Deleuzian Time and Picnic

English Studies
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Deleuzian Time and the Elemental Rhythms of

Nature in Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock
(1967)
Eduardo Valls Oyarzun
To cite this article: Eduardo Valls Oyarzun (2022) Deleuzian Time and the Elemental Rhythms
of Nature in Joan Lindsay’s Picnic�at�Hanging�Rock (1967), English Studies, 103:1, 113-137, DOI:
10.1080/0013838X.2021.2021673
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ENGLISH STUDIES
2022, VOL. 103, NO. 1, 113–137
https://doi.org/10.1080/0013838X.2021.2021673
Deleuzian Time and the Elemental Rhythms of Nature in Joan

Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967)
Eduardo Valls Oyarzun
Department of English Studies, Complutense University, Madrid, Spain
ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

The present article offers a Deleuzian reading of Picnic at Hanging Received 6 April 2021
Rock (Joan Lindsay, 1967) that does not start by analysing binary Accepted 12 December 2021
oppositions, but rather construes the space and, more specifically,
KEYWORDS
its synthesis in and through time as processes of “different/ Joan Lindsay; Picnic at
ciation” and “becoming”. The article probes into Deleuze’s idea of Hanging Rock; time;
the first synthesis of time in the novel. Time can be read as a difference; Deleuze;
synthesis, a contraction of differences in repetition. This resonates becoming
with the “elemental rhythms” of nature the novel overtly
identifies as constitutive of the natural space. These rhythms are
in turn projected onto different fictional levels, so much so that
the novel reads like an organic spread of the patterns of nature
into the very structure of the narrative. Victorian identities and
cultures attempt to resist the spread of this pattern, albeit to no
avail. Finally, the spread of the said pattern reveals the possibility
of a new virtual set of relational tools for the self to encounter
the other via processes of different/ciation and becoming.
1. Introduction
Critical assessments of Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock have read the novel, and its
eponymous film adaptation,1 more often than not, “as being constructed around a
number of binary oppositions” (such as nature vs. nurture, wilderness vs. civilisation,
order vs. chaos or chronological, linear time vs. timelessness), which, in turn “meditate
on the presence of a settler-colonial culture that foregrounds its belonging to the land in
its very relation to the land itself”.2 Consider, for instance, Pablo Armellino’s remark that
Picnic at Hanging Rock “perfectly embodies the anxieties of the Victorian age” and, “most
importantly, presents an alternative perception of the outback”.3 Armellino’s claim,
posited in relation to the ideological construction of the colonial space, assumes that
“[the] characters and [the] story are the distillation of the perennial struggle between
nurture and nature”, a “pre-existing Australian anxiety” that forces the Rock to be con-
structed as a “completely ‘other’”, an inapprehensible space “diametrically opposite to the
CONTACT Eduardo Valls Oyarzun evallsoy@ucm.es

1
Picnic at Hanging Rock, dir. Peter Weir, 1975.
2
Wild, 125. Wild’s article focuses on the film as the primary object of study. Nevertheless, the review of the “existing
literature on Picnic at Hanging Rock” she presents considers the critical corpus of both the novel and the film alike,
intimating both texts are manifestations of the same cultural phenomenon. Wild, 124.
3
Armellino, 77.
© 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
114 E. V. OYARZUN
orderliness of Mrs. Appleyard’s College”.4 Similarly, the conflation of cultural identities,

i.e., “the clash between [a] supposedly ‘old’ Europe embodied in the relatively ‘young’
Australian national entity”,5 as Victoria Bladen acutely describes, pervades in different
ways the critical corpus of the novel. Traditional evaluations of the text based on these
binaries range from the appropriation of spatial and cultural (id)entities,6 through the
conspicuous absence of aboriginal culture7 to the politics of the white-vanishing trope
in the Australian tradition.8 Even critical assessments that do not necessarily examine
postcolonial context(s) or focus alternatively on broader cultural issues – feminism,
negotiations between man and nature or sexual politics9 – thematize their hypotheses
by either probing into or framing a binary clash of cultural identities.
If Suzie Gibson is correct in stating that “commentary around Lindsay’s novel has
been driven by the desire to locate and foster an Australian literary tradition independent
of its British and American counterparts and also by a pervasive need among Australian
critics to address and redress specific cultural concerns”,10 resorting to said binaries
oftentimes characterise a type of identity work – by which I mean the construction of
a narrative both informing and addressing the independent tradition and the particular
cultural concerns Gibson alludes to11 – based on “structural” frames of meaning and pol-
itical relations largely conceived within the limits of dialectics. These are indeed “unde-
niably valid and valuable”12 readings and yet I agree with Harriet Wild in that “the
structuralist reading has proven itself in need of exploration and extension beyond the
binaric charge that characterises previous interpretations and criticism”13, if only
because, as Malcolm Crick states, “Picnic at Hanging Rock poses particular problems
for structural analysis” – and, arguably, its political correlative, dialectics – “since it
very much revolves around the inchoate, the unsystematic and the dissolution of
order”.14 Crick does not cancel readings that largely rely on dialectics to underpin the
conflicts set in binary structures of reading, but implicitly calls for other types of
reading that largely eschews the binary model.15 By and large, however, Wild, Gibson
and Crick expand the debate on Picnic at Hanging Rock by co-opting the text(s)16 into
different critical areas or disciplines (Lacanian psychoanalysis, comparative literature
and anthropology respectively). These readings are clearly valid and valuable too, but
they drift away from “the meditation”, as Harriet Wild expounds, “on the founding
myth of Australian settler-colonialism”17 that dominates the discussion on the novel
and that most binary / dialectical readings dwell on.
4
Ibid., 77-8.
5
Bladen, 178.
6
Steele; Bladen; Holmqvist; Mayr.
7
McCarthy.
8
Tilley, “The Uses of Fear”; Tilley, White Vanishing.
9
McFarlane; Crick.
10
Gibson, 8.
11
As will be discussed shortly, these ideas easily inform the category that Christine M. Korsgaard defines as “practical
identity”. Korsgaard, 101.
12
Gibson, 8.
13
Wild, 126.
14
Crick, 231-2.
15
Ibid., 232; my emphasis.
16
See above, n. 2.
