The Beech, the Hearth, and the Hidden Name in World Enough and Time
1984; University of North Carolina Press; Volume: 17; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1534-1461
Autores Tópico(s)Research, Science, and Academia
ResumoCrouching in darkness outside a house in Frankfort, Jeremiah Beaumont remembers a from his boyhood. One morning after a night of freezing rain he had come out of his house to gaze upon an ice-covered beech in sunlight. He plucked an icicle from it put it in his mouth, as he did so he felt his own strength pass from his fingers into tree. seemed to become tree, he had said to himself then, and knew how it was to be rooted in deep dark of earth.... (1) Now, waiting for Colonel Fort to emerge from house in Frankfort so that he can strike him down to avenge seduction of Rachel Jordan, Beaumont again fancies that he is growing into ground.., setting root like plants of thicket, it is this fancy that triggers recollection of earlier quasi-mystical experience. That memory was important to him now, for it seemed to verify him, to say that all his past was one thing ... that all had moved to this moment (p. 238). Jeremiah is making of his life a work of art, he is the author of his own ruin (p. 6), a dramatist (p. 311) who writes script of his quixotic quest for justice, of his avenging of a woman who did not really want to be avenged, of his murder of a just decent man whose punishment at Beaumont's hands is out of all proportion to his crime. Robert Penn Warren's World Enough Time is a historical novel about a man who writes his life history by living it in accord with his sense of drama--It was to be a tragedy, like those in books he read as a boy (p. 5)--but novel is made historical in an unusual sense by strong possibility that this protagonist may not be real author of his own life history, but that history itself is. Or, as narrator tells us early on, land history of land devised Jeremiah Beaumont drama in which he played, scene is action speaks through of Jeremiah Beaumont as through a mask (p. 6). Perhaps words are put in his as they were in his prophetic namesake's--Then Lord put forth his hand, touched my mouth. And Lord said unto me, Behold, I have put my words in thy mouth (Jeremiah 1:9)--and perhaps icicle from beech tree is latter-day equivalent of divine finger. The secular equivalent, for here it is history itself, together with land where history took place, that, narrator suggests, have written Jeremiah's history. Like a dream within a dream, this childhood incident will return yet again as memory of a memory, for in darkness of prison cell where his murder of Fort will send him Beaumont will remember how he remembered bright beech when he lay in wait among lilacs (p. 315). Freud believed that appearance of a dream within a dream was the most decided confirmation of reality of its content, (2) what happens here suggests that same may be true of a narrative's memory of a memory, for this third appearance of insistent beech puts us in touch with yet a deeper historical origin for Jeremiah's story. As most readers are aware, Jeremiah Beaumont is more devised than devising for another reason than what narrator tells us about land history of land about how scene is action, that reason is that Beaumont's is rewritten story of one Jereboam Beauchamp, who avenged dishonor of an Anna Cook by murdering a Colonel Sharp in Frankfort. (3) Now perhaps in manner of a dream, beech tree keeps insisting because it is naming something that has been forgotten, something of which we could say that one level of consciousness is aware another is not, something Robert Penn Warren knows we know but Jeremiah Beaumont can never know, that is that name of his original was pronounced, in early 19th-century Kentucky fashion in apparent ignorance of its French origin, Beech-am. Indeed it does insist precisely in form of a dream, one that comes to disturb Jeremiah in comfort of his marriage with Rachel like a message reminding him of his destiny. …
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