Time and Meaning

So far, it seems, most of our discussion both in and outside of class has centered around the spoken passages (or “dramatic soliloquies” as Hite refers to them in her introduction) which, admittedly, do comprise the majority our text; little has been said with regard to the italicized sections, and more specifically, how these lyric interludes connect with or weave through or problematize the spoken text. Ironically, I look to Rhoda's soliloquy on pg 13 for clues.

Here's the situation: “Miss Hudson has shut the book. Now the terror is beginning...”--the very special terror of mathematics, it seems, as Miss Hudson writes a number-problem on the board. Everyone aside from Rhoda seems perfectly capable of writing “the answer,” but Rhoda has no answer. She sees “only figures” and worse, “the figures mean nothing now. Meaning has gone.” Rhoda goes on to describe the passage of time through a frankly harrowing extended metaphor:

“The clock ticks...” [tick(mark)s not unlike the accented beats in metered rhythm/the rise and fall, the ebb and flow of waves] “Two hands are convoys marching through a desert. The black bars...” [recalling the “flat bars of white, green and yellow of the book's opening italics] "on the clock face are green oases. The long hand...” [maybe a stretch, but reminiscent of the arm of a woman crouched beneath the horizon, also from the opening] “has marched ahead to find water. The other painfully stumbles among hot stones in the desert. It will die in the desert... Look the loop...” [one of several instances of loops and rings] “of the figure is beginning to fill with time; it holds the world in it. I begin to draw a figure and the word is looped in it, and I myself am outside the loop; which I now join—so--and seal up, and make entire. The world is entire and I am outside of it, crying...” and so on.

So obviously we're concerned with Time here, and, it seems to me, with a distinction between objective and subjective perceptions of Time. Objective Time, i.e. time as imposed on the individual by society, depends on such markers as numbers—dates the calender, hours on the face of a clock, etc. However, the numbers on the board, as Rhoda perceives them in her subjective isolation of childhood innocence, are little more than arbitrary figures, signs empty of meaning. Then the bars on the clock (also which represent numbers), are pregnant with meaning, a meaning Rhoda slowly associates with the figures on the board--”Look the loop of the figure is beginning to fill with time.” In learning to read the clock, Rhoda loses her subjective, individual perception of time, and finds herself ticking away in the confines of a desert, empty of meaning except at the oases--the bars placed at intervals by society.

I begin to drag on... so to wrap up: the italicized sections seem to me connected with objective time as represented by the clock in the cited passage, although not a societally imposed objectivity so much as a natural ,cyclical, and--I might argue--mythic time. That these sections are framed in the past tense implies a certain fixity, a certain omniscience, that contrasts with the subjective lyrical-present tense of the speakers. Hard to say only 50 pages in though...