On the role of time, re-presentation, and self-conscious narrators in postmodern narrative

1 On the basics of narrative

This paper has been written as an attempt to right a wrong of omission, to draw from a source that should have been drawn from in my previous work exploring films and novels. It hopes to do so by combining insights from Paul Cobley’s seminal narrative on “narrative” (as found in his book of the same name) with my own analyses of two postmodern works (one of fiction and one of film). My arguments here within are provoked by his ideas. I had been writing about what could be deemed “narrative” without even categorizing it as such. Paul’s book gave me reason to understand what I had been doing in a way that was previously unclear to me, due to a lack of knowledge about what truly defined the term “narrative.” It is most definitely true that to write a paper on narrative, one must first understand what narrative is and what it is not. There are several, basic distinctions and characterizations that Cobley early on in his book says are necessary for something to be considered for that category. This effort on my part is an exploration of Cobley’s definition of the term “narrative” as it applies to the work I do.

In his 2014 book Narrative, Paul Cobley states that all narratives share certain key elements – one being a requirement for a beginning, an end, and whatever comes in between. “All narratives are the movement from a beginning point to a finishing point. Narrative is just a sequence which starts and moves inexorably to its end. To understand this is to understand the most important principle behind narrative” (Cobley 2014: 9). This is the case with classic 19th-century novels and films up into the 1960s, but, as the most important principle of all narrative, it is also necessary that the idea carries over into the postmodern films and literature of the late 20th century and turn of the 21st century. As an attempt to analyze what is most important during the postmodern period, I have chosen to explore If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino, written in 1979, and the film Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Michel Gondry, and released in 2004. With classical novels and cinema, the period of time-in-between the beginning and the end tended to be completely linear, following the hands of the clock and the days of the calendar by rote. However, with the advent of postmodernism, the time-in-between the beginning and the end of a novel or a film exploded into an unbounded universe where clocks and calendars ran unfettered and just might have – or, then again, might not have – run forward. For example, at the turn of the 19th century, narratives had endings that came after everything else. With postmodernism, endings started showing up in all sorts of unlikely places. They start the movie before the movie actually starts (as with Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind) or they do not come at all for a good number of novels within a novel (as is the case with If on a winter’s night a traveler). It is not, however, just beginnings and endings that create narrative. Narrative requires more than just the element of time passing in order to be itself.

The concepts of “plot” and “story” also include an expectation of a beginning and an ending, but the plot of a work or the story told by it are not the same as its narrative. It is narrative’s specific relation of “showing” and “telling” that makes it differ from the roles plot and story have to play. Cobley explains:

There are three fundamental items which, while they sometimes blend in a most pleasing way, are really separate. These are ‘story’, ‘plot’ and ‘narrative’. […] Put very simply, ‘story’ consists of all the events which are to be depicted. ‘Plot’ is the chain of causation which dictates that these events are somehow linked and that they are therefore to be depicted in relation to each other. ‘Narrative’ is the showing or the telling of these events and the mode selected for that to take place. […] The act of selecting what is depicted […] is […]crucial in the process of narrative and provides a demonstration of a general fact about representation: that representation allows some things to be depicted and others not. (Cobley 2014: 3–6; italics mine)

The things told and shown (perhaps “described” is better word in the case of written works) in novels and films are signs, consisting of things represented (representamens) to the reader or viewer (the interpretant) that stand in for the action thereby represented (or sign vehicle). In the case of the cinemagoer or the reader – whether by reading words or watching a flow of pictures – this action of signs results in the audience being shown something novel and unique. That it is a series of things that are shown (at each instant concrete and singular) illustrates the fact that for every admission there must be an omission – for everything a writer or director decides to describe or show, there are a myriad of other things not shown to the audience that those readers or viewers must either leave unknown or fill in with details themselves. As I have discussed previously, in the case of Mrs. Dalloway (Baker 2012a), Clarissa says she will buy the flowers herself today, but what, exactly, that bouquet consists of – flower-wise – is left up to the imagination of the reader. It is omitted by Virginia Wolf, who, apparently, prefers that the type of flowers Mrs. Dalloway buys are best left up to the individual reader. Whether purely objectively – as seen only in the mind of the reader – or objectively (to use more of Deely’s terminology) as something seen in the eye of the beholder (Deely 2009) the action of seeing something shown occurs, but, as Cobley points out, the selection of what is shown is ultimately created by editing out or never including things the writer or director did not want (or felt it was not important for) the reader or viewer to see.

