was really fascinating and I particularly was interested in time. So that was the topic that I found the most interesting time and existence and obviously Berkson was one of the main philosophers that we studied for that. So ever since that time it's always been on my mind.
Speaker 2:But then I studied literature because that was what I was really passionate about. And then when I obviously first read Dickens, I just kept thinking about how he, like you said, how he used time and that kind of time travel aspect. But really thinking about Berkson in the background and that idea of subjective time and how going back to the past and the future obviously is such a central part of that narrative voice. But also in so many different ways we always think about time with Dickens and the clocks and all of that. So I was always really drawn to that. So when I found my studies and then I just thought, actually this is what I need to do, this is what I really need to look into, to see what if there's a similarity there, if there's a connection there, and then I really got lost in time there.
Speaker 1:And how did you narrow down your choices of books to look at? That must have been a really tough call for you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely so for Berkson, actually, because I just realised I forgot to summarise.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's alright.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for Berkson, I'm actually focusing on the first two books that he published. So he did publish more books and it goes deeper and deeper after that as well.
Speaker 2:But I focused on the first two because it made more sense with Dickens, because obviously my PhD is in literature, so it focuses on Dickens' fiction. And it made sense because in his first two books he talks about durée, so duration, and he really clearly summarises what his philosophy is in those two first books. So the first one is called Time and Free Will and the second book is Matter and Memory in English, yeah and so the second one really goes deeper into the idea of memory and the past and the present and the role that memory has in our temple experience day to day. And so that's what I think resonated the most with Dickens.
Speaker 2:And then for choosing the Dickens books, I think it was really at first just an instinct, I was just drawn to because I did read Dickens before and I read most of his books and I really felt like the Christmas books and I represented the turning point in the way that he thought about time obviously, which a lot of people would probably associate with time. When I first say Dickens and time, obviously they think about Christmas Carol, but then the other ones that less people talk about, that you know really well obviously the chimes and the haunted man and then the later books, the first person narratives, because for me, that's where, when I was reading them, when I was studying my undergrad and everything, there was a module called Memory and Time and we studied David Copperfield in depth in relation to that and I really realised that these first person narratives have really yeah, there's much more to say about the way that Dickens creates that narrative voice that emerges the past, the present, the future that isn't just aesthetic past and an ongoing present.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and for what I've understand of Berkson and reading your work, the subjective narrative is obviously a very key window to understanding duree or duration. Now you mentioned duration, I think to a lot of listeners people will think duration, oh, how long does it take to listen to this episode? How long does it take to boil a kettle? But that's absolutely not what it is. So what I thought if we could maybe carefully go through a little bit of a list of some of Berkson's key terms and try and understand it.
Speaker 1:I mean just assume no knowledge and for those that do know a little bit, maybe we can I don't know shine some more light on it and find other ways of seeing it. But I suppose which would be a good one to start is duration, duree.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's the most important Right, that's the most important.
Speaker 1:So here's for duree, then.
Speaker 2:So when you think about trying to explain Berkson it's just this whole thing I'm like why did I get myself into this? But it is so fascinating and I just keep even now as I'm preparing to do my Viva examination, I'm just rereading it and I'm just again thinking about new things. It's endless really with trying to think about Berkson. But to summarize duree would be to say that he basically opposes a mathematical, linear, chronological way of seeing time, and so he wants to bring us back to the mind, our consciousness, our own internal subjective experience of time, and he says that that is central really to the way that we navigate the world. And so that's why he does in the first book, and duree specifically, is that kind of interconnected aspect of time, so the fact that it's not just this linear Monday, tuesday, wednesday it's more of the past weaving into the present and states interconnected.
Speaker 2:He uses many different ways of explaining this, so he uses the example of a melody. That's very interpenetrative. So it goes from the past to the present, to the future. We're anticipating what is going to happen next already, as we're speaking now, and we're also thinking about the immediate past at the same time. So it's this idea of duree as really being in time and the fact that the present is always already past, so we're always moving.
Speaker 1:And I suppose that that's no less great and the primacy of subjective experience. So he's coming up against, at the end of the 19th century, into the 20th century, science and empiricism and utilitarianism and all of those ideas of kind of you got to be able to measure it and whatever you're feeling inside doesn't mean anything. But he's saying no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We are subjective beings. So anything that we choose to measure, we're still being, I guess, subjective, we're perceiving it in a subjective way.
Speaker 1:Exactly, and then he complicates it even further, because then you would think I just thought we got that, yeah, but it is exactly that, it's exactly that.
Speaker 2:But then when you you would think, then, seeing that you would think, oh okay, so then it's only the subjective world and nothing else exists. But it's not that he does then go on to say no, no, the real world is obviously important and is there, and we are in that world and we are part of that world, and so it's not. He's not saying that the inner world is the only world, but it's just the yeah, like you said, it's the most central part of it and it connects the external with the internal through our consciousness. And so that's when he goes to matter and memory and he says that actually matter and memory coincide continuously, because we're constantly interacting with the world, but also interacting with all our memories and our consciousness at the same time.
Speaker 1:Yes, and another fact about him that I've picked up is that he was an excellent mathematician, so he's not making these arguments from the standpoint of someone that can't actually measure stuff. You know, I think that line that you use obviously in your thesis, scrooge is one about I will live in the past, the present and the future, and that Scrooge returning to his true self. So Berkson is arguing the clock time, the external time and measurements of it can drive us away from our true selves our natures our busy timetables and all of that Exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he goes actually into more detail about that. He calls it the superficial self and it kind of goes with the idea of a mechanical. He also goes into this idea of the mechanical man. So it goes with the idea of mathematical time, the fact that, yeah, we want to structure our inner life the way that the external world is structured, and so that's why we think of time as linear. We need those timetables, we need everything that's structured in that way in order to exist and to function in this society that is driven by the structure. But then obviously it's completely different to what we experience internally, and that is the idea that we can't separate who we are now from who we were yesterday or who we will be tomorrow. Yeah, exactly, the past, present and future.