17
Wild, 124; Gibson’s “cultural concerns” largely fall into the “meditation” Wild describes here. See Gibson, 8.
ENGLISH STUDIES 115
By and large, the meditation Wild locates at the centre of the commentary on Picnic
focuses on the negotiations between the settler and the land as absolute other. And yet
this opposition usually finds a necessary, inextricable counterpart in the binary time
vs. timelessness, for “contemplating nature in the Australian landscape inevitably
involves contemplating the vastness of time”.18 Indeed, “temporal and spatial discourses”
in “white-vanishing” narratives such as Picnic at Hanging Rock “are intertwined”,19 up to
a point in which both dimensions help unfold each other. In Picnic, the “imaginative pos-
session” of space would inevitably bring about the “symbolic appropriation” of time,20
prompting “nature and natural terrain”, as Victoria Bladen suggests, to “constitute a
window onto time”.21 Most interpretations of vastness of time or timelessness in the
novel – like Bladen’s – often aim to underpin a somewhat normative reading, to wit,
the dialectical opposition between, on the one hand, a sublime Australian landscape –
a space beyond comprehension and understanding – that overwhelms, on the other,
the ravenous, yet invariably thwarted desire of the settler to control and assimilate
said landscape.22
Accordingly, depictions of sublimity through time vs timelessness actualises a some-
what fixed and strong Cartesian self, as well as the stable cultural construction it prompts.
These inform an agency fuelled by an “ordered ‘civilization’” that fears its own death
through assimilation by the space of otherness, – i.e., the bush. The European self
“cannot overcome the gothic landscapes of settler imaginations”, to wit, “landscapes
where time and people disappear”.23 It is the settler indeed who creates the dialectical
discourse constitutive of the land as other and against which a practical identity for
the settler can be defined, so much so that the negotiation of the landscape and the
sublime experience it prompts consistently reinforces rather than challenges the for-
merly-assumed identity. Characters in the European fold therefore “do not try to under-
stand what they” see, but “rather, […] retreat into an ordered world of ticking clocks,
punctual meals and annual rituals”,24 namely, the “suffocating routine”25 the vanishing
schoolgirls arguably flee from.
It is only natural then that, as Kathleen Steele contends, the “apparent timelessness”
of Australia is as much a consequence of European – or Victorian – consciousness26 as
the “prism of subjective historical perception” effectively is.27 And it is the fleeting –
and misleading – quality of “transience” European minds endure, rather than the
actual confrontation with Australia, that truly upsets the settlers’ mind.28 Similarly,
Elspeth Tilley calls attention to the fact that not even the most traumatic event in
the novel – the vanishing episode – can be adequately credited to the almighty Aus-
tralian landscape, insofar as “the tools employed by the vanished characters to
18
Bladen, 173.
19
Tilley, White Vanishing, 203.
20
Tilley, “Uses of Fear”, 39.
21
Bladen, 173.
22
Kirkby, 255.
23
Steele, 44.
24
Ibid.
25
Joan Lindsay, 5.
26
See below, n. 81. The European consciousness, as it is effected in the novel, is arguably akin to the Victorian colonial
milieu the novel exposes.
27
Steele, 45.
28
Ibid.
116 E. V. OYARZUN
escape the repressive order of their own time are explicitly those of order within Euro-
pean culture: geometry, algebra and a Cartesian model of space”.29 The argument is of
the essence, for it bespeaks that the “temporal trouble” put forward by the novel – and
by other white-vanishing narratives for that matter – is “what Hayden White calls a
counter-instance within the dominant discursive current, rather than a prevailing
counter-current. It acts as a stimulus for the iteration of a dominant discourse of tem-
poral certainty and linear progress that is distinctly in mode and function”.30 Temporal
trouble befits the assertion and justification of the settlers’ identity in itself as it con-
stitutes a self-contained, self-reliable narrative, one that depends – dialectically – on
the absolute other – as defined by the Cartesian self – to reaffirm both itself and
the cultural structure it is fraught with.
By and large, readings of the novel that focus on sublimity or enshrine the landscape
and its apparent timelessness as an “other” only manage to work because they operate
within the limits of the European consciousness, even if they make a virtue of not
doing so (as Tilley insightfully intimates) or they start with a sublime affirmation of
the other. Binary interpretations of the novel that set out to affirm the presence of an
autochthonous, independent Australian self usually represent the absolute other as a sub-
ordinate which is only necessary to enact the process of self-affirmation. In other words,
they enact a dialectical negotiation that Deleuze describes as a process of “alienation and
reappropriation”.31 These readings align with what Kathrin Thiele aptly describes as the-
ories of “recognition”, i.e., discourses that “continue to problematise the dialectical
(specific) relation of self and other as constitutive of both subjectivity and collectivities”.
From a Deleuzian standpoint, these theories “not only confuse cause and effect in regard
to” the “division” of self and other by “assuming first a given subject which then encoun-
ters difference instead of seeing the subject as an effect of a process of difference”, but also
“mistake where difference starts (not merely between given entities but always already
with-in-between them, constituting and different/ciating in the first place”).32
If the binary opposition, which presides the somewhat normative reading of Picnic at
Hanging Rock, suggests the possibility of a mistake in understanding difference as the
chasm of alterity – the self / other relationship – a new reading of the novel under a
new conception of difference is surely warranted. This reading will have to assume, as
Thiele informs,
the premises of a subjectivity that is a becoming other, situated within an ontology of
becoming that is no longer secured by the binary and oppositional discourses of subject
versus object, of nature versus culture, or of a truthful macro- versus an inefficient
micro-politics.33
This is the aim of the present article, namely, to offer a Deleuzian reading of Picnic at
Hanging Rock that does not “start by opposition”,34 but rather construes the space and,
more specifically, its synthesis in and through time as processes of “different/ciation” and
“becoming”.35 The article starts by analysing Deleuze’s idea of the first synthesis of time
29
30
Ibid., 158-9.
31
Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 151.
32
Thiele, 58.
33
Ibid., 59.
34
Ibid., 70.
ENGLISH STUDIES 117
in the novel. Time can be read as a synthesis, a contraction of differences in repetition.

