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Note: this article is based on my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which can be downloaded (for free) from the repository of the Tampere University Press. For a list of my other academic publications, see here.

What Is the Eternal Now

Arthur Schopenhauer states in his 1818 The World as Will and Representation that “[the present], empirically apprehended, is the most fleeting of all … [It] constantly becomes and passes away, in that it either has been already or is still to come” (Schopenhauer 1969, 279).

The metaphysical spectrality of this undefinably small present, this malleable here-and-now, seems to exist in a conflicting relationship with the sheer weight of reality it seems to carry. Human consciousness possesses epistemological access to the present that is uniquely more reliable than that of the past or the future.

The reason is that these “contain mere concepts and phantasms … The present alone is that which always exists” (Schopenhauer 1969, 279). I refer to this present, the borders of which are ambiguous, as the eternal now or the eternal present.

Time and Gothic Fiction

Defining time is not as straightforward as one may think. This is particularly the case when one attempts to separate past, present, and future from one another.

Similarly, defining the Gothic appears almost as elusive as defining time. Gothic works are often expected to contain “a common insistence on archaic settings, a prominent use of the supernatural, the presence of highly stereotyped characters and the attempt to deploy and perfect techniques of literary suspense” (Punter 1980, 1).

For Chris Baldick, Gothic fiction involves an obsession “with old buildings as sites of human decay” (1992, xx). Jesse Molesworth argues that “[a]lmost nothing occurs in the gothic without some reference to the hour of its occurrence” (2014, 36).

However, the importance of time transcends mere settings. Fred Botting states that the beginnings of the Gothic mode coincide with the post-Enlightenment period that facilitated the emergence of oppositions, including those that are temporal in nature.

As he argues, the Gothic narratives of the time “were set in the Middle, or ‘Dark’, Ages. Darkness – an absence of the light associated with sense, security and knowledge – characterises the looks, moods, atmospheres and connotations of the genre” (2014, 2).

The Role of the Eternal Now in the Gothic

As the Gothic is not preoccupied with offering strictly realistic depictions, time deviates from what one would define as objective or normal. In such works, time can be perceived to flow faster or more slowly, or to even stop altogether. Similarly, temporal dialectics possess a central role in Gothic works – for example, splits between night and day, cyclical and linear time, and immortality and mortality.

It is important to note, however, that the key aspect of these splits is the fact that their borders are hazy and their shape unclear, with an ambiguous, in-between area that can belong to both of the sides it seemingly separates. As a result, this leads to instances where Gothic temporality appears as an alloy of the very dichotomies it is divided into. As Molesworth emphasizes, “Gothic time is therefore not simply… ‘out of joint’, as its frequent anachronisms and uses of supernaturalism might imply … [G]othic time is curiously both out of joint and aggressively in joint – marked by exceptional precision and promptness” (2014, 32). It is precisely the presence of what appears to be incongruous intermixing that underlines the existence of the vague, undefinable, and abstract tangent that is the eternal now.

The Eternal Now and the Sublime

The eternal now of the Gothic imagination attempts to negotiate the temporal dialectics between past and future. In other words, it attempts to dampen the conflict between a past that is still existing and a future that is unknown. This process contains important spiritual components, partly due to its connection with the sublime.

One can notice the connection between the eternal now and the sublime by looking at Philip Shaw’s approach to sublimity. Shaw, referring to Frances Reynolds’s 1785 Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Taste, presents an argument with important implications:

[T]rue sublimity occurs at ‘the point’ where the distinctions between categories, such as cause and effect, word and thing, object and idea, begin to break down. The moment is religious because it also marks the limits of human conception, the point at which reason gives way to madness, certainty to uncertainty, and security to destruction. (Shaw 2006, 46)

The excerpt contains three important elements: firstly, a transcendental, spiritual essence; secondly, a connection with dialectical collapse occurring at the level of the sublime, as traditional separations begin to break down, thus placing limits on reason, expression, and direct perception; thirdly, the importance of the eternal now, or the indefinably small “point” where sublimity occurs.

The Diversity of Gothic Fiction

A closer analysis of any work of Gothic fiction would reveal its obsession with time, which is not surprising. Temporal fears are situated at the very core of the deepest human existential fears.

Past traumas, the inevitable future annihilation, dreams (and nightmares) of immortality, are but a small portion of the rich diversity of such themes featuring in the Gothic. It is this very diversity that, in a perhaps fittingly contradictory way, both emphasizes these fears and at the same time attempts to exorcise them

Read more: Angelis, Christos. “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic. Doctoral Dissertation. Tampere, Finland: Tampere University Press, 2017. Available from the repository of the Tampere University Press.

Works Cited

Baldick, Chris. The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1992.
Botting, Fred. Gothic: The New Critical Idiom. New York: Routledge, 2014.
Molesworth, Jesse. “Gothic Time, Sacred Time”. Modern Language Quarterly 75.1
(2014): 29–55.
Punter, David. The Literature of Terror. London: Longman, 1980.
Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation. (1st ed. 1958).Translated by E.F.J. Payne. New York: Dover, 1969.
Shaw, Philip. The Sublime. Oxon: Routledge, 2006.