In the beginning was the past. Before any story begins, the events it describes have already unfolded, just as there was a beginning to time itself. As readers, we enter a story somewhere in the middle and immerse ourselves in its recreated past, but we can never reach the time before the narrative starts. Although, as Robert Hughes says, writing "creates experience", the gap between the life of the text and life itself cannot be bridged.
Yet in the history of Western literature, which is itself a constructed narrative, the metaphor of "the book of life" has resonated; literature offers the satisfactions of a parallel, or virtual world. Literary form is temporal.
"It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature," Henry James wrote, but that little literature allows us to extend ourselves over the centuries, across time and space. It is our history. When we read we can contract the years between the Homeric epics, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or The Decameron and ourselves. The literature of the past may be viewed as our prehistory, enabling us to recognise things that we already knew, but didn't know we knew.
Literature captures a particular moment, or, more accurately, a heightened version or memory of that moment, and it does so in ways that depend upon an understanding of what time is. Some 2,800 years after the Iliad was first written down, 1,000 years after the first manuscript version of Beowulf, this understanding has changed profoundly. These two works themselves arose from significantly different philosophical and religious sensibilities, one describing a heroic code embedded in a polytheistic world view, the other suffused with Christian morality - both separated by the vast historical and cultural gulf between the end of the Greco-Roman era and the rise of Christendom.
The spread of Christianity throughout Europe followed the period, described by Flaubert as a "unique moment in history", when "the gods had ceased to be and the Christ had not yet come . . . between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone". Yet, if literary form can be viewed as an arrangement of beginnings, middles and ends that reflects ideas about time and history, these two works are closer to each other in sensibility and outlook than either is to us at the end of the 20th century. Continuity is discernible in their highly elaborate form: the verse epic, one written in the Ionic dialect of Greek, in dactylic hexameter, the other in alliterative Anglo-Saxon, both with oral origins, composed to be recited publicly to music and describing a mythical past of warriors and heroes, of battles won and lost long before the text came into being.
As readers and writers we are engaged in the act of reclaiming the moment or era evoked by a poem, short story or novel, while briefly absenting ourselves from the present. The American poet, Amy Clampit, has written about the experience of reading Homer in Greek in a New York classroom in the 1980s: "For an hour and a quarter at the core/The great pulse was dactylic." Like Sheherazade's stories in The Arabian Nights, told each night in order to prolong her life, all literature is written against time. The writer's race against the clock is a leitmotif of European literature, as common as the image of the hourglass in portrait painting. The desire to create a work that will outlive its author is expressed repeatedly in Shakespeare's sonnets, an aspiration realised every time these poems are read.
References to time may be conventional in 16th- and 17th-century poetry - or may appear conventional through their familiarity - but they are also a shorthand for an expression of the limitations or disappointments of human life, of a sense of futility like that of Macbeth: "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow/ creeps in this petty pace from day to day/ to the last syllable of recorded time;/ and all our yesterdays have lighted fools/ the way to dusty death."
Our awareness of time is existential, deriving from the inevitability of our death: "And Time that gave doth now his gift confound". The marking of the passage of time in literature becomes a notation of personal unhappiness, disappointment or grief. John Donne's `A Nocturnal Upon St Lucy's Day, Being the Shortest Day' begins: "Tis the year's midnight and it is the day's" and continues: "For I am every dead thing/ in whom love wrought new alchemy/ For his art did express/ A quintessence even from nothingness/from dull privations and lean emptiness/he ruined me and I am re-begot/ Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not." A sense of time is inextricably related to the sense of self.
With the Romantics, the sense of time becomes the search for the remembered self of the past, like Wordsworth revisiting Tintern Abbey ("I cannot paint what then I was"). From the Renaissance onwards, the expression of the individual writer was paramount, and with the development of the first printed books (the vernacular Bibles) in the 15th century, the encounter with literature became a private hermeneutic act. By the 18th century, the exploration of the self had become a central theme rather than a subtext of European literature. The suffering, hyper-sensitive individual artist is given voice in Goethe's novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, or, almost a century later, in Hopkins's desperate poem, `My Own Heart': "My own heart let me more have pity on; let/ Me live to my sad self hereafter kind/ Charitable; not live this tormented mind/ With this tormented mind tormenting yet."