This resonates with the “elemental rhythms”36 of nature the novel overtly identifies as
constitutive of the natural space. An explanation of the theoretical foundations of
Deleuze’s second and third synthesis of time ensues. These synthesis actualise the possi-
bilities of constituting subjectivity and cultural identity, but by virtue of the fracture that
lies at the core of the third synthesis of time, these (subjectivity and identity) can be con-
strued as illusory phenomena that arise due to the said syntheses. The girls experience the
land and synthesise the experience in time, thus carrying out the experience of becoming,
which in turn entails – coevally – the process of unbecoming, or the unloading of the
cultural burdens that encumber the experience of the space. This is foregrounded by
the metafictional level the text brings off and which forces the implied reader in the
novel to query the relational dynamics embedded in the self, the space and how the
experience thereof allows for the self to become an-other. A final section concludes
that the novel reads like an organic spread of the patterns of nature into the very structure
of the text. Victorian identities and cultures attempt to resist the spread of the pattern,
albeit to no avail. Finally, the spread of the said pattern reveals the possibility of a new
virtual set of relational tools to encounter the other. If Elspeth Tilley is correct in present-
ing the novel as a “counter-instance”, hence “a stimulus for the iteration of a dominant
discourse of temporal certainty”,37 the present article attempts to show the novel also
opens up possibilities for alternative relational discourses that do not necessarily rely
on “over-arching meta-discourses of white Australian colonialism and nationalism”.38
2. Synthesis of Habit and the Elemental Rhythms of Nature

Picnic at Hanging Rock famously tells the story of the disappearance of four students and a
math teacher from an all-girl school – Appleyard College, a Victorian establishment led by
the eponymous Mrs. Appleyard – during a field trip to Hanging Rock, near Mount Macedon.
Two of the girls came back (Edith Horton and Irma Leopold, though the latter does not
reappear until a week after the incident) but the other two (Miranda and Marion Quade)
and the math teacher (Miss McCraw) remain lost forever. The text then zeroes in on the
lives of several characters, mostly Europeans, whose circumstances are inevitably changed
by the influence of the Hanging Rock incident, even as the mystery is dismally left unsolved.
Early in the novel, a seemingly unimportant discussion between Miranda, Edith Horton,
“the College dunce”,39 Irma Leopold and Marion Quade on the magnificence of Hanging
Rock reveals the way in which the text problematises expanses of time (and quantity)
larger than human perception. Marion “breaks through the web of silence” to report non-
chalantly that the peaks on the Rock “must be a million years old”.40 Edith answers then
in awe, for “at fourteen, millions of years can be almost indecent”.41 An argument ensues:
35
Ibid., 57.
36
Lindsay, 153.
37
38
Ibid., 155.
39
Lindsay, 5.
40
Ibid., 30.
41
Ibid.
118 E. V. OYARZUN
“Whether Edith likes it or not”, Marion pointed out, “that fat little body of hers is made up
of millions and millions of cells”.
Edith put her hands over her ears, “Stop it, Marion! I don’t want to hear such things”.
“And what’s more, you little goose, you have already lived for millions and millions of
seconds”.
Edith had gone quite white in the face. “Stop it! You’re making me feel giddy”.42
If unwieldy largeness in the Rock, or sublimity in the form of seemingly eternal and
“monumental configurations of nature”, the “long vertical slabs, some smooth as tomb-
stones, others grooved and fluted by prehistoric architecture of wind and water, ice and
fire”43 shocks Edith on account of its elusiveness, for which the human eye proves to be
totally inadequate, the sheer representation of vastness through infinitesimal units makes
Edith feel downright giddy.44 The millions of cells and millions of seconds Edith – as the
entity that gather these elements together – comprises invoke a sense of inconspicuous
differences that make up for the whole, so it is almost ironic that, by Marion bringing
these differences to the fore, the entity that apparently ties them together (Edith)
almost breaks down and falls to pieces. Rather than the eye, it is the (Cartesian) self
which feels completely inadequate here, an idea Edith finds totally obnoxious and
obscene. It must therefore remain unsaid. The self is somewhat expounded as a feeble
connection that cannot account for the undercurrent of infinitesimal differences in the
world, an “optical illusion”,45 as it were, that might stem from the common ground
which makes both Hanging Rock and characters like Edith possible, to wit, the self as
contracted phenomena whereupon time is constituted:
Contracted water, earth, light and air – not merely prior to the recognition or representation
of these, but prior to their being sensed. Every organism, in its receptive and perceptual
elements, but also in its viscera, is a sum of contractions, of retentions and expectations.
At the level of this primary vital sensibility, the lived present constitutes a past and a
future in time.46
Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy on difference and repetition provides a suitable model to

read both the structure of time and how it helps constitute subjectivity in the text. For
Deleuze, time is a synthesis,47 that is, a contraction of “differences” that operates at
three different levels (first to third synthesis). These in turn mark the “foundation of
time,” the “ground of time” and the fracture of time.48 Contraction as a synthesis of
differences – not just the affirmation of different identities, but the affirmation of differ-
ence in itself – constitutes a process whereby things can be connected via repetition. And
repetition, accordingly, “does not take place in time, but rather time […] is a
contraction”.49
42
Ibid.
43
Ibid., 29.
44
Ibid.
45
Widder, 405.
46
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 93.
47
Ibid., 95, 97.
48
Ibid., 91, 101, 111. Deleuze associates these to the philosophy of Hume, Bergson and Nietzsche respectively. Ibid., 92,
101, 112.
49
Williams, 24.