Speaker 1:Dickens obviously shows this with some of his characters that if you try and separate yourself from your past and the challenge you were, you have problems. Or if you try and force yourself to stay in one place, try and hold times, advance again, you have problems. But clock time, the limitations of clock time, is that it's taking a piece out of time or duration and that's not enough. So when you have the image of a clock and chimes and things, it doesn't tell you if you see 12 o'clock, strike 11 o'clock gone. You can't have 12 o'clock without 11 o'clock. But there is no in our experience. From looking at the clock we have no sense of 11 o'clock, it's only the present 12.
Speaker 2:He actually uses that example, what you just described.
Speaker 1:That's great. I'm not really ripping him off.
Speaker 2:He's using that example exactly of the clock and how. Yeah, obviously we perceive everything at the same time and we live through what the past is just then, but obviously on the clock it's all this kind of separate structure. He uses so many examples like that, including counting the sheep as well. You know, when you try and fall asleep and you're trying to count sheep that's the typical idea Then if you count sheep, obviously you're imagining sheep that are all the same they're all identical, you wouldn't imagine any difference.
Speaker 2:And he says that that's the reason why we need, obviously, a mathematical structure to count and to measure things quantitatively like that. It's because they're all going to be the same and obviously that shows that our inner, internal, subjective perception of time is all but that it's completely different to that. It's differentiation. Every moment is radically different and so that's why. So he shows through that small example and I just find that great. I threw that one example you can illustrate the point.
Speaker 1:No, no, no, it helps understand it. So I was trying to understand duration. Then I was thinking of clock time as a snapshot of a clock face telling one moment in time. So let's say we move from photographs to film. Fine, say you film a clock for a 24 hour cycle, but of course the frames in a standard film move on from all those points, all those markers. They go from one to two to three to four. So I suppose to understand duration a bit more would be that you'd have to have every single frame of the film visible at the same time. Is that closer, do you think, possibly, to duration?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So he uses the example of the melody, music. He says that music is really the example of interpenetrative jury and the interconnectedness of our subjective experience. We remember instantly what just happened. The melody is that collective whole that is also full of differences and full of changes. So that is the at the heart of our subjective experience of time the fact that it's a continuous change, constantly changing, but at the same time keeping something there, a link throughout that is the same and our perception would be the past that we've known, the present that's probably now already the past, exactly, yeah, he says it's always.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that we're always. So his focus after in matter of memory is really to say that we're always looking ahead. We are creatures of habit and we need to obviously go towards the future of action constantly, and so we use that past to move into the future always, and so that's why the present is always already past and we're always moving into that future through jury, something that is useful. So he does say that memories are kept and retained to be useful. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So duration, then, is all these states that are merging. So the melody is an interesting idea, though, because it makes me think that, of course, then is it the case that these individual states, though they're not all equal in the way that we recall memories, they're not of equal importance. So for a melody to not become just a buildup of continuous noise, with every note carrying on and sustaining, they have to actually fade, they have to decay, they have to fade into the background yeah yeah.
Speaker 2:That is really I think you're really giving a good example there what he's trying to say yeah, the yeah. It's this continuous recreation, in a way, something that's recreated in every moment of things that are less important and then become important again when we recall them. In a sense, so if we need them now towards action, towards the future, if we need something, so then it's used again and recreated in a way.
Speaker 1:Also, he's fully aware of the fallibility, in the way that Dickens is, of memory. The play Copenhagen by Michael Freyner. There's one point where the character describes the organic quality of memory. Am I getting this right Quantitative and qualitative time? Would you be able to have a little? I'm sorry to throw these things at you, but have a little, because we will move on to the Dickens books and the stories and everything I think, but just to get this little foundational understanding would be great.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So the quantitative is the kind of measured chronological time or mathematical time. So you could say just mathematical and then the subjective, in a way as well. So quantitative is more of the measuring and the quantifiable, something that's more scientific way of measuring things, mathematical. And then the qualitative is this subjective, internally perceived, internally felt experience.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so anything that happens within I got thinking about a tale of two cities.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I just wondered what you thought of this. Just on that quantitative and qualitative. There's this moment you know where Sydney Carton is going to the guillotine in the Tumbrills and the knitting women are counting the numbers. And there's this most extraordinary moment I'm sure you know where it goes something like crash. A head is held up and the knitting women, who scarcely lifted their eyes to look at it a moment ago, when it could think and speak, count one.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 1:I mean, I thought that was that really, and it came to me as I was reading your thesis. I just thought, oh gosh, I just really remember that line about that's a quantitative view of time and the world and existence. And you know that a person has just been killed and you're just counting them off as a number at the point of their death.
Speaker 2:And that contrast there that Dickens is underlining, you know, the complete lack of empathy or the lack of it just reminds me of hard times, obviously, as well that idea of just measuring and counting things. And obviously, yeah, dickens is always talking about that, isn't he? About the importance of feeling things internally rather than counting and measuring things that obviously don't have that significance and that meaning if you just count them.
Speaker 2:So that's exactly what Berkson is saying is the problem with the way that we talk about time, or that we yeah. So that's, that's really interesting. I need to go back to.
Speaker 1:Oh no, but I don't say anything, it's just going a little further on from that is Sydney Carton with the seamstress and she's saying when I die, is it going to be long before I'm reunited with my sister? And he says something like there is no time there and no trouble there. So it's like Carton has got himself into a place of duration. Is that? Is that too much of a stretch, do you think? Because he's not. That's really interesting. He's not in the world of that violence. He's not in the violence that's about to be done to him. He's beyond it and he's looking. He's looking into the future of what he's done for Lucy and Dane and their family and all of that. It's just really interesting.