Choosing what words or images to use to re-present a fictional world (in other words, editing) is not the only thing – beyond the temporality of a beginning and an ending – a narrative requires to be what it is. It is also necessary, for a narrative to be narrative, that there must be a narrator of some sort. Someone must be transmitting this story – whether it is a character, or the film director, or the ambiguous “I.” Some one must be showing and telling us these things that make up the world of the book or movie. Cobley explains:

At the lowest level of simplification, narrative is a sequence that is narrated. […] Customarily we will assume that these consist of a series of pictures which we watch on the screen and which are narrated by a voice-over commentator. […] Thus, the narrative seems to come from the authoritative voice-over. But one might ask whether the actual pictures on screen and the way that they are organized into a sequence also constitute a narrative. […] By asking this question it is not necessarily implied that verbal and visual narratives are the same. (Cobley 2014: 6–7)

Although this statement by Cobley is applied specifically to film, the idea of a narrator who “shows” (by admission and omission of words, i.e., a writer vs. a director) and a narrator who “tells” (an authoritative “I” – who can be the author, or a character, or multiple such characters) can be applied to the world of written fiction, as well. Cobley compares them thus: “Cinematic narrative devices are not identical to those of […] print narrative, but they manifest the same impulse to supplement their ‘showing’ with a degree of ‘telling’” (Cobley 2014: 153). Perhaps one might argue that films primarily consist of showing, with the occasional authoritative voice-over telling us things about the pictures (while its primary method of telling takes place with camera angles, cuts, and edits), while literature tells more than shows what is going on in the narrative – or not – via a play of admission versus omission in the details given to flesh out the story as a whole. As Cobley says of Juri Lotman, “[He] usefully illustrates that the verbal arts such as literature are characterized by sequences whose individual elements are themselves discreet units of meaning (words or phrases). The […] pictorial arts […] realize their meaning through their existence as an isolated whole, [while] film […] combine[s] these characteristics” (Cobley 2014: 7). (Although one could argue that film also consists of discreet units in the form of twenty-four frames, while literature, once read, can be taken as a whole – but those are thoughts for another day.) So, a temporal setting in the form of a beginning and an ending, the telling and showing of things (as apart from a plot or story), as well as a being who is doing the telling and showing are all required for a narrative to occur.

2 Metanarrative in postmodern literature and film

According to the OED (Oxford English Dictionary), the word “metanarrative” is defined thus: “Any narrative which is concerned with the idea of storytelling, spec. one which alludes to other narratives, or refers to itself and to its own artifice” (OED 2022). A metanarrative is self-conscious – literally, conscious of itself. This consciousness exhibits itself via the role of the narrator. Cobley points to the place that “metanarratives” have in postmodern fiction: “‘Metanarratives’ […] do not simply seek to open up realist fiction in order to present different consciousnesses or amplify the experience of common place events. Instead they indicate the re-presentative nature of narrative in toto” (Cobley 2014: 157–158). Metanarratives are self-consciously representing – or “re-presenting” – something to their audience. There is a consciousness about them, purposefully transmitted to the viewer or reader, as they seem to know that they are in the process of telling and showing a story, which is itself representative of the story being told or shown. This self-conscious storytelling about the idea of telling a story (OED 2022) can be found in both If on a winter’s night a traveler (with its “I” narrator telling the reader how to prepare to read the story and its self-aware construct of placing numerous unfinished novels within a novel that is arguably not finished itself) and Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind (with its painfully self-conscious, first-person narrator and the numerous different realities – at least three of them – that are woven in and out of each other, in one case starting before the credits have even rolled, only to break off and resurface as an ending that, by the end of the film, finally makes sense).