ENGLISH STUDIES 119
The foundation of time (the first synthesis) is the synthesis of habit, “constituted […]
in the repetition of instants. This synthesis”50 takes place in the self51 through imagin-
ation.52 It “contracts the successive independent” —i.e., different— “instants into one
another”,53 prompting a connection among them that, in turn, accounts for the rep-
etition of the said instants. The repetition thereby constitutes “the lived, or living
present”, whilst past and future coalesce in it.54 These are not separate moments in
time, but dimensions of the present.55 The present preserves the past in the form of
habit, which points to the future in turn with a gesture that asserts all possible expec-
tations contained within and by virtue of the present. The “self” arises here,56 in the
first synthesis of time, since “habit” lays “the foundation from which all other psychic
phenomena derive”.57 It “constitutes the life” of the living present,58 namely, the self
as a state of contraction, or, as Miranda puts it, the conditions for everything to begin
and end “at exactly the right time and place”.59
Counter to the cartesian reading of the “I” as a fixed immanence, assigned to the “indi-
vidual, traceable back from the subject of actions and open to reflection and self-rep-
resentation”,60 the novel arguably allows for a type of “self” (and later the subject)
envisaged as a constituent in a pattern, a conspicuous beat in a rhythmic design set in
motion through repetition. The elemental beat that underpins these rhythms is the self
that materialises in nature, which compares favourably with a more complex, European
or Victorian, culturally-laden, purportedly transcendent “I”, which, much like Edith,
then repels or denies these rhythms as a threat to the said “I”.
For Deleuze, as has already been suggested, there is too an intimate relation between
time and the self, in that the latter constitutes the former and, puzzlingly enough, “resides
within” it.61 The complexity of the self also evolves from the way in which time engages
with the subject. Habit opens up possibilities and expectations, a multiplicity which is
determined by retention through the self in transit to the future. In other words, habit
– or rather the first synthesis of time – enables a myriad of “contractions, contemplations,
pretensions, presumptions, satisfactions, fatigues”, or rather, “variable presents”.62 Like
Michael Fitzhubert contemplating a swan – the daydream representation of the vanished
Miranda – “sending out showers of concentric ripples across the surface of the lake”,63
habit enables the perceptual experience to constitute passively as a living self. The
novel even spells out the process, ever so subtly, albeit crucially at the start of the
doomed trip to the Rock:
50
51
Widder, 408.
52
53
Ibid.
54
Ibid.
55
In Deleuze’s model, the “present” is not “a dimension in time”. On the contrary, the “synthesis constitutes time as a […]
present”, for “the present alone exists”. Ibid., 97.
56
As is argued below, the self constitutes time, even as it resides within time. See also, Widder, 410.
57
Ibid., 99.
58
Ibid., 101.
59
Lindsay, 122. Since the self constitutes time, even as it “resides within” time, duration must necessarily be limited to
the experience of said self.
60
Williams, 43.
61
Widder, 410.
62
63
Lindsay, 60. The “ripples” also bring to mind the “spreading pattern” that – as will be expounded below – structures
the novel. Ibid., 111.
120 E. V. OYARZUN
So Mr. Hussey, in the best of holiday tempers, guided the five bay horses out of the known
dependable present and into the unknown future, with the same happy confidence with
which he daily negotiated the narrow gates of the Macedon Livery Stables and his own
backyard.64
Mr. Hussey’s “happy confidence” gracefully transitions from past to present even as it
is retained in the act of “guiding the five bay horses”. The “happy confidence” has been
forged in the contemplating mind, “which precedes”, according to Deleuze, “all mem-
ories and all reflections”65 as the contraction of all different elements that constitute
the repetitive “daily” negotiations of “the narrow gates of the Macedon Livery Stables
and his own backyard”. Furthermore, not only does Mr. Hussey’s confidence imbue
the present with a flair of dependability, but also the past confidence is retained in the
present for as long as the present lasts; and, as a dimension of the present, it also
points to future events. These actualise all “general possibilities […] as yet not even con-
ceived of in a mind”,66 hence their being completely “unknown”. And the “unknown
future”, in turn, does not stand alone as a point of arrival, but rather belongs to the
dependable present, in that the present action in itself (“guiding the horses”) constitutes
time by virtue of both the “getting out” of the past and “moving into” the future. In James
Williams’s words, “retention leads into and feeds anticipation”, whereas “anticipation
rests on and drives off from retention”.67 There is no “guiding” without the expectation
of arrival embedded in the contraction of the present act of “guiding”, hence both are
necessary constituents of the living present.
Mr. Hussey hereby constitutes the present by setting up the “elemental rhythms” of
habit.68 He becomes a conduit, as it were, of the primary pulse of nature, literally an
enabler for repetition to become apparent. Similarly, Miranda, while ascending the
Rock, cuts across a pattern of recurrence as she walks “a little ahead” of the others “cleav-
ing wave after wave of dusty green”.69 She coheres into a joint, the primeval connection of
the natural habit, constituting a conduit whereby actual rhythms of recurrence can occur.
Likewise, the four schoolgirls exploring the Rock constitute the selves who articulate the
space in patterns of recurrence and iteration, by “following the winding course of the
creek upstream”70 and connecting “the endless loops and turns of the wayward creek”.71
Recurrence, iteration and repetition articulate the experience of life in the novel. These
are the elemental rhythms characters in close contact with nature are “aware of”,72 but
they also make up for the “ravages of time”73 the oppressive – and repressive – world
characters like Edith cannot quite fathom, let alone endure. In order to weather these
ravages, the European character, the staunch believer in the Cartesian self, simply
effaces the possibility of a synthesis of difference as the ground of its own self, because
it does not belong to the virtual possibilities culture offers. Accepting such synthesis
64
Ibid., 14.
65
66
Williams, 27.
67
Ibid.
68
Lindsay, 153.
69
Ibid., 33.
70
Ibid., 23.
71
Ibid., 29.
72
Ibid., 153.
73
Ibid., 7.
