According to Wesley Kort, ' narrative art, by virtue of its form, matches the belief structure implied by the ongoing life' (Kort, 173), i.e., the author' s climate of opinion is inevitably suggested in a piece of literature and in such cases we can read from the text much more than the author intended to say. His worldview, his beliefs and experiences are imprinted on his writings. In other words it is logical that current time perception is recorded in one way or another in Barkley' s two books.
Barkley' s accounts not only show the author' s worldview. They depict the whole cultural intermixture that Bulgaria was. The Englishman reports the similarities and differences in the mental constitution of the nations portrayed with respect to time. In doing so he demonstrates good analytical skills. These are due to the ability of the observer to perceive and comprehend events consciously in their continuity and interdependence. In a study on the language expressions of consciousness Wallace Chafe states that every human being possesses a complex internal model of reality centred around the self that is essential to the human way of coping with the world. He observes that the experiencing subject' s model of the surrounding reality does not seem to be able to ' function properly without peripheral knowledge of spatial and temporal location, knowledge of the people with whom the self is currently interacting, and knowledge of what is currently going on' (Chafe, 30.). This explains the moments of perplexity and sense of personal dislocation, the loss of continuity with respect to traditional authorities and values, etc. that Barkley sometimes experiences. This is the reason why many of the depicted events seem disruptive, even violent and traumatic.
Another particularity of the texts is that they are based on past events which the author experienced personally. In such cases Holl speaks of ' erlebte Zeit' :
Die Basis der Zeitstruktur erlebter Zeit sind nicht die exakten Zeiteinheiten der Uhr oder des Kalenders, sondern die persönlichen Erfahrungen des einzelnen und seine konkreten Lebenserfahrungen. (Holl, 69.)
The memory images of Barkley do not form a continuity comparable to the motion picture film; they are like photos in a family album. There is no real flow of time in Bulgaria before the War and Between the Danube and the Black Sea. What exists is a discontinuous, non-causal chain of snapshots that tend (but not always) to be ordered in the sequence of their occurrence. Often involuntary memory images of incidents or impressions assert themselves with complete indifference to chronology. An instance of this occurs in the last chapters of Bulgaria before the War, where different topics and observations that have not yet been mentioned in the text are randomly piled up. It appears that history is no process at all but a succession of kaleidoscopic changes. So it is not objective time with its specific climate of opinion that is recorded, but time as subjectively experienced.
The reason for the discontinuous character of time in Barkley' s books is that for him the process of writing was a process of remembering. Siegfrid Kracauer is of the opinion that one may vividly recall certain events of his past without being able to date them:
The better equipped a person is to resuscitate the essential features of encounters that played a role in his life, the more easily will he misjudge their temporal distances from the present or play havoc with their chronological order. These errors must be laid to the difficulty for him to transfer his memories from their established places on his subjective time curve to their objective positions in chronological time -- a time he never experienced. (Kracauer, 69.)
The fragmentary and often non-chronological time structure in Barkley' s narrative is also partly due to the medium through which the events are presented -- literature. In travel writing texts, the sequence of events is prominent, and it is very important for the force and meaning of the work, the interests or intentions of the characters, and the conditions under which they live or to which the narrator reacts. The Englishman recalls all his experiences that seem important or relevant to the topic, no matter how minute, he observes them in detail, presenting them as huge enlargements. Each of such "close-ups" consists of reflections, analogies, reminiscences, etc..
Barkley, Henry C. Between the Danube and the Black Sea or Five Years in Bulgaria. London: Murray, 1877.
Chafe, Wallace. Discourse, Consciousness, and Time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Holl, Waltraud, "Geschichtsbewußtsein und Oral History. Geschichtsdidaktische Überlegungen"in: Niethammer, L., Trapp, W. (edd.). Lebenserfahrung und Kollektives Gedächtnis. Der Praxis der Oral History. Frankfurt am Mein: Suhrkamp, 1985.
Kort, Wesley A. Modern Fiction and Human Time. A Study in Narrative and Belief. Gainesville: South Florida Press, 1985.
Kracauer, Siegfried, "Time and History" in: History and Theory. Studies in the Philosophy of History. History and the Concept of Time, Beiheft 6, 1966, p. 69.
Last modified 2001