Speaker 2:I just taking a step back from that real world or external view and thinking more about his inner experience.
Speaker 1:There we go. Well, that's anyway that just wanted to share.
Speaker 2:That's really makes me want to read a tale of two cities again now.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's just astonishingly good, isn't it? I mean the echoing footsteps in there as well, and and premonition and foreshadowing and all those things. But I'm going to let. I'm going to let you lead on the dickens now properly, though, because could we go? Could we go, possibly? I know this is a non linear concept, but a little bit in order through what you've chosen. Yeah, we need linearity, we need chronology, yeah and Berkson deals with that as well, doesn't he?
Speaker 2:Yeah definitely.
Speaker 1:It's really important to say that. I had to remind myself of that, but I think it's a product of our time now, isn't it, that we have such polarized thought that we're so ready to think, oh, this person stands for this, in total opposition of that.
Speaker 2:True, and that is the essence of his philosophy. There isn't just one thing, is nothing is just static? Nothing is this static thing. It's always in movement and always heterogeneous, rather than something that's just one plane, yeah.
Speaker 1:And, if anything, he's trying to restore balance in some way, because we've gone too far one way in our minds with calculating and measuring and yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so Dickens, well, yeah, I started talking about Christmas Carol, obviously with Scrooge and when I looked back, because obviously a Christmas Carol for me was something that you know, you first you think that you know that story so well and that you, but then when you really start thinking about it through this lens and the, you know the fact that Scrooge uses this ruler to try and terrify people. And I was just thinking, even the objects that he picks up are literally objects that measure things and calculate, obviously, and quantify how much money he has, or all these things that obviously Dickens is pointing out to. So that's something else, obviously, in the external world that you can see is already pointing to what Dickens is saying about his inner life, or his mind, yeah.
Speaker 2:So that's something that I thought was really interesting.
Speaker 2:And then, obviously, when you go back to his past and you see all these images of the past, it's very visual and I think well, people have said before that it's very cinematic in the way that he describes it. So forward thinking when you think how he describes the hovering above the past and the images of his childhood. And these memory images are what Berkson calls memory images, because they are conjured up from the past, because they are useful in the present and because they will have an impact with each new perception in the present. And that's what really made me thinking about all these images and how then it has an effect on the ongoing experience of time. And then also forward thinking because Bergson says you know, we need to think about our actions and we need to always think ahead. And when he looks into the future and even the way the spirits are described as well, obviously so interesting and there's just so much to say. Even those little passages when he describes the ghost of Christmas past is almost, yeah, this, even just that character.
Speaker 1:It's amazing as it is. You're looking down a time corridor right Because you're seeing a child that's an old man, and then a child again and all the limbs multiplying and then disappearing again.
Speaker 2:It's so powerful, the light that cannot be extinguished as well, and the idea of, because when you, when you look at Bergson's language as well, the way he uses language he often uses that word of extinguished and Dickens also uses that to talk about the past and memories that Really can't be extinguished, and that's the point. Isn't there, is that it's always there and it's always Going to influence on the present, and that's something that, at the level of the sentence itself, you just see the impact already of memory.
Speaker 1:Yeah, another moment in your thesis which you include, which I love this bit so much. The start of rabbi Mali is visited and screwed wakes up.
Speaker 2:And he wakes up if you're not on the gap yeah, in between world, any way that in between obviously dreams, reality happen. Next, what just happened? If it's real, and this kind of world of spirits and shadows is really what I think allows Dickens to use that idea of the subjective, the past influencing the present. There's something that we can't see, that we can't grasp.
Speaker 1:Mason, and I suppose how time is felt as well comes in a lot, doesn't it? You know, we all know that feeling of something taking ages. You're waiting for something and it's stressful and that takes ages, whereas some pleasurable time can just fly by, can't?
Speaker 2:it and you just Mason. Time flies, mason. Yeah, exactly, time flies.
Speaker 1:The occasion is when Scrooge blisters for the strike and then nothing happens and he goes. Oh well, and of course, and other times he feels like he's been asleep longer than he has. And all of that, mason.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's completely distorted his perception of time, Mason.
Speaker 1:And that pulls him. That pulls, being pulled away from the clock time of the world draws him near himself again. He finds himself.
Speaker 2:Mason. But trying to and that desire to always try and find that reliable marker of time, that is again something that obviously in Dickens as well. The clocks suddenly everywhere and that awareness of something that's reliable was in a way reassuring.
Speaker 1:Mason yeah, absolutely, and I feel like and I've taken this quote from you, this Proust quote about railways making society suddenly having to think about minutes in order to catch the train.
Speaker 2:Mason yeah, railway time itself as a concept and having to think about those specific timetables that suddenly appeared that people wouldn't be thinking about before that.
Speaker 1:Mason, whereas beforehand, pre-industrial times, you might have just listened for the quarter Mason. Yeah, or the church bells Mason yeah exactly, and you go oh, the sun's up now, mason. Yeah, mason, or the sun's up, it must be time for work.
Speaker 2:Mason, that's stressful, mason.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely so. It has all of that. It brings so much opportunity and, at the same time, stress. In recent years, we've lived through the birth of the internet and, of course, we have all this stuff about AI at the moment as an equivalent, which is very interesting, mason.
Speaker 2:And, obviously, being aware of everything that goes with it the awareness of time and clocks and the awareness of everything at once. Now, mason.
Speaker 1:Yes, and free will is important, isn't it? Free will is clearly laid out in this story. Dickens is a believer in it, isn't he? And it's Berkson, if I got that right, berkson Mason.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely. He says that you are truly within du re if you realise that the past is always no more and that you have to take action, and so that action is your decision and it's always informed by the past, but also constantly moving towards the future, and at the centre of that is our own free will and our actions, obviously, that make a difference each passing moment. So definitely that goes with Dickens and what he says. You know, we are all scrooge in a way, and we all need to realise that our actions have consequences. And he made that chain. I can't remember exactly how he says that. Yeah, it's a chain that he made himself.