ENGLISH STUDIES 121
lays out the cultural conception of the self, as implied in the notion of what Christine
Korsgaard defines as “practical identity”:74 “a description under which you value yourself
[…] you find your life to be worth living and your actions to be worth undertaking”. 75
This description means the stratification of a manifold of conceptions and represen-
tations that are nevertheless ethically- and culturally-bound.76 Indeed, all identities
“give rise to reasons and obligations”,77 thus signalling to what Malcolm Crick defines
as culture, i.e., a “power structure” that legitimates a “meaning system”78 which in
turn “constrains ‘seeing’ and so legitimises authority”. 79
According to Crick, the intricate relationship between identity and culture articulates
the thematic core of the novel,
Power, particularly, resides in the way in which a cultural system defines people, their
natures, and aspirations. This is why the inexplicable is threatening to cultural order. […]
This is what happens in Picnic at Hanging Rock: a stable, rigidly controlled cultural universe
is undermined by inexplicable disappearances.80
Appleyard College, a Victorian establishment that in turn serves as an outpost of Vic-

torian culture,81 epitomises the said “rigidly controlled cultural universe” both in time
and space. In Appleyard, “Silence [is] golden was written in the corridors and often
imposed”.82 The College, a deceptive institution – probably fraudulent83 – is “already
an architectural anachronism”, “in the year nineteen hundred”, “a misfit in time and
place”, which still survives due to the disciplined routines Mrs. Appleyard imposes,
aimed in turn at silencing the natural rhythms recurring outdoors.84 Appleyard
College harbours a world of “ticking clocks, punctual meals and annual rituals”,85
which in turn perform the ravenous, yet invariably thwarted Victorian desire to
control and assimilate the elemental rhythms of nature86 into fixed identity. And this
is a key issue. The reason why this desire is ceaselessly thwarted, from a Deleuzian
point of view, is because identity derives from an illusion.87 It is the representation of
a side-effect built-in the affirmation of difference through the syntheses of time, rather
than the cultural construct of a subjective, transcendent, Cartesian self. In order to
clarify this point it is necessary to expound Deleuze’s second and third syntheses of
74
Korsgaard, 101.
75
Ibid.
76
Ibid.
77
Ibid.
78
Crick, 234.
79
Ibid.
80
Ibid.
81
Commentaries on Picnic at Hanging Rock usually – and rightly – refer to the culture of the settler as European. Yet the
ethical and ideological stratum the European settlers inhabit is overtly epitomized, in Appleyard College, as Victorian.
Thus, from here on out, I will use “Victorian”, “Victorianism” and “Victorian culture / identity” as shorthand for the colo-
nial identity.
82
Lindsay, 9.
83
Ibid.
84
Ibid.
85
Steele, 44.
86
Kirkby, 255. Marek Haltof, Harriet Wild and Jytte Holmqvist agree with Joan Kirby, albeit with nuances. Wild, for
instance, expounds the “narrative contrasts” whereby the novel, via the 1975 film adaptation (Picnic at Hanging
Rock, 1975), has been “co-opted into” Australian “cultural discourse”. Kathleen Steele, conversely, upholds that Euro-
pean characters “display an obsession with time” in order to “keep the chaos”, not the absence “of natural time from
their door”. Haltof; Wild, 123-4; Holmqvist; Steele, 44.
87
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 145-8, 334-5; See also, Widder, 405.
122 E. V. OYARZUN
time, as they give way to the possibility of subjectivity and its representation in the idea of
identity.
3. Second and Third Synthesis of Time. Memory and Trauma as

(Mis)Representation of Identity
From the second plateau of Hanging Rock, for Marion Quade people look “like a lot of
ants”, scuttling “tiny figures”, apparently without purpose, although, as she also acknowl-
edges, “it’s probable, of course, that they are performing some necessary function
unknown to themselves”.88 Marion cannot pinpoint what the “necessary function is”,
but from near to the privileged perspective of the “bird’s eye”,89 she manages to faintly
conceive a process, which additionally corresponds to a specific duration. That particular
duration constitutes a narrative in the making that can only be experienced from another
perspective in time. At this stage of the ascent, Marion seems to have transitioned to a
metanarrative status, whereby functions of consciousness can be inferred from characters
that apparently belong in the same timeline.
Deleuze’s second and third synthesis of time work somewhat akin to a metafictional
model. The first synthesis of time, that of “habit”, provides us with a “living present”,90
but “creates only a static” horizontal “line of time, which cannot account for the passage
of the present”91 (“to pass” is, naturally, ingrained in the “present”). Therefore, Deleuze
concludes there need be a second synthesis of time, a second time in which the present
can become past. This is the synthesis of memory. Deleuze then creates an intersection of
timelines. The memory synthesises the past in the second timeline. If the synthesis of
habit signals to the foundation of empirical reality, the second synthesis refers in turn
to the possibility of representation. The fundamental principles of psychological
memory operate herein, since “every moment is at the same time perception and recol-
lection, actual and virtual”.92 This means that present and pure past “differ in nature, but
coexist as two different worlds” or a “world with two focuses,” that of the actual and that
of the virtual, “both coexisting in reality”.93 As such, there is nothing more present than
memory, which cannot be experienced in the past, even though it brings the focus of the
past to the present. Since memory prompts the past to be relived in the present, the
second synthesis of time refashions the present as a dimension of the past, for the
present now becomes “the product of the synthesis of innumerable layers of virtual
pasts”.94
Identity becomes apparent here. The first synthesis of time is constituted by the
“self,” via imagination. The “self” arises in the first synthesis of time since “habit”
lays “the foundation from which all other psychic phenomena derive”.95 The
second synthesis, conversely, contracts all pasts in the memory, thus actualising
the past selves into present. These spawn the illusion of identity. Memory
88
Lindsay, 34.
89
Ibid., 111.
90
91
Widder, 409.
92
De Bolle, 139.
93
Ibid., 139, 142.
94
Widder, 409.
95
ENGLISH STUDIES 123
somehow works akin to a meta-narrative. It implies the negotiation of a subject and

an object, or rather, an “I” and an “other”.96 The narrative thus dwells on a rep-
resentation of its own likeness, its own self, which, paradoxically constitutes the
“other” that the narrative treats as its own “I.” That treatment is truly a mask of
sameness, for the “other” is the contraction of all the different selves through all
the different times it comprises. The “I” is, therefore, an illusion, a mask of identity,
that conceals “no essence, no identity […] only difference”.97 Furthermore, this illu-
sion truly makes the subject elusive. Because identity arises from a narrative, that
very narrative collapses the moment it narrates itself, for it must always create an
“other” to constitute the “I,” a new mask to substitute, in turn, the old one. “It
is,” Deleuze argues, “as though the “I” were fractured from one end to the
other”.98 This particular elusiveness, and the fracture it evinces, corresponds to a
third synthesis of time, which refers to the ongoing process of bringing a new
mask of identity each time around. Every mask conceals the underlying differences
behind it, and since every new mask is different – we only construe its sameness
because it is an illusion of sameness – every time we acknowledge the new self,
we bring about the eternal return – after Nietzsche – of difference. Finally, this
eternal return characterises the process of “different/ciation” which in turn corre-
sponds to the notion of “becoming”.
