A billiard ball, clumsily struck by a medical orderly, leaped off a billiard table and rolled under a bench; the scraping of disturbed chairs, the stamping of feet, and the ridiculous exclamations of women echoed round the room. A soldier who had been sick and then brought round by his friends had collapsed on a bench, his face distorted, stinking of sour wine and ammonia; nearby, a drunken whore was asleep in front of her plate of sauerkraut, which a quartermaster was surreptitiously picking at. soon, amid the drunkenness of the wild parade-ground party, the arguments began.
J.K. Huysmans Parisian Sketches
It is not much remarked upon, and still less is it judged extraordinary, that the passage of time is used as a means for passing through time. Just as past experience is a necessary component in the formation of experience (experience supposes experience), so passing through time assumes an earlier separating of time into passages. For example, the reader of the quoted sketch by Huysmans is able to both anticipate what might happen next as events unfold in a Parisian music hall, and at the same time understand that whatever happens next the narration occurred 130 years in the past, and is thus fixed there: beginning, middle and end.
Even so, the reader has a capacity to set a particular sequence of narrated events in temporal order as he or she passes through the present. The entirety of the sequence belongs to the past but becomes a means through the present. It is peculiar this temporalising capacity, this recommencing of past times as if they were current.
It is strange, but it is also the structural condition for all narrative... sequences of events from another time when reactivated become the means for negotiating a passage through this time. Narration (a present activity) uses narrative (the stuff of a past narration) as its material. That is to say, any use of time supposes used time. And any traversal of time supposes the completion of earlier traversals of time. Huysmans’ sketch ends with the soldiers and some of the whores staying behind, whilst the narrator and some other women walk down the street... they all disappear.
