“The Slow Pale Chaos Drift West”: Depth of Field and The Crossing into the “Pure Past” of the American South
Keywords:
literature and film, narratology, narrative time, virtual time, past, incompossible worlds, monad, Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Bergson, Henri, Deleuze, Gilles, American literature, McCarthy, CormacAbstract
In his analysis of the fragmentation of narrative time in postwar cinema, Deleuze relies on the concepts of virtual time in Bergson and Leibniz: the “pure past” and “incompossible worlds”. I explore this line of thought in conjunction with Leibniz’s schema of perception in “monads”, which involves no outside object but focuses instead on the self in an endeavor to discern the relations that constitute world-memory. The final part of the essay draws the implications of monadic perception for the “postapocalyptic” world of Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, which confronts the vagrant orphan characters with an impossibility of self-orientation.References
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