Speaker 1:Mason, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:Dickens.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that chain is a recurring theme for Dickens, isn't it, mason?
Speaker 2:Exactly yeah, dickens, we've got great expectations.
Speaker 1:Mason and free will, and Berkson is standing in opposition to some of the people that come after him in that sort of very brutal 20th century, slightly more nihilistic, look at things.
Speaker 2:Mason.
Speaker 1:Definitely Dickens, where you don't have any control over your destiny. But he truly believes that we're not all of us, we're not just the effect of a cause, we can be the cause, mason.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he really repositions the self and the mind and our consciousness ourselves. We are in action in the present and we are in control. Yeah, so definitely he really puts the individual back at the centre of everything, really for our existence, for human existence yeah, rather than what happened before, where people used to all the philosophies of empiricism and associationist theories as well, thinking about the world having an impact on us, rather than this symbiotic double movement that he thinks Mason.
Speaker 1:Okay, so we move on to your next book. This is great. We move on to your next book. It is the Chimes, isn't it from?
Speaker 2:1944.
Speaker 1:So go on, hit us with the Chimes then, loretta.
Speaker 2:So when I just reread all the Christmas books because I thought, okay, there's something here, and I think this was a turning point, and I think that out of the five, these were the three that really say something for me resonated with this philosophy that Berkson has.
Speaker 2:And with the Chimes. I was thinking about obviously subjective time and our own feeling of who we are in the world and the relationship between the world and the self that Berkson talks about and obviously the threat to that subjective self when you think about Trotty and how he gets caught up in all these newspapers and what other people will say and this very, yeah, very detached, obviously the description of people and people's lives and obviously what Dickens wanted to show the fact that you can't just read a newspaper and understand a person's experience. You can't generalise by just pointing out numbers and again numbers and measuring and calculating just people as numbers and so that really dehumanising aspect of the society that he was living in and the difference between that and his connection with his daughter and their own experience, bringing him back to that realisation in the end that really that is the most important is our own experience, rather than trying to fit into these calculations or try and fit in a society that doesn't really understand you.
Speaker 1:Yes, and society is measuring Trotty, isn't it, and bringing up very little. You know, that very Victorian idea of usefulness, a person's usefulness is recurring all the time, in that moment where Alderman Cute starts eating Trotty's lunch of tripe and says to him oh, don't tell me, you haven't got enough to eat, because I've just tasted your tripe. And Alderman Cute is taking one lunchtime, one moment in Trotty's life which is a rare occasion when Meg, his daughter, in celebration brings him food that he doesn't always get to have.
Speaker 2:And he's judging him by that. Yeah, he talks about this, yeah, he talks about dinner time and that specific passage about dinner time. I just when I read it again I was thinking how did I not think about this before? Because it's so that small passage is so important, saying that for other people dinner time is just this mundane day to day activity, but for him it has that special significance, obviously because it's not easily accessible to him to get a regularity of dinner time, but there's nothing regular about dinner.
Speaker 2:Exactly. I think that's really at the heart of it and it's something that I didn't really think about before, with the chimes and the bells obviously the chimes and the fact that he feels like he is part of the chimes. In a way, he's described as part of them, as if he's almost invisible part of that every day, a regular sound which is really eerie.
Speaker 1:And the melody of those bells. And how it comforts him and everything. It makes me think of what you were saying about Berkson's image of melody, that even though he's counting time, the melody of those bells, the singing of those bells have something deeper for him, a kind of durational quality to them that lift him out of his mood and make him able to do his work. Yeah, he imagines are talking to him and telling him what happened and then it turns out later on, of course they are.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they really are, but so when he's in the bell tower and all of that, what does that? How do you see that moment?
Speaker 2:And I can't help when I'm talking to you. When I realized that I'm talking to you about this and watching your performance of the chimes, it was incredible.
Speaker 1:Oh, did you see that? Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:I saw your performance of a Christmas carol and the chimes but when I think when I was doing the PhD, it all started when it was the virtual ones.
Speaker 1:Yeah, unfortunately not in person.
Speaker 2:But yeah, so that was incredible. But yeah, thinking about that moment with the chimes and the bell tower, that is just, it's something again that I think is just so long as well, that whole moment, the description and how he describes even just the bells themselves.
Speaker 1:I hope it didn't feel long with me performing it. No, no, no, no, it was incredible, but you're right because the description of the bells that haunting you get through a lot of the story, don't you?
Speaker 2:before that happened, I was thinking, yeah, how do you decide how to perform it as well? Because it's such a yeah, and it's because you have to show their presence, you have to make that a presence, but at the same time, it's something that's not really there. So it's very and that whole idea that the bells have always been there and they've been a part of this material world for such a long time and they represent this kind of historical past, something reliable again.
Speaker 2:A connection to our past which again is so important for our existence, then in a Berksonian, but then the completely different experience of that moment for him and him being transported and not knowing how much time has passed. And I remember when I thought, how am I going to begin with thinking about this passage with Berkson? Because it's so. I think it's the least obvious out of all the books I'm looking at, but then it's the most. In a way, it's very rich in detail and the way that all the different, the goblins and all these creatures that surround him, all these details about how they represent people who have been here but who are not there, and then these spirits that just appear that he can see, and I think, yeah, it just shows again that sense of an interconnected experience between what he can see and what he can't see, which is the problem, because when he reads these newspapers he's not actually realising that this could happen to his own daughter.
Speaker 1:And that's when it hits him. Yeah, and the element of spirits and phantoms and things, I mean they may be faded, perhaps because they are from the past, and or from the future that they're not.
