Fiction: The Language of Time—Thomas Mann and James Joyce

Abstract

Techniques found in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain and James Joyce’s Ulysses seem to illustrate similar views about human time. Repetition of events, as described by Mann and Joyce, in which theme and motif occur and recur, suggests that on this earth the influence of each person continues only as part of the huge gathering snowball he has helped to form, and that death is the still center, apart from process, wherein individuality is lost. Mann and Joyce see the circular pattern of lived time as the ultimate reality. They both use the circle to describe process, although process itself may be variously interpreted by them. It is this observation, made with the help of fiction, of a circular reality basic to various points of view that substantiates, in my opinion, the validity of the philosophical position on time as circle, spiral, cycle, or as simply round, like, perhaps, space.