If time was no longer needed as a trope or an allegorical device, it could be tackled head on by authors such as Laurence Sterne, whose anarchic masterpiece, Tristram Shandy (1759), poked fun at the absurdity of linear narrative development. He refused to play by the rules of the new literary form, the novel - which itself was a by-product of an abundance of time. The existence of a newly leisured class allowed for the enjoyment of mammoth works, published in multiple volumes, such as Samuel Richardson's epistolary novel of over one million words, Clarissa.
Tristram Shandy begins at the moment of the narrator's conception, briefly traces his early years in "this scurvy and disastrous world" and then abandons the linear narrative in favour of a series of interruptions and digressions that attempt to convey the simultaneous nature of events and the relative way that we experience time.
Jonathan Swift satirises the conventional poetic longing for immortality in Gulliver's Travels, when Gulliver meets the Struldbrugs, who, although endowed with immortality, are utterly miserable and long for death. This degree of playfulness didn't surface again until the early 20th century. On the whole, the great 19th-century realist novels of France, Russia, Germany, the US and England, which depicted what Balzac called "La Comedie Humaine", strove for verisimilitude in relation to time and place as well as character. Dickens did play with time travel in A Christmas Carol, for instructive purposes, propelling Scrooge back into a forgotten past and forward into a miserable future, and in Miss Havisham in Great Expectations he created an unforgettable image of an attempt to arrest time. By remaining dressed in her wedding gown as the years go by, she is determined to be her past self, the self who was once poised on the brink of matrimony.
The narrator (Marcel) of Proust's extraordinary work, A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, is not trying to be his past self, but to evoke the presence of the past, to capture the past through language. Published in 12 volumes, this work which demands considerable time to be read is a sustained exploration of the effect of time on human character and of the power of memory. T.S. Eliot's lines from `The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock' could have been written about Marcel: "For I have known them all already, known them all -/ Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,/ I have measured out my life with coffee spoons".
The work of Proust, Eliot and Joyce's Ulysses reflect traces of the ideas of the French philosopher, Henri Bergson, about the nature of time (he contrasts "real duration", intuitively perceived, to measured time) and Joyce's work also exhibits the influence of cinematic devices of flash-back and jump-cuts. Stephen Dedalus and Bloom are both preoccupied, in their own ways, with time and identity. "I am other I now", Stephen muses, while Bloom looks back at his past self: "I was happier then, or was that I? Or am I now I?"
Having entertained, fleetingly, the faint hope that the remembered past might hold some consolations, in Krapp's Last Tape, Samuel Beckett eventually abolished the dimension of time altogether.
In the later plays such as Ping there is no chronology, no causality, no simultaneity, while in his novel trilogy, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable, he moves into an almost mystical mode of perception. He was not alone in these extremes in the middle years of this century: Alain Robbe Grillet and Georges Perec also wanted to excise the paraphernalia of narrative, setting and character, to break the relation between the signifier and the signified and remind us that all that exists in a text is a series of words on a page.
This kind of fictional writing was mirrored in the development of (post-structuralist) critical theory, during the past three decades, which has refused the age-old narrative game of make-believe and argues that a literary text offers no determinable set of meanings. A text can only be perceived as an arena in which various readings compete for the power to determine cultural meaning. The narrative certainties of traditional literary forms are unpicked or deconstructed; by way of consolation for the loss of a "story", theoretical writing offers us a plethora of metaphors about texts: of grids and mappings, of the centre, of frames, circumferences and marginality. I know which I'd prefer to read.
But, both narrative and metaphor, the most enduring features of literature, are, of course, impositions of our intellect and imagination, methods whereby writers and readers make sense of the mystery of being in the world. It is our mind that imposes taxonomies and hierarchies and makes connections between disparate things, between events, between past and present. "A mind", as Milton wrote, "not to be changed by place or time/ The mind is its own place, and in itself/ Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n."