Metanarratives are self-consciously aware of the fact that they are using language as a system to reflect upon themselves. In postmodern novels, the role of language can be as primary as the story it narrates – at times, even more so. As is the case with If on a winter’s night a traveler, where, at the end of the book, a list of all the unfinished novels’ titles creates a newly entitled story of its own that all of the book’s readers – including oneself – want to read. That book that never was is entitled: “If on a winter’s night a traveler, outside the town of Malbork, leaning from the steep slope without fear of wind or vertigo, looks down the gathering shadow in a network of lines that enlace, in a network of lines that intersect, on the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon around an empty grave—What story down there awaits its end?” (Calvino 1979: 258). In this case, Cobley’s discussion about the ideas that Jean-François Lyotard has on the knowledge function in postmodern narrative is significant for the ideas within this paper, particularly when it comes to one critical point. Lyotard postulates that postmodern “narrative lends itself to a great variety of ‘language games’; not only does narrative include statements which describe its ‘content’, it also contains statements which suggest what is to be done about these described contents” (Cobley 2014: 167). Certainly, this is highly evident in If on a winter’s night a traveler, where the self-conscious transmittal of knowledge that is found in postmodern literature and films is thrust into the reader’s face from the first sentence of the book, by the brazen “I” narrator, and language games ensue from that point onwards.

What Cobley refers to as the “metanarratives” found in postmodern novels and films have to do in many ways with the disruption of the temporal order often found within their plots. Traditionally, one expected from a novel or a film a beginning, a middle, and an end, in that order. “‘Postmodernist’ narratives often demonstrated a wariness of the formulation of history as a steadily unfolding series of events. Frequently, they coupled this with a display of awareness of the thoroughly constructed nature of narrative and the impossibility of producing true closure of time and space through the device of a conclusive ending” (Cobley 2014: 182). This lack of a conclusive ending is evident in both If on a winter’s night a traveler and Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. In both cases, the ending proves only to be a continuation of the beginning with none of the finality normally found at the end of a classic narrative. These stories are both left dangling, open to interpretation on the part of the reader as to what happens next. One instantly longs for a sequel in order to find out “how things turned out,” despite the obviousness of the fact that there will not be one in either case. (Spoiler alert!) One closes the pages of If on a winter’s night a traveler not sure if one has even read the novel one started out to read and that, apparently, one is still reading as the book comes to its end, a stunning feat of non-closure fitting for a book that encompasses the beginnings of numerous novels without conclusions or closures. In a similar fashion, one watches the credits roll over the final scene of Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, having spent almost two hours watching Joel and Clementine erase each other out of their memories, only to actively sabotage Joel’s erasure so they can cross paths again after Joel wakes up. Even after realizing what has happened, they decide to try to have a relationship again, although acknowledging that the odds of failing the second time around are high. One realizes that both book and movie have ended, but the endings feel more like new beginnings that screech to a halt just past inception than they do like traditional endings. One is stuck in a middle place in both cases, the fate of oneself and the other characters left wide open, not shut by a happily-ever-after scenario but simply by a period followed by a blank page or credits pouring down a screen. More questions remain at the end of novel and film than do answers.

3 If on a winter’s night a traveler: postmodern narrative par excellence

In If on a winter’s night a traveler combines the classic elements of narrative and postmodern narrative. There is a beginning and what might be identified as an end, although it is a novel full of novels without endings. There are multiple narrators, and the re-presentation is achieved by showing and telling the readership what to do and expect each step of the way. Considering what has been said above about Cobley’s analysis of postmodern narrative, fiction of that era can be expected to be a metanarrative with sequences of conscious narration, temporal flights of fancy, and inconclusive endings running about throughout. In this sense, Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler is an example of postmodern literature par excellence. It is one which Cobley himself pulls from in writing Narrative and one which I have used previously in my own work (Baker 2012b). It is with pleasure that I revisit it, keeping Cobley’s thoughts in mind.

