BAKHTIN AND "A RESUMED IDENTITY"

AT THE VERY MOMENT of conception, human beings begin a race each and every
one inevitably loses. This contest is with time. Yet, it is precisely time that defines so much of what we are as humans. Our lives are literally shaped and formed within the past. Our knowledge of self largely depends on what we can remember about our relationships, activities, and circumstances. But what happens to a “person(ality)” when that person can no longer remember who one is or was? Perhaps more important is the question, “What happens when one’s conception and memory of self is found to be erroneous or false?” These questions form the foundation and substance of Ambrose Bierce’s short story, “A Resumed Identity.” And the answers provide the twist to one of the narratives for which Bierce is so famous. Perhaps the ideas of M. M. Bakhtin concerning time and space in a narrative, paired with a close reading of the text, will provide a fuller understanding of how Bierce constructed this story for maximum effect.

In "A Resumed Identity," Bierce presents his readers with a man watching an army pass
in the predawn hours of the morning. [1] Contextual clues reveal that the man does not physically and at that moment see what he believes he is seeing. What appears to be a simple case of hallucination, however, is actually amnesia and the gradual recall of lost memories. A dialogue with a physician returning from an all-night house call reveals to Bierce’s readers that the man is suffering from memory loss as the result of a head wound, but is now regaining his memory of his life before the accident (306-7). Subsequent events lead to the man finding a monument to the unit to which he was attached as a soldier when he received the wound initially (308). The monument has fallen into disrepair after years of neglect and the passage of time. The man sees himself in a pool of water, realizes how old he has grown, and suffers heart failure and dies (308). Bierce’s manipulation of time and space in this narrative, coupled with the almost supernatural phenomenon of memory, lends itself to examination using Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of the chronotope.

While discussing the nature of novelistic discourse, Bakhtin notes that “a literary
work’s artistic unity in relationship to an actual reality is defined by its chronotope.” [2] We have at hand, however, a short story, but Bakhtin is emphatic that those motifs and other structural aspects of the novel “enter as constituent elements into plots, not only of novels of various eras and types, but also into literary works of other genres [. . .] (although it is true the chronotope is developed in different ways in the various genres)” (97). The chronotope, then, is a useful tool for thinking about the narrative structure of any genre. Perhaps a brief definition is in order.

Bakhtin defines the chronotope as “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and
spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature. This term [space-time] is employed in mathematics, and was introduced as part of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity” (84). Before we panic at the thought of having to understand and be conversant with Einstein, however, Bakhtin limits the scope of his definition by saying, “What counts for us is the fact that it expresses the inseparability of space and time (time as the fourth dimension of space)” (84). For Bakhtin, in “the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole” (84). More important, Bakhtin insists that “the image of man is always intrinsically chronotopic” (85). In doing so, he quotes Immanuel Kant from Transcendental Aesthetics, noting how “Kant defines space and time as indispensable forms of any cognition, beginning with elementary perceptions and representations. Here we employ the Kantian evaluation of the importance of these forms in the cognitive process, but differ from Kant in taking them not as “transcendental” but as forms of the most immediate reality” (85). The chronotope, simply expressed, is the relationship of time and space as it applies to the development of a narrative. Now that we have a clearer understanding of what Bakhtin means by the chronotope of a narrative, a close reading of Bierce’s story and an application of Bakhtin’s ideas may illuminate some of the dark spots in the mystery of “A Resumed Identity.”

The title of Bierce’s piece sets the stage for his mystery. “Resume” means to take back
again or go on again after interruption. In the case of Bierce’s story, the resuming is surrounded in a shroud of almost supernatural mystery, yet it is a simple case of resuming identity. Several contextual clues make this fact clear. Bierce’s manipulation of a person (his character) within a context (the chronotope) to achieve the effect of the supernatural, however, is the focus of this discussion.

