Eudora Welty's Cyclical Temporality: Intersections among Memoir, Nonfiction, and Fiction

Abstract

Eudora Welty's Cyclical Temporality:Intersections among Memoir, Nonfiction, and Fiction Viktorija Bezbradica I don't write out of anger. For one thing, simply as a fiction writer, I am minus an adversary—except, of course, that of time—and for another thing, the act of writing itself brings me happiness. —Eudora Welty, OWB, 882 Among the many adversaries to fiction writing Eudora Welty might have highlighted within this moment of hindsight in her memoir One Writer's Beginnings, she chose to emphasize time. In "Some Notes on Time in Fiction," an essay published eleven years prior to her memoir, Welty reveals that in order to write effective fiction, time must be represented as "the bringer-on of action, the instrument of change" (165). In her estimation, because life itself exposes "the vulnerability of human imperfection caught up in human emotion," it thus naturally reflects "growth,… crisis,… fulfillment, [and] … decay" (164–65). Crucially, therefore, she emphasizes that time in fiction moves akin to the fluid pathways of life in what she deems "the direction of meaning" (166). Due in part to this haphazard representation, in Welty's deductions, it is the fictional mode or genre which "penetrates chronological time to reach our deeper version of time that's given to us by the way we think and feel" (168). If fiction enables the production of a realistic or subjective representation of time, could Welty's alternative nonfiction pieces and memoir resonate with similar conceptions? In her 1984 memoir One Writer's Beginnings, Welty heightens the differences between chronological time and temporality in conjunction to writing, positing that "time as we know it subjectively is often the chronology that stories and novels follow: it is the continuous thread of revelation" (914). For Welty, time itself does not demand the creation of fiction so much as the conception of temporality, or that particular manner through which the [End Page 83] human subject circles back to moments suspended in a cyclical, rather than linear, fashion.1 Indeed, what better way to inspire fiction than from lived experience? As she puts it in "Words into Fiction," also published prior to her memoir, "a writer's subject, in due time, chooses the writer—not of course as a writer, but as the man or woman who comes across it by living and has it to struggle with" (141). Her last novel, The Optimist's Daughter, portrays similar beliefs, aligning with "Words into Fiction" and her memoir.2 Laurel McKelva, a woman in the midst of mourning her recently deceased father and exhibiting a perpetual aura of melancholy, allows memory to become the catalyst through which uncovered knots of her family's ties come loose. Laurel does not measure life through a chronological lens, but rather becomes stimulated by the recognition which often comes with the kind of subjective knowledge brought about by temporality, distance, and age. Like her protagonist, Welty views the pathways of her own experiences through memories, suggesting that there exists a link between what she preaches and what she writes. Therefore, in the intersections between her memoir, One Writer's Beginnings, her nonfiction works, and fictional texts, I propose that Welty utilizes constructions of cyclical temporality to reveal and pronounce the human experience—for the burgeoning writer, reader, and critic. To ground these considerations and better conceptualize the differences between chronological time and temporality, I draw on Paul Ricoeur's philosophical explanation of narrative and time. The scholar has two different considerations of time itself, referring to each as either "cosmological" or "phenomenological" (Atkins). Cosmological time marks the successive passage of one's life from birth to death, while phenomenological time passes through the subjective experiences of the past, present, and future—not necessarily marked by a chronological path (Atkins). Ricoeur contends that both cosmological and phenomenological time work in tandem to express the full extent of the human experience, which narratives have the unique capability of illuminating effectively. As Kim Atkins asserts, "narrative configuration has at hand a rich array of strategies for temporal signification," where, for instance "emplotment forges a causal continuity from a temporal succession, and so creates the intelligibility and credibility of the narrative." In other words, Ricoeur...