Cobley uses If on a winter’s night a traveler as an example of what he calls “the ‘rupturing’ effect […], an effect which consists of the narrating agency revealing itself ” (Cobley 2014: 156). He says that “in some cases, the ‘straightforward’ realist narrative is supplemented by a voice that sometimes comments on the narrative, sometimes overwhelms it or even undermines it.” Cobley brings forth as an example If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino, which Cobley describes as being “made up of twelve chapters, nearly all of which are proceeded or followed by a chapter devoted to commentary on reading the main narrative, as in the opening sentences of Chapter 1: ‘You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel If on a winter’s night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate’” (Calvino 1979: 9). The narrator goes further in telling you how to create the right space in which to read Calvino’s new book, saying:

Best to close the door, the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, “No, I don’t want to watch TV!” Raise your voice—they won’t hear you otherwise—“I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed!” Maybe they haven’t heard you, with all that racket: speak louder, yell: “I’m beginning to read Italo Calvino’s new novel!’ (Calvino 1979: 3)

This is the narrator’s advice, but he is not an omnipotent God showing you the TRUTH. He is suggesting, rather than dictating, but quickly lets you know you don’t have to do things his way by saying, “Or if you prefer, don’t say anything; just hope they’ll leave you alone” (3).

The primary narrator of If on a winter’s night a traveler also reminds you of why you own the book you have started reading, which, in his account of things, you have somehow not yet started to read, but are only being told about the how and why of reading it, with a note of congratulations on your good judgement added at the end. The narrator tells you about your decision to get the book: “So, then, you noticed in a newspaper that If on a winter’s night a traveler had appeared, the new book by Italo Calvino, who hadn’t published for several years. You went to the bookshop and bought the volume. Good for you” (Calvino 1979: 4). Then the narrator – who you thought might be the author but now doesn’t appear to be – proceeds to discuss what he says you are thinking about this author’s tone:

So here you are now, ready to attack the first lines of the first page. You prepare to recognize the unmistakable tone of the author, No. You don’t recognize it at all, but who ever said this author had an unmistakable tone? On the contrary, he is known as an author who changes greatly from one book to the next. And in these very changes you recognize him as himself. (Calvino 1979: 9)

You have begun to recognize yourself in this Reader the narrator is addressing. You realize that it is you that is the main character of this book. The author has written you into what you are reading. The new book by Italo Calvino is a book about you reading the new book by Italo Calvino. You turn the page to the next chapter, and “Oh! Here it is”: If on a winter’s night a traveler reads the second chapter’s heading. Now, you will truly begin reading Calvino’s new book, but haven’t you been reading along in his book for an entire nine pages already? Still, let’s see what the story has to say. How does it start? Oh yes, there is a narrator. What! Another narrator!! (There will be a total of eleven, all told.) This narrator, too, is addressing you, the Reader, directly. Indeed, this first-person narrator must have something of Calvino in him. He admits so himself.

I am not at all the sort of person who draws attention, I am an anonymous presence against an even more anonymous background. If you, reader, couldn’t help picking me out among the people getting off the train and continued following me in my to-and-fro-ing […], this is simply because I am called “I” […]. The author, since he has no intention of telling about himself, decided to call the character “I” […]. By the very fact of writing “I” the author feels driven to put into this “I” a bit of himself, of what he feels or imagines he feels. (Calvino 1979: 14–15)

So you read along, liking where I f on a winter’s night a traveler, the novel within the novel by the same name, is going. The narrator speaks directly to you again, saying:

For a couple of pages now you have been reading on, and this would be the time to tell you clearly whether this station where I have got off is a station of the past or a station of today; instead the sentences continue to move in vagueness, grayness, in a kind of no man’s land of experience reduced to the lowest common denominator. Watch out: it is surely a method of involving you gradually, capturing you in the story before you realize it – a trap. Or perhaps the author still has not made up his mind, just as you, reader, for that matter, are not sure what you would most like to read. (Calvino 1979: 12)

Then abruptly, at the point of a climax, the book you are reading – the new book by Italo Calvino – stops. It just drops off, leaving you dangling there. You begin to search for the rest of the novel, only to find that there has been a mix up. The book you thought was Calvino’s was not his at all. It was different book by another author, mistakenly attributed to Calvino. Despite its title, it is another book you are wanting to find and read now. The search for the rest of the novel begins (novel after novel, all with sudden endings, mistitled and assigned to the wrong author); you think you have found the book you want to read, only to realize you have not.