Speaker 2:Yeah, or something that could have been or that could be, because that's also such a big, that's such an important aspect.
Speaker 1:Yes, you're pointing us towards the haunted man.
Speaker 2:I feel already, yeah, even with the Carol, obviously, what has yet to come, christmas yet to, and obviously, yeah, this is always a part of it and I think, with the haunted man again, that's a really important part of it, obviously with the deep, deep gulf where things that might have been or might be are always wondering.
Speaker 1:That's my favourite quote from the haunted man. I love it, it's so decency, and I suppose both Sony and as well. But just yeah, just before we get into the haunted man. There is one thing, though, that comes up in that scene, that same scene with Trotty and the tribe, but then you remember the sleek coated gentleman. Yes, it goes on about the past and it's all nostalgia and he rejects the present time. I mean everything's rubbish today, but in the good old days, the good old days the good old times.
Speaker 1:He goes round and round like a hamster in a wheel.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that is dangerous if you idealise the past as well. It's all about balancing. And the same with Berkson. Berkson goes into detail about this explanation and he compares two different types of people to illustrate that. He says the extremes are the dreamer, who is completely in the past and in that world of pure memory and has no access to the real, ongoing present, and then the impulsive man of action who just always thinks about what's about to happen and action and who is completely disconnected from the past. So it's really interesting when you think about those examples and he says that we are always in the middle. Really we are merging the past and the present all the time.
Speaker 1:Just talking about the times again really quickly. I don't know if you've ever felt this. I don't know if you have this kind of sentimental side to you at all, but have you ever felt there's something about there's sadness in the passing of the year where the old year is already treated as dead and gone before it's actually gone, and I don't know why. There's something quite moving about that passage in the times and I remember having feelings like that when new year approaches and you have a sense of that year passing and I know it's just in a way we think of it as just a number.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's really interesting when you think about that, because in a way, it's just a chronological marker that we've created in a way Artificially put on the yeah completely artificial but then, because we have that and because we do, need that to be in this world of action and structure.
Speaker 2:So then we do need it. So then it's interesting to see how Dickens plays with the emotions, with that. Yeah, definitely out of that passage where he talks about the old year and the new year and all the feelings that everyone celebration for a new year and the hope that that brings, but also, yeah, a very nostalgic and very sad moment to think about something that isn't yet over, that is already going to be gone.
Speaker 1:And when Trotty's saved at the end and Meg is saved and all of that, the last thing they do is have a big dance, don't they? Where the drum is drunk and the bells are ringing in their own time and it's all cacophonous and the dancing is all out of time and all over the place and there's something about that freewheeling spirit that isn't conforming to what the beat is meant to be. That's the true freedom there. Yeah, go for the haunted man, yeah.
Speaker 2:I've been really advocating for the haunted man in conferences and things, because nobody really knew about it. Everyone knows the Christmas Carol and now everybody's telling me oh, I want to read that book, I want to read that story.
Speaker 2:So I'm happy, Absolutely but yeah, it's so, because I think obviously that line for me is that really central line.
Speaker 2:I think that in between Worldie and the Dickens creates, between the memories that we have, also the hopes that we have for the future and the regrets but the things that we also wish we could still do, and all that goes, and the story about our memories that could be erased and that packed with the devil trope thing, I think is so powerful and I think it's really surprising that we don't know about the haunted man more than we do.
Speaker 2:So I think it's such a powerful story and the way that yeah, he says to keep my memory green at the end as well, that sense of yeah, so the fact that memory is so central. So it really is the story about memory for Dickens, yeah, and so I think it's so interesting and I wish I could know where the Berkson ever knew about this. Probably not. Maybe he would have known the more famous Dickens novels, I don't know, but it's really interesting to think about that because it is so representative of the idea that the past is always with us and can really haunt you and can change the way you think, but at the same time we need it and it is essential, and if we don't have it, then we are completely different.
Speaker 1:It's deeply profound, isn't it? We lose our empathy and ability to empathize with other people's suffering if we've lost all our remembrance of our own grief and suffering.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's like an experiment, this novella, because it's showing how we would be without memory, which is so, I think. A lot of the Gothic texts talk about memory and haunting aspects of it, but here Dickens is really exploring what red law would be without it and how that has an impact on real life and how people start arguing and people forget the relationships and the memories that they have together and the sense of the idea that the struggles and life and problems also bring people closer and make people stronger. And, yeah, you have empathy and you can understand the world that you're living in. Yeah, it's so powerful and I just wish more people knew about it.
Speaker 1:Oh well, I'm sure they will, especially after this conversation. Yeah, come on. But that prayer of almost Lord, keep my memory green. That occurs at the end. And of course you have the old man with the holly and he's amazing and I know that. I think you point that here.
Speaker 2:Exceptional memory.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and he talks out, he goes on about for ages going. I'm 87. I'm 87, about 100 times in that section. But the holly and the things that he can remember when he goes into that description of the memory he has of his mother who's gone.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's so, so powerful and how it brings comfort even though red law initially thinks that that's horrifying, the idea that he's got such a good memory of sorrow and loss but then the fact that he actually finds comfort in those memories and that it brings happiness to know that you've had those times with the people that you loved and yeah. So I think it's an interesting way that you wouldn't expect, maybe, to think about the pain and how that can be a positive experience and a positive memory.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's a rocket. That's going to come back in the next couple of books, possibly as well, I think isn't it when we get there, but yeah, so that's and yeah, when is it? The teterbees? It's the teterbees, isn't it? And the wife, when she comes into contact with red law and she's, she picks up the curse for a moment and she falls out of favour with her husband and starts to think what if we'd never met? What if I hadn't married you and I'd been able to take a different path?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and then he also is touched by it, and then they, they just think about all the kind of every day difficulties of day to day life, and it becomes so. That's interesting when you think that if you forgot all your memories, and then it's just the day to day that resurfaces and the little problems and the little things that you would focus on, and so it's more of this whole picture that memory gives you, that's always there, because if you don't have it, then you only think about what is right there in front of you and your experience in that day, on that one day. So then, the sense that again, it's this whole, continuous whole that memory provides, that's not just static and not just in the past, but it's, it completes every experience that you have every day, every moment, yeah.