The third synthesis of time lies in the elusiveness of the fracture. It is a “caesura” that
recurs over and over again99 and puts time out of joint even as it constitutes its structure.
The fracture of the self is represented by a symbol, a signifier to which the totality of time
is “adequate”, a trauma which harbours the coexistence of a multiplicity of subjects.100
The symbol appears as representation, that is, narrative, not a cause. Its main function
remains to separate two orders and to join them at once. Deleuze ultimately contends
that the symbol is somehow informed by trauma. Trauma characterises the enigmatic
and mysterious difference that returns with every mask of identity. We affirm our identity
as sameness, we repeat the disguise of the “I” as many times as memory allows. Yet each
time around, Deleuze argues, it is a new “I” invariably displaced from the series by
trauma. The series, therefore, is established altogether by the eternal return of trauma.
In this fashion, trauma works as the fundamental device that casts time and the self
“out of joint”101 even as it provides time and the self with a structure. All in all, the “scat-
tered members” or fragments of the subject revolve around a secret, “the sublime image”
of an enigma.102
The vanishing of the girls epitomises the fracture of the self in the novel. It functions as
the “adequate image” that channels trauma into the narrative even as it sits at the centre
of the structure – the pattern – through which the said trauma and its synthesis in the
becoming is rendered apparent.
96
Ibid., 108.
97
Widder, 408.
98
99
Ibid., 111-2.
100
Ibid., 112.
101
Ibid.
102
124 E. V. OYARZUN
4. Beauty and Completeness or The Effacement of Time. Unloading

Cultural Identities to Become-other
Chapter 3 of Picnic relates the ascent of the four schoolgirls to the top of Hanging Rock
and the ensuing disappearance of three of them (Miranda, Irma and Marion) whilst
panic-ridden Edith hangs back. At first, “walking toward the lower slopes of the
Rock”, the girls do not take notice of the “monumental configurations of nature”, thus
somewhat proving that the “human eye is woefully inadequate” to comprehend the land-
scape.103 They suitably remain “locked in their private world, unconscious of the strains
and tensions” that “hold” the Rock “anchored to the groaning earth”.104 When the girls
reach the first ledge over the lower slopes, they acquire a fascinating “stereoscopic
clarity”105 that truly allows them to see the distance between them and the scene at
the picnic grounds – the outpost of Victorianism, the cultural nest of identity they
come from. The girls then loosen up and take their shoes off, much to Edith’s chagrin.
By the time they reach a second plateau, they have already acquired certain insightfulness
that does without the other elements necessary to the experience of their subject as a cul-
turally-ridden identity.106 The last stage of the ascent takes the girls almost instan-
taneously to the base of a monolith, which resembles “something like a monstrous egg
perched above a precipitous drop to the plain” and which Miranda, the party bellwether
is naturally “the first to see”. The girls then fall into a symbolic sleep, after which they
awake – symbolically too – and silently disappear, hardly walking, but “sliding over
the stones on their bare feet” behind the Rock.107 Edith stays behind though, absolutely
horrified, and then runs downhill screaming all the way back, barely noticing Mrs.
McCraw “walking in the opposite direction” in her underwear.108
The ascent to the Rock – a primeval symbol of detachment and transcendence in its
own right – and the ensuing disappearance articulate a process whereby the narrative
unloads the burden of the three girls’ own cultural consciousness – including, as will
soon become apparent, its own built-in set of tools to engage the other – for them to
finally come to face the foundation of time through difference. As the girls climb up
the slope, time seems to reach a standstill, subtly hinted at by means of sensory para-
doxes. Already at the second plateau, “Clumps of rubbery ferns motionless in the pale
light cast no shadows upon the carpet of dry grey moss”.109 And shortly before disappear-
ing, the girls fall asleep under a “colourless twilight” before awakening to a new state of
consciousness – or rather, the lack thereof – where
every detail stood out, clearly defined and separate. A huge untidy nest wedged in the fork of
a stunted tree, its every twig and feather intricately laced and woven by tireless beak and
claw. Everything if only you could see it clearly enough, is beautiful and complete – the
ragged nest, Marion’s torn muslin skirts fluted like a nautilus shell, Irma’s ringlets
framing her face in exquisite wiry spirals – even Edith, flushed and childishly vulnerable
in sleep.110
103
Lindsay, 29.
104
Ibid., 29-30.
105
Ibid., 30.
106
Ibid., 34.
107
Ibid., 35.
108
Ibid., 35, 58-9.
109
Ibid., 34.
110
Ibid., 34-5.
ENGLISH STUDIES 125
In Adam Hulbert’s words, “perfect” forms and patterns arise “as a result of the inter-
action between figure” (the girls) “and ground”.111 Specifically, the girls envisage “spiral
forms”, that is, “the morphological traces of vortices”112 in a sort of pure transcendent
abstraction. This abstraction might denote a timeless interstice, or “unmarked eternal
time”, as has been argued from the traditional standpoint of a binary oppositional struc-
ture.113 Then again, the very “patterns of connectedness” that Edith fails “to identify” on
her way back114 might be here at a standstill, suspended, hanging conspicuously like the
eponymous Rock. This would cancel the structure of time underpinned by the synthesis –
the connection – between instants. Time thus reaches a sort of Beckettian deadlock,
whereby the process of affirming difference as a means of constituting time is represented
in the making. Indeed, “a succession of instants does not constitute time […] time is con-
stituted only […] in the repetition of instants”,115 but “there is no repetition until a con-
nection has been drawn” between the said instants.116 Accordingly, there can be no
synthesis of time unless a connection between moments is established. If “every detail
stood out, clearly defined and separate” at the base of the monolith, it is because the nar-
rative focuses on an instant out of joint with the synthesis of time. From a Deleuzian
point of view, this intimates that timelessness does not derive from pure or transcendent
perfection – as epitomised in the ideas of “beauty” and “completeness” – nor that trans-
cendence can be drawn from “connectedness” at all, but rather that the effacement of
time, the isolation of a moment disconnected from duration, involves the appearance
of transcendent perfection. This is what Nathan Widder brands as the “optical illusion”
of identity, or fixed transcendence, which makes us “fail to grasp the dynamics” of per-
ception and settle for identity, transcendence or perfection accordingly.117 Identity, in
turn (or any other stratified representations of Western ideals, such as “beauty” and
“completeness” in this context, as surrogates of said culture) evinces “an abstract and rep-
resentational schema that loses sight of more concrete differences”;118 and since time is
the correlate of the ongoing repetition of difference, cancel the perception of difference in
repetition and time necessarily ceases.