All of the aborted novels are understandably short. But the physical book you are reading is extremely short for a novel as well. Time is constricted, but repetitive, within its covers. The original narrator (Calvino?) speaks to the brevity of postmodern novels:

Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered: we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears. We can rediscover the continuity of time only in the novels of that period when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded, a period that lasted no more than a hundred years. (Calvino 1979: 8)

This meshes with Cobley’s ideas about temporality and a self-conscious narrator in postmodern fiction. The effect can be seen again in the second (or is it third, what about if we just say next) novel you start reading. In the opening chapter of Looks down in the gathering shadow, the third narrator tells the reader:

It is not impossible that the person who follows my story may feel himself a bit cheated, seeing that the stream is dispersed into so many trickles, and that of the essential events only the last echoes and reverberations arrive at him; but it is not impossible that this is the very effect I aimed at when I started narrating, or let’s say it’s a trick of the narrative art that I am trying to employ, a rule of discretion that consists in maintaining my position slightly below the narrative possibilities at my disposal. (Calvino 1979: 109)

Things divide into “trickles” of plots. Things that are not important to the story are emphasized, while things that are important recede prior to coming to the fore of the story. So Calvino’s novellas loop around on themselves but offer no conclusive ending. The novel proceeds until you reach what is technically the end. The last page with print upon it has risen into your view. As more than half the page is blank, you are aware that the book is ending. The original narrator speaks to you again, saying, “Now you are man and wife. Reader and Reader. A great double bed receives your parallel readings. [The other Reader] closes her book [….] and says, ‘Turn off your light, too. Aren’t you tired of reading?’ And you say, ‘Just a moment, I’ve almost finished If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino’” (Calvino 1979: 260) – but you have not quite yet, have you? So once again, we see the concept of a beginning leading to a neat, pat ending implode upon itself. Truly postmodern indeed.

4 On the turn-of-the-21st-century cinematic narrative

After reading what Narrative has to say about the sense and sensibility of postmodern film as it applies to postmodernist works of the generation I most relate to – Gen-X – I chose to look at how narrative is used in a film that has been dear to my heart since I first saw it in the theater twenty-eight years ago: Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. I believe Cobley would agree that the movie can be classified as what Jeff Sconce calls a “smart film.” Cobley states:

The area of narrative where innovation has been the most notable has been the cinema, [where] there has […] been the inauguration of new styles and cycles of narrative. Jeff Sconce (2002) has observed the development of the ‘smart film’, created by a coterie of film directors who […] have noted that they were born too late to have any real sense of modernism or postmodernism to which they felt compelled to respond. As well as ironic disengagement, non-participation and disaffection, [these] films also manifest “a sensibility or ‘structure of feeling’ that articulates the historical moment of the 1990s: the postmodern sensibility of Generation-X […] a mix of cynicism, irony, secular humanism and cultural relativism.” (Cobley 2014: 193–194)

Although perhaps claiming lack of knowledge of what I suppose could be considered the “classical” postmodernism of the 70s and 80s, these post-postmodernist film makers, such as Michel Gondry, director of the film under discussion, continued to use the lack of temporal consistency, the disaffected narratorial “I,” and the re-presentative features of showing and telling in a self-conscious way – classic postmodernism.

Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind (Gondry et al. 2004) begins with a tight shot of Joel Barish’s unshaven face, laying on a wrinkled, muted-blue pillowcase, bathed in dove-gray, hazy light that is yet still somehow bright. A car door slams – the sound of finality. Night ends: the next day begins. Dingy, crooked bamboo window blinds let in hazy rays of sun – the visual reflection of pessimism and angst, the concept of LOSER as epitomized by the young adults of the 1990s. A hanging window ornament of two brightly-colored birds dangles mid-air in front of the window. They sit on a flat, rectangular bird feeder. The birds reflect the deeply buried, yet ever-present, optimism born of a pessimism turned in upon itself so extremely it swings over to its opposite state. Chaos theory (so prominent a topic at the time) exemplified. The film’s non-linear timeline acts as a constant cinematic rupture of cuts and images, taking the viewer in and out of a nightmare/romance which is, bit-by-bit, eroding away into future darkness and loss. What, after all, is one’s life but a collection of memories, both dark and light? The film begins with the ending, as though one had flipped to the final chapter of a book, reading a part of it before beginning the first sentence. That this is so only becomes clear as the film draws to its end after an almost two hours, fast-paced, hallucinatory ride though the human mind’s capacity for memory.