Speaker 1:And to come back to Bergson and Melody, I think you know what's coming then for the haunted man, there are two key moments out there for Redlaw and that. Melody, could you take us, take us through that, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the fact that he's in a way a static, mechanical man that Bergson would say, because he's decided to forget his past and forget that pain and the sorrow, and then he he can't really hear or perceive music in the same way, because the memories that he had were always coming back to him with Melody or with the wind, or at twilight, specific times of the night, and obviously with the ghost and his double, and so that the idea that it's specifically with music and with the wind and at specific time of day, at night, at twilight, that he has those sorrowful memories and then, when he no longer has them, it's music again that brings him back to time and to memory and to feeling empathy when he hears music in the distance. So I think that's really interesting there, that direct connection between music and memory, and I think it's that connection that Dickens often thinks about with subjective experiences. It's always with music, with the wind or the I think this is a whole other topic but with the fire and firegazing.
Speaker 1:It's in my notes, Celeste, because I'm going to have to talk about fire and fire watching.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and this is actually so. I wrote a blog post about this with the Dickens Society because this was an idea that I realised during my that I had during my PhD. But obviously this is completely another, another thing entirely. But I think there's just so much where in so many of Dickens' books where he talks about characters looking at the fire and firegazing and wandering and time travelling to the past and thinking about the future and just reflecting subjectively in general.
Speaker 1:I think, what I've learnt from reading your thesis one of the things, well, I've actually learnt- quite a lot.
Speaker 2:I'll be completely honest.
Speaker 1:But it's things I've never known at all. But one thing that's really struck me is how in plain sight Dickens and concepts of time actually is. I mean, it's everywhere Once you open your eyes Once you see it. You think, oh my God, you got me thinking about duration, actually in relation to the battle of life as well.
Speaker 2:Definitely.
Speaker 1:The durational quality of that battleground where the traces of that very bloody battle haunt the characters all the way through, and then the physical traces in the ground of all the weapons and all of that and the green growing grass where people have died.
Speaker 2:So again, the idea of memory that's green, that's still there and what can grow from something that is past.
Speaker 1:Just to say about Berkson being aware of the unscientific yet crucial aspect of subjective time. There's this lovely bit at the end of the battle of life, where the very last paragraph is he mentions time. The narrator talks he's talking to Father Time, basically leaning on his side, and he says I have observed that time confuses facts occasionally. I hardly know what weight to give to his authority which is so interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, father Time. And there's another thing the way that Dickens pursues this sonified time figure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's almost a kind of a slight God type figure. All powerful controls everything in some way, and there's a kind of perhaps an imperialism in clock time isn't there? I mean, I'm personally very glad we have international time zones that are recognized across the world. It would be very handy if we could go to flight somewhere, but at the same time we are under its yoke a little bit, aren't we? Can I invite you to move on to our next.
Speaker 2:Yeah, david Copperfield, so obviously yeah, and so this is the one, the first one that I ever thought about in relation to all of this, as the first person narrative, as this retrospective Bill Dung's Ramon typical novel that you would think of when you think of time.
Speaker 1:You just threw that word in there, didn't you, bill Dung's Ramon?
Speaker 2:What it was. That does that mean?
Speaker 1:linear. Does that mean yes it?
Speaker 2:means that there was novels that go from childhood to adulthood and follow someone. Yeah, so in a way I would say that it challenges the typical Bill Dung's Ramon that you would find in the 19th century, because it's not this linear development narrative that you usually see, obviously, as childhood and then you go into adulthood. Here it's more through that narrative voice. It's something that's rooted in change, but also in the fact that the past is not static.
Speaker 2:We don't have this archive of memory. There's just sitting there and there are changes like a picture book that you could go through. Instead, Berkson says and I think Dickens really shows in David Copfield and Great Expectations is that we constantly recreate our past and our past memories with each new perception and with our experience as we live. It's the same when David thinks about his mother and he sees these images of her and he thinks that she's there in front of him. So we have those very vivid visual images, but obviously those are tainted by the perception that he has in that moment.
Speaker 2:Through the narrative voice you really see the adult that is also very hesitant and doesn't really know sometimes. Okay, is this really what I saw? I think it is, or I think this is what I feel now about this past experience. Berkson also says that in our lives, every day, we recreate what we think is the past. We are stories, we are narratives that we create for ourselves. It's very unreliable, in a way, what we think of as these past memories. We change them, we mold them, we reconstruct what we think of in that narrative of our life.
Speaker 1:And read them differently and draw different conclusions from it.
Speaker 2:Exactly yeah.
Speaker 1:There's a word beginning with P, is it panams? You mentioned panams. Oh yeah, panams. Panams says that's the terminology for doing that. Where you jump back, it's almost like graffiti, almost in an extreme image.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but seeing what was there before and adding on in a way, because through the pages you would be able to see what was behind. So, yeah, the idea that you're constantly adding on to. But I think with Berkson you also see something else. That is, the fact that each memory, when you remember it, it's already changed. Because of what you're going through now, you are not that person who experienced that memory.
Speaker 1:In your David Copperfield examples in the thesis there's a fantastic passage where David is tormented by the ticking of the clock. There's that very powerful quote as well from Betsy Trotwood which you used, and it's also on the beginning of Demon Copperhead as well. Yeah, Is it.
Speaker 2:It's in a vein trot to recall the past unless it works some influence upon the present, and that is exactly what Berkson says, that memories do. But it's interesting obviously because it is Miss Betsy and we know that in the past she doesn't have a really good relationship with her past.