Proust's memories of his childhood holidays at Cabourg are firmly rooted in the pastoral and Romantic traditions, in which landscape becomes a key to unlock memories of a vanished past. It is another way of writing about the self. A European vernacular literature that began by vividly depicting and celebrating the shared experience of pilgrimage in Boccacio's Decameron and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, is now preoccupied with interior journeys. The tales told to pass the time on journeys to saints' shrines, or the picaresque adventures of Cervantes's Don Quixote and Rabelais's Pantagruel have given way to the flourishing late 20th-century genre of confessional travel writing; we now relish journeys of self-discovery.
Since the Modernist movement, writers have drawn attention to this self-referentiality, and refuse to allow landscape any other significance. "Place means nothing," the narrator of Richard Ford's Independence Day (1995) insists as he walks along a beach that is vaguely familiar: "there is now no sign of you, no mention in the air's breath that you were ever there, or that you were ever, importantly you, or that you even were . . . Places never co-operate by revering you back when you need it. In fact they almost always let you down . . ."
Laments for a lost pastoral landscape become synonymous with the loss of a younger, better self, of innocence. "It is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence," Elizabeth Bowen wrote, "and once we have lost that it is futile to attempt a picnic in Eden." A sense of loss permeates much of the best poetry of the 20th century, loss of faith of various kinds - in the divine, in the transformative, improving or moral qualities of literature, in the values of "civilisation", in human goodness. The result need not be nihilism and despair: it may be a reinvigorating impulse to look unflinchingly at the world, without the accretions of convention, habit and received opinion, as in Wallace Stevens's poem, `It Must Be Abstract': "You must become an ignorant man again/ And see the sun again with an ignorant eye,/ And see it clearly in the idea of it."
The alternative is to succumb to the Golden Age syndrome, one which seems to have been around since the Babylonians invented the alphabet, and generally asserts that nostalgia isn't what it used to be. The tendency to glorify the past has become more pronounced as our century ends, as writers and critics look aghast at the march of technology and predict the end of literature as we know it. Roland Barthes's declaration in 1968 of the Death of the Author (an inevitable sequel to Nietzche's assertion of the Death of God) has been joined by announcements by George Steiner and V.S. Naipaul, among other Jeremiahs, of the Death of Tragedy, the Death of the Book and the Death of the Reader. The corpses are piling up. The only one still standing, strangely, is the literary critic . . .
YET while these obituaries were being written in the European nation states that had been the birthplaces of the novel, elsewhere in the world "stories" were thriving and narratives abounded, infused by different ideas of time derived from fairytale and folktale, from cyclical, mythopoeic time rather than rational, linear time. The fabulist impulse, which was given new energy through the 1960s drug culture and counter culture, and the influence of anthropological and psychoanalytical research, flourished in the form of magic realism and the neo-gothic, written in parts of the world where the miraculous was viewed as part of everyday life. Increased access to literature in translation form Africa, China, Japan and Latin America has reinvigorated the European novel, demonstrating cross-currents and cross-fertilisation, and subverting the distinction made by Modernism between popular fiction and literary fiction.
The blurring of forms between fact and fiction, between novel and memoir, between creative falsehood and fictional truth, all point to the playful possibilities of literature in the next century. While cinema and television will continue to satisfy the need for narrative for many millions of people, that will not diminish the dominion of literature, which has, in any case, always been a minority pursuit. Technology may spawn new, hybrid forms of cyber-literature, but there is no evidence that readers en masse are abandoning books in their current paper-bound form - on the contrary. As was evident in the hot air generated by discussions during the past decade in the US about what should be included in the Western Canon of literature, there seems to be a surprising insecurity and lack of confidence among literary scholars in the staying power of the literature of the past.
The recent re-interpretations of classical Greek texts (by Tony Harrison, Ted Hughes, Michael Longley, Christopher Logue and Derek Walcot, among others), the inventiveness of the historical novel and the return of the long novel (by Vikram Seth and Kazuo Ishiguro, among others) point to a renewal of literary forms, in myriad ways, which Derridean theorists may deplore, but the reader can only celebrate. Perhaps the hourglass can be inverted, and the coffee spoons scattered. They're only words, after all.
Helen Meany is an Irish Times arts journalist