The frame cuts to a shot of Joel leaving his apartment building to go to work, only to find the driver’s side door of his car banged in. Thinking it was done overnight by a neighbor, he leaves a sarcastic note saying, “THANK YOU!” on the window shield of the car next to him. There is a quick cut to Joel at a train station. He is thinking: “Random thoughts for Valentine’s Day 2004. Today is a holiday invented by greeting card companies to make people feel like crap” (Gondry et al. 2004). For reasons unexplained, he makes a sudden decision to skip work and take the train to Montauk. Sitting on the stoop of an empty beach house, he pulls out his journal. He notices that pages have been torn out but does not remember doing so. He notes, “It appears as though this is my first entry in two years” (Gondry et al. 2004). Walking down the beach from the house, Joel bends over to chop at the sand with a stick. Digging it up in clumps, he says: “Sand is overrated. It’s just tiny little rocks” (Gondry et al. 2004). Joel is the ultimate self-obsessed, ironic, cynical, 90s, angst-ridden, loner male in the Sub Pop LOSER shirt. In the distance, he sees Clementine, with electric cobalt-blue hair, strolling on the beach in a bright orange hoodie. “I wish that I could meet someone new,” he thinks (Gondry et al. 2004). Then, “Maybe I should get back with Naomi. Naomi was nice. Nice is good” (Gondry et al. 2004). “Nice” is Joel’s favorite passively neutral adjective, something that Clementine later gives him grief over on the train back to the city. After Joel uses the adjective “nice” apparently one too many times, Clementine screams at him: “I don’t need nice. I don’t need myself to be it, and I don’t need anybody else to be it at me” (Gondry et al. 2004) Then later on as Joel leaves her apartment, she leans out the window and says: “Wish me a Happy Valentine’s Day when you call. That would be … nice” (Gondry et al. 2004).

Scribbling J. R. Crumb-like drawings in his notebook throughout the Montauk scene, Joel seems like he is doing his best to not meet the new girl he has said he wanted to meet, deflecting Clementine’s attempts at conversation. He is painfully awkward around her. He is the completely self-conscious narrator, thoughts rambling across the screen. Later in her apartment, Clementine accuses Joel of being “close-mouthed.” He apologizes but tells her that his life is not very interesting. “You should read my journal. I mean it’s just, blank,” he says (Gondry et al. 2004). Clementine asks him if that makes him “sad” or “anxious”, and tells him, “I’m always anxious, thinking I’m not living my life to the fullest. Taking advantage of every possibility and making sure I’m not wasting one second of the little time I have” (Gondry et al. 2004). In this way, Clementine plays the unfettered wild child, the 90s, wacky (or perhaps truly insane) “It” girl. She is a more than a little out-of-control and cynical but sweet girl who frantically chases every new adventure with a manic gusto and changes her mind as often as she changes her hair color. She is damaged. She says of herself: “I’m not a concept, Joel. I’m just a fucked-up girl who’s looking for my own peace of mind. I’m not perfect.” She is, however, the perfect yin to Joel’s yang. Joel is the primary narrator, painfully aware of his inadequacy for the job. But Clementine has bits where she plays narrator, too, especially in the tape of her explaining her request for the erasure of Joel from her life. Although it is a film of random, lengthy monologues on Joel’s part, there is always the voice of the “other” in Clementine, offering him balance and perspective – her exuberance tapering his pessimism. Cobley says of that other voice in postmodern fiction:

The consciousnesses of characters as instigated by their situated voices will always be related to an ‘other’ voice such that their voices cannot be ‘monologic’. [In addition], in narrative, while ‘other’ voices will frequently be those of other characters, a constant other voice will be that of a narrator who is not necessarily omniscient and by no means in control of the other. (Cobley 2014: 135)

As the voice and the other voice, Joel and Clementine both echo and reverse each other. Joel thinks (on catching the train to Montauk): “I’m not an impulsive person” (Gondry et al. 2004). Clementine (commenting later on why she erased Joel) says to him: “You know me. I’m an impulsive person” (Gondry et al. 2004). Joel fears the world. Clementine convinces him that even dangerous things are benign. On a night picnic to Lake Charles, which is frozen over, Clementine convinces Joel to come out onto the ice, saying: “It’s really solid this time of year.” Joel follows her out with trepidation onto it. She suddenly lays down on her back on the ice and urges Joel to join her. He says, “I think I heard it crack.” The camera pans out, and they are surrounded on three sides by a large, fractured crack in the ice. Joel is smiling.