Speaker 1:No, because of that chapter one where you see you have faced the past wrongs. Working within her, yeah, and her probably with men, yes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so, but for Betsy, yeah, don't think about anything that brings you sorrow, so maybe like a red law.
Speaker 1:A little bit more red law yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But it's also you can avoid nostalgia dangerous nostalgia, perhaps, if you apply the past to the present time. Yeah, and I think there's cultural and also things happening because people are unwilling to connect the past with the present. They just want to go back to the past and have that pure past that doesn't want those difficult conversations.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so in a way it is also a good piece of advice that she gives us. So, yeah, it's very ambiguous because you can see it in both ways.
Speaker 1:Yeah, miss Havisham.
Speaker 2:She's the one who doesn't want to move forward and doesn't want to go through change. And isn't that static past really that cannot move forward. Then even Satis House, obviously with the clocks that have stopped at 20 to 9. And the wedding table and the wedding dress and all those descriptions and the spider webs and all of that, when you go into the details, so interesting to think about.
Speaker 1:Well, yes, I think I mean. It just got me thinking that if you try and capture a single moment in time and you cling to it and, with all the force of your existence, try and not to move on from it, that moment that you're forcing yourself to stay in molders, doesn't it? And decays, infestors and goes, grows very, very horrible.
Speaker 2:It just made me think that the fact that you said that it just makes me think that in a way, even though she seems like she is stuck in that past and in a static past, but at the same time it does change and it does, like you say, become worse and become more and more painful because of that. So the idea that it's not just aesthetic and it will have consequences if you think that it won't change, if you think that you can just never change, change is always there, even when you try to resist.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, and it got me thinking, just from what you're saying, that red law is trying to destroy the past and this Havisham is trying to destroy the future that's laid out from her.
Speaker 2:She's, in that past, trying to keep it.
Speaker 1:Gosh. And then when she does move out of that a little bit towards the end, it's so sad in a way, isn't it? When she asks Pip for forgiveness moments before she goes up in flames. I mean it's brutal, isn't it?
Speaker 2:that whole moment, yeah in a way, it's the opposite of how Scrooge is just so joyful that now, knowing that he has this new perception of the world and he completely changed his way of thinking about things and thinking about time and thinking about the past, which is really joyful, and in the same way for red law, the fact that he realizes in the end, it's a very positive experience compared to, yeah, how Miss Havisham goes through.
Speaker 1:It's interesting because I feel like someone that you quote actually in your thesis, Robert Douglas Fairhurst, who's been on this series a couple of times.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I listened. Oh, thank you.
Speaker 1:Well, he said to me at one point, I think when we're doing the Christmas books and he's just mentioned I think we're talking about the haunted man and he said how Dickens isn't always very Dickensian and I think that's a very, very. It stayed with me. It's a very interesting point and you know his belief in free will and people able to turn things around for the better. One story that really challenges dad and torments him is the signalman.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah because there you have that signalman, desperately wanting to know how to change course, and can't read, can't interpret the visitation, the ghosts, and maybe that comes out of Dickens' own experience and stablehosts yeah. And you suddenly think there's a moment, there's a story where you see another side of him that he doesn't show us very often.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Thinking about the future and trying to change what hasn't happened yet. Maybe he was more conscious of that because of his own experience. That's really interesting.
Speaker 1:Something I've written down il en vitale. Have I said that Il en vitale? Il en vitale.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I think in English you could say the vital impulse of life.
Speaker 1:And intuition. Is that correct? Yeah, so there's something, you know, when Bergson is discredited a little bit by other philosophers, because there's a potential bit of mysodony there with the idea that basically machines of measuring instruments are manly and emotions and feelings are womanish Exactly. And the mathematics are very reliable.
Speaker 2:Yes, Very scientific, but anything else is not true. Yeah, and again, it's because he was criticised as being a mystical philosopher in some way, just because you couldn't root his thinking in a scientific method or a scientific experiment that you can see. And of course, that's because it is metaphysical. It's the metaphysics of time and subjective experience, and so he really wants to reconcile philosophy and science and say we don't have to separate them, they can work together. Life is not just science.
Speaker 1:Something else that comes up is the idea and it's not to do with time, but it's to do with laughter, and how laughter. What's his idea about that? That that brings us back to our true selves.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's really, really interesting Actually, this is a complete side note to this, but Monty Python they were inspired by Berkson and his theory of laughter and comedy and the fact that it brings us back to ourselves, because he talks about a few things in that book laughter, the rear, where he talks about comedy, and the fact that, yes, the mechanical man that's where it comes from, the idea that when we are rigid and mechanical and that we don't realise something, or if we are unaware of ourselves, then that's when the ridicule or the comic will be most effective and will be then punished with laughter.
Speaker 2:In a way, that's what he says that laughter is a punishment. But he also a large part of that book that I was interested in is how he talks about language, and I think this is so interesting to anyone who thinks about fiction and language and just how we use language, even every day. He says that language is, in a way, limiting, because obviously it's a social tool that we use to communicate with the world outside and so because of that, we need to use something that is universally understood. Obviously, there are many languages, but still we can communicate.
Speaker 2:We can't just communicate with ourselves or one person. It's universal and so because of that, we are inevitably going to be distanced from our own inner self and our own inner reality, how our real emotions are to us and how they feel to us internally. There is a barrier between language and that, and it's really incredible. I actually wrote it down because I thought it's just so great to think about this, and if he met, or if Dickens and him could have talked about that, because I'm always thinking about that, that's my opinion.
Speaker 2:He says that language is obviously, yeah, it creates this superficial self that is trying to use language to obviously be a part of this social world which we need to be and we need language and it is very useful and we do need to have it.