Perception – i.e., “seeing” – here is of the essence, and it adds to the oblique feel of the
novel that it is treated ambiguously, even as the novel takes a turn to the realm of metafic-
tion. Here, beauty and completeness arise “if only you could see” everything “clearly
enough”.119 The girls cannot “see” (perceive) thus, as they experience an isolated
instant and thereby do not constitute time anymore. From a Deleuzian point of view,
the three schoolgirls do not perceive pure, transcendent forms but rather manifestations
of differences in isolation: “the ragged nest” and “its every twig and feather”, Marion’s
111
Hulbert, 49-50.
112
Ibid., 49.
113
Tilley, White Vanishing, 163. Elspeth Tilley identifies two definite time zones: “John Lindsay’s vanished girls […] cross
from finite, marked time (where pocket watches operators normal) to unmarked, eternal time (the rock’s natural zone
where watches do not work) after passing through a gate”. Ibid., 163-4. See also Bladen, 173-5.
114
Hulbert, 50. The phrase “patterns of connectedness” denotes the process of communication and / or cultural binding
that should help Edith locate “her own sense of self”. It therefore assumes time and divines it as a structure either
harboured by or embedded in the connection, the absence of which involves what Malcolm Crick dubs as “cultural
de-structuring”. Ibid.; Crick, 238.
115
116
Williams, 22.
117
Widder, 405.
118
Ibid., 408.
119
Lindsay, 35; my emphasis.
126 E. V. OYARZUN
“muslin skirts”, or “Irma’s ringlets”. They perceive “every detail” standing out, “clearly
defined and separate”, but not forms, shapes or any other connection or contraction
that might help constitute time through repetition in a synthesis of imagination.120
And provided that they cannot constitute the first synthesis of time – the “foundation
of time”121 – it follows that they cannot misconstrue perception as transcendence in
the plane of representation – i.e., in the second and third synthesis of time.
All this notwithstanding, here the narrator calls for the intervention of the implied
reader – as “a component part”122 of the text – in the form of a conspicuous “you”.123
Thus the narrator timely deploys a “split-level technique”124 in order to self-consciously
effect a “metalanguage”125 that effectively nuances the (cultural) meaning of the episode.
The appeal to the reader breaks the narrative in two planes. On the one hand, there is the
diegetic plane that articulates the ascent and the vanishing episode and, on the other, a
metafictional plane that brings to the fore an explicit, self-reflective interpretation of the
said episodes. The latter re-inscribes in the text the cultural boundaries the characters in
the diegetic plane (i.e., the girls) had somehow managed to dissolve. And it does so by
tracing back the meaning of the diegetic episode to what Stuart Hall defines as “domi-
nant” or “preferred” reading:
[The] question of the “structure of dominance” in a culture is an absolutely crucial point.
We may say, then, that the different areas of social life appear to be mapped out into con-
notative domains of dominant or preferred meanings. […] We say “dominant,” not “deter-
mined,” because it is always possible to order, classify, assign, and decode an event within
more than one “mapping.” But we say “dominant” because there exists a pattern of “pre-
ferred readings,” and these mappings both have the institutional/political/ideological
order imprinted in them and have themselves become institutionalized.126
The “dominant” meaning does not allow readers to “see” time at a standstill, the criti-
cal point of a synthesis of time. Readers instead can “see” (grasp, understand, recognise)
everything “clearly enough” due to narrative (representation), which helps misconstrue
perception as “an optical illusion” of Victorian transcendence, identity, completeness or
perfection – as is the case – or, in other words, the “preferred readings” which “have the
institutional/political/ideological order imprinted” and are, accordingly, “institutiona-
lized” in Victorian culture. Surely, readers are forced (“if only you could see […]”) to
derive forms, shapes, transcendent meaning – or the lack thereof – and / or identities
the novel hints at, but the illusion occurs in the representation, on a level of connected-
ness in itself that the dominant, preferred meaning privileges over the disjointed percep-
tion of the girls – i.e., the synthesis of time brought to a standstill. In short, the girls can
120
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 90-1.
121
Ibid., 101.
122
Iser, 112.
123
Lindsay, 35. In chapter 10, the narrator actually brands the “you” as “the reader”. Ibid., 111.
124
Iser, 112.
125
Waugh, 4. For Waugh, a metalinguistic practice in the novel results “in writing which consistently displays its conven-
tionality, which explicitly and overtly lays bare its condition of artifice, and which thereby explores the problematic
relationship between life and fiction […] The “other” language may be either the registers of everyday discourse
or, more usually, the “language” of the literary system itself, including the conventions of the novel as a whole or par-
ticular forms of that genre”. Lindsay inscribes the metafictional element in the novel overtly, as she entrusts “the
reader” with the task of deciding whether the novel “is fact or fiction”. This actually foregrounds the “split-level” nar-
rative I discuss in the following paragraphs before the novel begins. Waugh, 4; Lindsay, 5.
126
Hall, 269.
ENGLISH STUDIES 127
see (perceive) in a moment unhinged from time, outside the narrative, and consequently
they cannot see (understand) identity (or rather the reading preferred by culture).
Readers, conversely, are directed towards a dominant reading of “seeing”, so the “you”
cannot see (perceive) time at a standstill, but they can see (understand) clearly enough
by means of narrative and representation, and thereby derive identity, somewhat mis-
leadingly, as an illusion.