On the temporal level, time switches back and forth between the pre-erasure, post-erasure, and time of erasure. Time is flipped on its side from the beginning, which, it turns out, is the beginning of the ending, the time post-erasure. Seventeen-and-a-half minutes into the film, the credits roll over a close shot of Joel’s face crying, twisted with grief, behind the wheel of his car. He makes a curve in the road and throws a cassette tape out of the window. It is the tape consisting of Clementine’s account of why she was choosing to erase him, and it is not very pretty. Clementine has gone to a company that promises to set you free from the past. The name of the company is Lacuna Inc. Early on in the film, Joel is shown a card that he was never supposed to see. The card says Clementine has had Joel erased from her memory and asks that the receiver never mention him to her again. Angry, Joel decides to erase Clementine from his memory as well. The doctor at Lacuna promises him: “You awake in the morning. You find yourself in your own bed as if nothing had happened – a new life awaiting you.”

Prior to his complete erasure of Clementine, Joel drags her around on a whirlwind of a journey, trying to hide from the computer doing the erasing. He hides Clementine in scenes from his childhood where she plays the sexy neighbor visiting his mother. Eventually they find themselves on the beach in Montauk, as the first day of their meeting each other crumbles away. “This is it,” Clementine tells Joel. “Meet me in Montauk,” she whispers, as the house crumbles down around them, and the last of Joel’s memories of Clementine fade away. The beginning of the movie – the part before the introductory credits roll – starts again. The scene reverts back to Joel waking up after the erasure and deciding to ditch work and take the train to Montauk instead. He admits he does not know why he is doing it. The reader now knows more than Joel himself (as narrator) about his motivation to go to Montauk. What at first appeared random and unclear now takes on monumental proportions. The car door slamming outside his wind now re-presents the technician who has performed the erasure leaving in his van. The train ride to Montauk finally makes sense. The viewer now knows who Clementine is when Joel meets her for the second time on the beach at Montauk. Even the meaning of the cassette being thrown out the window makes sense. Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind ends with a scene of Joel and Clementine running on a beach blanketed by thick snow. The ending is their new beginning.

5 Conclusion

“The signs which make up narrative are constantly open to other signs: no single authority owns them and is able to control their uses” (Cobley 2014: 105). Thus Cobley describes the lack of true ownership of postmodern signs as represented by words and increments of twenty-four frames. The ownership of what the symbols re-present belongs neither solely to the writer, nor the reader, nor the narratorial voice. In If on a winter’s night a traveler Calvino nails it on the head:

“Reading,” he says, “ is always this: there is a thing that is there, a thing made of writing, a solid, material object, which cannot be changed, and through this thing we measure ourselves against something else that is not present, something else that belongs to the immaterial, invisible world, because it can only be thought, imagined, or because it once and is no longer, past, lost, unattainable, in the land of the dead.” (Calvino 1979: 72)

Calvino says, as though coining the definition of postmodernism; “You are gripped by the fear of having […] passed over to the ‘other side’ and of having lost that privileged relationship with books which is peculiar to the reader: the ability to consider what is written as something finished and definite, to which there is nothing to be added, from which there is nothing to be removed” (Calvino 1979: 115). The same can be said for postmodern film, as Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind so clearly illustrates. Between admissions and omissions of re-presentation, over-arching narrators who tell you what you are doing or whose voices ring with nihilistic cynicism, and timelines that defy the hands of the clock, shifting back and forth in complete disregard of a linear time sequence, If on a winter’s night a traveler and Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind epitomize the postmodern sensibilities of their eras.