Speaker 2:But then it limits our interconnected subjective in life when we want to translate how it really is to feel these emotions. But he says that the novelists, or sometimes the artists, the painters, the musicians, are able to translate that through art. And that's what I think is such a powerful passage. And he says that we estimate the talent of a novelist by the power with which they lift out of the common domain to which language had thus brought them down, feelings and ideas to which they try to restore by adding detail to detail their original and living individuality. So the idea that sometimes the novelist and we judge the quality of a novelist by this ability to translate or lived in the experience, and when I was reading that I was thinking that is exactly what I feel Dickens does. So I think the Berkson would agree Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Because it is a paradox, isn't it? Because language on a page, their markers, their empirical markers, and in a sense, they're far away from what they're conjuring. They couldn't be further, in a sense.
Speaker 2:And the chronological aspect of the novel, when you think that Dickens so that's what I established at the very beginning of this research is that obviously there are limits to the way that we can see the connection there, because a novel is chronological, linear form that is finished and contained in a whole in itself. So it will never be the exact representation of our experience, obviously, but this is what he does say. Novelists are sometimes able to do, through the limits that I impose, by language, that they can translate what it feels like and they in a way take away what is universal in general about language and make it individual and original, the way that our feelings are.
Speaker 2:So yeah, that is really interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely Gosh. I had one thing Does Berkson mention our heartbeats? Because, only because he's talking. I only say this because he's talking about the true self and the subconscious, and the emotions and everything, and of course, all of that is underpinned by a regular ticking clock in our building.
Speaker 2:True, and our emotions are connected too. Yeah, and if we?
Speaker 1:don't have a heartbeat. If that stops, we have problems. We don't have any. So it's whether or not there's a belief that our spirit or our souls exist outside of matter, outside of these forms, or not. I suppose that's where you would have to go with that question.
Speaker 2:I don't know, and he actually writes a few books after this. That really goes into the kind of biological aspect of evolution as well and how we are in the world and how we live in the world, the real world of matter. And he goes into this whole debate with Einstein and it becomes very complicated because it's not successful, it's not deemed like he was victorious after that debate. So it's really funny. But yeah, he goes into that and he tries to and it's called Creative Evolution.
Speaker 2:The book after that, that really goes into this. It's quite complicated and it's not as connected to, let's say, just the experience of time. It's more about the world and matter as well, and connecting that with matter. So that would be, I think, the more relevant book to think about that. But, yeah, that is interesting and he does obviously think about the connections between matter and mind, but I don't think he mentioned specifically the heartbeat, which, yeah, when you think which Dickens does think about with time?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I just wondered that. I just wondered that. And you talk about Einstein and Bertrand Russell, didn't.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, you had many critics, yeah but it's interesting.
Speaker 1:But do you think that that goes into well, nationalist? You know, french philosophers think this, they're like this, whereas English fear once believed this, or German ones think this. When you consider the what was going on in the world, with world wars and God knows what else and rising, do you think that in some ways, you know that, clouded perhaps, or that there was a prejudice there at work?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think the most, I think, yeah, the biggest. The main reason why he was criticized so much, I think because he was so forward thinking and because he was really successful in the way that he explained this metaphysical experience of time and trying to make it a scientific, rigorous philosophy, and so because he was really successful at that and because so many people started really relating to that. But I think, and I think when you think about free will and you think of the individual and putting the individual back at the center of one's existence and human existence with the wars, then obviously I think that does have a link that complicates. If you believe that we are really central to our existence and we are at the heart of everything, then I think that with the First World War and the impact that that has, maybe, yeah, it made it more difficult to come face to face with that yeah, I think what Martin Amos calls we decades and me decades that we go.
Speaker 1:society moves through these different phases of collectivism and then individualism, but I think it seems to me that Berkson suffered from being hugely popular, famous and understood by a lot of people that don't think about philosophy a lot.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the funny rumor is that he caused the first traffic jam on Broadway.
Speaker 1:That's amazing.
Speaker 2:I just heard them. And when Dickens went to Broadway, whatever he caused, similar yeah and I was thinking about this, the fact that they're so in a way not related, but then connected in many ways, I think yeah, they're kindred spirits in terms of Because, obviously, Dickens I think probably for the first, maybe two thirds of the 20th century wasn't revered in the way that he is again now.
Speaker 1:He'd fallen out of favor, hadn't he?
Speaker 2:And it's the same with Berkson, yeah. He was really criticized and then yeah, so it is and I think the same thing where people who become very popular and where people are fascinated about, so maybe fearful of that because that has power and so the power and the impact that that had yeah.
Speaker 1:And are you a believer in Berkson's philosophy yourself, do you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think, definitely.
Speaker 1:I think that this whole I mean, it's a supreme well done if you're not, because that was a supreme effort.
Speaker 2:Imagine if I was trying to convince some people. Yeah, no, definitely. I think there are obviously some things now that are, and I think that's another point that is so interesting At time. Obviously you could think about it in so many different ways. And now neuroscience of time.
Speaker 2:I mentioned your brain as a time machine by Dean Buonamano. I really recommend, if you're interested in our experience of time, because now I think there's just so much more. So I think that I would love to see Berkson now thinking about all these things and with the new developments with neuroscience, because it's really coming from that, because what he says in your brain as a time machine, talking about the neuroscience aspect, is that we are stories and that our brain is effectively a time machine because we are constantly thinking about the past and the future and that is rooted in evolution. We needed to start thinking subjectively about what's going to happen next to build tools, to start agriculture, all these things for survival and for. So I think that aspect is really interesting, how Berkson is still so relevant today, even now, in our own new research. So, definitely, I think it would be such an interesting conversation if Dickens and Berkson could appear right now. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much, celeste. Thank you, this has been wonderful.
Speaker 2:It was wonderful to speak to you.
Speaker 1:Great.