Bierce’s lieutenant is a man out of place and out of time. He is “as one who among
familiar surroundings is unable to determine his exact place and part in the scheme of things” (303). Bierce places him in a place and time devoid of other human companions at the beginning of the story. The lieutenant, in the brief moments before a misty dawn, “sees” things that may or may not be “real,” and he has no one to confirm his perceptions. Consequently, he “could not rightly understand” (303). He even questions his ability to hear (303-4). Bierce, at this point in the narrative, launches into a lengthy definition of “acoustic shadows” by offering several Civil War examples (304). His narrator subsequently remarks, “These instances were not known to the man of whom we write,” maintaining the monologic character of the text, yet simultaneously serving to further distance the lieutenant from those surroundings and time. As the scene vanishes before his eyes, the lieutenant is “inexpressibly astonished” and “he could not comprehend it” (304). In the developing chronotope, “he had lost his sense of time,” and as he looked at the scene before him in the growing daylight he realizes that “on every side lay cultivated fields showing no sign of war and war’s ravages” (304). The conflation of memory and immediacy in the opening segment of Bierce’s story clearly places the lieutenant in two times, the present and the past. Because they are fused in his mind, he is unable to distinguish one from the other in time, although he definitely defines them within the same space. So ends the first part and begins the second.

The subtitle of the second division in Bierce’s story, “When You Have Lost Your Life
Consult a Physician,” certainly does not preclude 1) the possibility of a disembodied spirit having a conversation with a living being, nor 2) the possibility of an amnesiac conversing with a doctor. Contextual clues, however, make the latter a probability rather than a possibility. Bierce inserts another being, a doctor returning home after an all-night house call, into the chronotope. The doctor is situated firmly within a “real” chronotope. Various details, easily confirmed, lend verisimilitude to the fiction of his existence in this plane of reality. Narrative comment provides the confirmation that the doctor, at the least, diagnoses the lieutenant as an amnesiac when we read, “he was recalling much that is recorded in the books of his profession – something about lost identity and the effect of familiar scenes in restoring it” (306). Subsequent dialogue only confirms the doctor’s diagnosis. Once having planted this seed in the minds of his readers, Bierce simply reinforces the perception.

In the third part of the story, Bierce has his lieutenant realize that his hands are extremely
wrinkled, to which he subsequently muses that “a mere bullet-stroke and a brief unconsciousness should not make one a physical wreck” (308). He also realizes he “must have been a long time in hospital” (308). The apparent passage of time is important to the development of the chronotope. The lieutenant finds an aged, crumbling, grass-encrusted monument to his Civil War brigade, which “in answer to the challenge of this ambitious structure Time had laid his destroying hand upon it, and it would soon be ‘one with Nineveh and Tyre’” (308). Bierce’s highlighting of the inscription firmly fixes the narrative thread in two times but only one space, and only further confirms for the lieutenant the growing suspicion that he is in a different moment than he believed. With the confirmation comes the realization that the return to the earlier time and his former consciousness should not negate awareness of the present and intervening time, despite the fact he is in the same space (308). What is not clear is whether or not the man remembers that intervening life. Arguably, he does not. Otherwise, why would he be so upset upon realizing he has grown old? One certainly cannot “experience” life without the accompanying memory of the activities and events of that life. Yet here it is as if those event(s) never occurred. For the lieutenant, the shock of understanding he is not who he perceives himself to be is too much for his elderly constitution. Consequently, he “yielded up the life that had spanned another life” (308).

Ambrose Bierce is a master of double entendre, innuendo, and mystery. Although his
stories are just plain fun to read, his narratives are much more intriguing as a focus of serious study. Bierce blurs the line of perception in “A Resumed Identity.” His readers can only question the reality of the lieutenant’s “life” between his wounding and his realization that he has effectively lost his entire adult lifetime. By anchoring the narrative within the boundaries of an amnesia episode, Bierce also forces his readers to question their own perceptions of “history” and their place(s) in it. As readers who must by necessity be in two places at once when reading history or historical fiction, our perception of where fact ends and fiction begins is always distorted. Bierce, along with other writers who manipulate the chronotope for narrative purposes, call into question the very nature of existence. His playful yet skillful handling of the chronotope opens many lines of inquiry. One fruitful path might be to examine other Bierce stories to ascertain any repetition of the chronotopic development in “A Resumed Identity.” Another line is variations on the chronotope, such as in “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” in which the chronotope involves two spaces contained within one time. “Reading” Bierce is a complex task in any context, but Bakhtin's ideas provide a practical means to determining Bierce’s narrative strategies.

WORKS CITED

1. Ambrose Bierce, "A Resumed Identity," Phantoms of a Blood-Stained Period: The Complete Civil War Writings of Ambrose Bierce, eds. Russell Duncan and David J. Klooster (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 303. All citations hereafter cited parenthetically within the text.

2. Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, "Forms of Time and the Chronotope in the Novel," The Dialogic Imagination, ed. and trans. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 243. All citations hereafter cited parenthetically within the text.