Time and Eternity in Weird Fiction

[MagnusTC]

I have enjoyed reading stories of time and eternity by Borges, Cortázar, Csáth, and Buzzati, and probably a few more. In non-fiction, I am still coming back to Dunne's An Experiment With Time and Cioran's The Fall Into Time. Any recommendations of other authors in the supernatural tradition focusing explicitly on time or its transgression?

[MagnusTC]

Obviously, stories dealing with clocks such as Aickman's "The Clock Watcher" or Grabinski's "Saturnin Sektor", would also be of interest!

[Nemonymous]

JB Priestley wrote about concepts of Time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._B._P...9;s_Time_Plays

And a brilliant clock story is THE INHERITED CLOCK by Elizabeth Bowen, possibly my favourite ever story of all time!

[gveranon]

Not weird fiction per se, but Nabokov is another author who influenced Ligotti. Nabokov's Ada and Transparent Things play with concepts of time, among other themes. (I haven't read either of those novels, and mainly know about them from Nabokov's own remarks in interviews.)

In fantastic genre fiction, some of Harlan Ellison's stories come to mind: "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman," "Jeffty Is Five," and "Paladin of the Lost Hour." I read and reread vast quantities of Ellison in my teens and twenties, and looking back on it I think "Jeffty Is Five" is Ellison's best story.

[Gray House]

"In the Land of Time" by Lord Dunsany
"A Dim-Remembered Story" by R. H. Barlow
The Dealings of Daniel Kesserich by Fritz Leiber

Maybe this anthology will be of interest when it's published next year: Ecstatic Days s Almanac: Update and Open Reading Period

[Piranesi]

You have interesting reading habits, MagnusTC. Two great stories with Time as a theme is ”Rip Van Winkle” by Washington Irving and Bierce’s much anthologized ”An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”.

Mircea Eliade is an author who is very preoccupied with Time in both his non-fiction and fiction. In the preface to Two Tales of the Occult (translated by Coates, 1970), he writes that in his “littérature fantastique” he has “repeatedly taken up the themes of ‘sortie du Temp’ and of the alteration, or the transmutation, of space”. This is evident in the two short stories contained in that collection. The same is true for the novel, Youth Without Youth, but I wouldn’t recommend it. The following three Eliade quotes is from Virgil Ieruncas informative article, ”The Literary Work of Mircea Eliade” (in Myths and Symbols: Studies in Honor of Mircea Eliade, 1969):

”’I believe I understand,’ says Birish. ’In a certain sense, you wanted, like Proust, to recover the lost time.’ ’No, that’s not it. It was another kind of Time. I had not yet lived it. It was not connected with my past. It was something other, as if it came from somewhere else.’” (Forêt Interdite)

”Learn then to ignore Time, not to fear its implications. Suppress every trace of sentimental memory, suppress evanescent contemplations, memories of infancy, autumns, pressed flowers, nostalgias.” (Oceanografie).

”My essential preoccupation is precisely the means of escaping History, of saving myself through symbol, myth, rites, archetypes.” (Caete de Dor).

I realize that I have strayed from the subject but I think that this passage from Myth and Reality will appeal to all lovers of reading: “The time that one ‘lives’ when reading a novel is not the time that a member of a traditional society recovers when he listens to a myth. But in both cases alike, one ‘escapes’ from historical and personal time and is submerged in a time that is fabulous and trans-historical. The reader is confronted with a strange, imaginary time, whose rhythms vary indefinitely, for each narrative has its own time that is peculiar to it and to it alone.”

[Nicole Cushing]

Bruno Schulz's story "Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass" comes to mind. (One of the most original takes on distorted time I've ever read).

Schulz, I think, was also an influence on T.L.'s fiction.

[Michael]

Borges immediately comes to mind but Mark Samuels also has many stories that, for me at least, do a highly effective job of distorting time within the story.

[MagnusTC]

Quote Originally Posted by Nicole Cushing

Bruno Schulz's story "Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass" comes to mind. (One of the most original takes on distorted time I've ever read).

Nicole, I agree with you very much about Schulz, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass happens to be one of my favourite books. I don't know why I forgot to mention him in my original post.

Thanks for all the recommendations so far! I am going to follow up on many of these titles.

[MagnusTC]

Quote Originally Posted by Michael

Borges immediately comes to mind but Mark Samuels also has many stories that, for me at least, do a highly effective job of distorting time within the story.

Michael, Samuels' fiction does pretty much the same for me. Did you have any particular stories in mind? I haven't read Samuels in a while, but I vaguely recall "The Age of Decayed Futurity" as a temporally paradoxical tale.