Here is where the dominant reading inscribed in the “you” the narrator engages with
becomes problematic. Stuart Hall makes a point of “preferred” meanings being labelled
as “dominant”, not “determined”, on account of their being susceptible of interpretation
through a variety of codes.127 This in turn helps characterise the “dominant cultural
order” as “neither univocal nor uncontested”.128 In essence, the potential instability of
the dominant order Halls intimates allows for interpretative possibilities in which the
text resides, as Jean Jacques LeCercle remarks in connection to Deleuze’s ideas on
language,
It is a characteristic of a text […] that it both transcends the interpretations to which it gives
rise (and which purports to “solve” its meaning), and it is immanent in them (in that there is
no text without a reader and a reading – and any reading is an interpretation, or a solution).
But no interpretation, or solution, is true […]. No interpretation is so good as to preclude
the emergence of an endless series of other interpretations – even if the text is a detective
story, and the interpretation is given within the text by the author in the form of the solution
to the mystery.129
In this context, the text works as a “line of flight” or a “movement of deterritorializa-

tion and destratification”130 that slices through the structure of culture and prompts
virtual de-legitimization of said dominant meaning by enforcing, with LeCercle, “the
emergence of an endless series of other interpretations, even if the text is a detective
story” or, arguably, a “dominant meaning” as a purported solution or the closure of
interpretation.
In the context of Picnic, the privileged meaning of beauty and completeness, perfec-
tion, an ideal transcendence or timelessness as quintessential eternity works akin to
the solution of a mystery in a detective novel in the context of cultural hermeneutics.
The dominant reading arguably precludes, or at least discourages further interpretation
outside the realm of Victorian culture, even if the novel famously calls for said interpret-
ation. On the one hand, from a Deleuzian point of view, the ascent sequence and the van-
ishing episode seem to play upon the idea of identity being an illusion. If time is brought
to a standstill by way of a representational contraption, the mystery of the disappearance
can be suitably construed as a form of death. If timelessness arises shortly before the girls
vanish, it is because the girls do not constitute time anymore. And yet, because they do
not constitute time, the purported “you” (the reader) can perceive the affirmation of
difference lurking behind the apparent void they leave. The ascent prompts the girls’
transition from their culturally-bound, heavily-relying-on-identity type of consciousness
to the affirmation of pure difference. Indeed there is a “cultural de-structuring”131 that
127
Ibid.
128
Ibid.
129
LeCercle, 39.
130
Deleuze and Guattari, 2.
131
Crick, 238.
128 E. V. OYARZUN
leads up to the decomposition of the girls’ subjectivity. Malcolm Crick refers to the
process of cultural “entropy” in order to discuss the overall feeling of the novel, a
process which, in the case of the ascent, feels somewhat accelerated and condensed.132
Deleuze, too, uses the term “entropy” to decode the Freudian understanding of the
death drive as a return to an inorganic state.133 For Deleuze, we encode the common per-
ception of death as a return to the inorganic, even if it only signifies the disappearance of
a particular difference – this particular difference – embedded in the “I” or the “ego”.134
Death performs the “eternal return” of the difference, which necessarily aims at de-struc-
turing sameness as a state “difference” always collapses into. Sameness, thus, is indeed
“doomed to die”,135 as all identities, as products of culture, are,136 by way of the
different/ciating process constitutive of difference137 (Deleuze’s take on “eternal
return”). In short, by ceasing the foundation of time (first synthesis), neither the
second synthesis (memory) nor the third (trauma, fracture) can function at all. On the
other hand, once the girls have undergone the process of cultural de-structuring, the nar-
rative insists precisely on a cultural reading of the ascent and the vanishing episode. It
brings key cultural notions pertaining Victorian identity (“beauty” and “completion”,
ideal concepts sitting at the core of timelessness) and in so doing, as has been argued,
it self-reflectively re-traces the episode to the cultural realm the girls have dissolved by
means of death.
Ultimately, the problematic raised in the dissociation of narrative planes purportedly
cancels the possibility of construing otherness as a result of experiencing the synthesis of
pure difference, as well as the necessary acquisition of new relational tools to engage with
the other fittingly. And this is a key issue in a Deleuzian reading of Picnic. A reading of
time based on a philosophy of pure difference implies time – as the synthesis, the new
experimental articulation138 of the space that has traditionally been construed as other
– enacts the dissolve of the self, but also of the subject, its identity, and the culture it har-
bours. These – Victorian subjectivity, identity and culture, to be precise – work along the
axis of a certain set of relational – i.e., ethical and political – forces which mark and
channel the engagement with the other. Any affirmation of a new self (first synthesis),
a new subjectivity (second and third synthesis) and a new identity perforce entails to
reboot any particular way to relate to the other.
Kathrin Thiele addresses a similar problem in her essay “The World with(out) Others, or
How to Unlearn the Desire for the Other”,139 in which she manages to reconcile Deleuze and
132
Ibid.
133
134
Ibid.
135
Lindsay, 32.
136
While resting on the second ledge of the Rock, Irma explains the meaning of the term “doomed” at Edith’s behest. To
that end, she alludes to the poem “Casabianca” by Felicia Dorothea Hemans. The poem tells the story of a boy that
follows his father’s orders to the letter and dies because of it. Irma’s reference echoes the doom of the three school-
girls, the doom of Sara Waybourne near the end of the novel – Irma links the term with Sara via metaphor – and the
necessary fate of a subjectivity that draws too much on illusive cultural stability, i.e., the “father’s word” in Hemans
poem. Hemans, 300.
137
It is worth noting here that “difference” is not a singular foundation or a virtual unity, which could risk an essence or an
identity – precisely the idea Deleuze debunks in bringing difference to the fore. It is rather a constant process of “differ-
enciation”, whose determination, that is, the actual multiplicities created from the process, constitutes “differentiation”
(hence the term “different/ciation”). See Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 258.
138
See Williams, 18. According to the third synthesis of time, the ongoing process of “different/ciation” implies all experi-
ences are new, as they perform the becoming of a new actualization of difference (or “becoming-other”).
139
Thiele, 55-75.
ENGLISH STUDIES 129
Gayattri Spivak “even beyond [the latter’s] own critique of [the former]”.140 Thiele nuances
Deleuze’s idea of becoming, notably “its singular mode of becoming-other”141 by attempting
a re-reading of Deleuze’s appendix to his own Logic of Sense (1968), viz, “Michel Tournier
and the World without Others”, in which Deleuze “devotes itself to the reworking of the
Crusoe-myth in Michel Tournier’s” novel “Friday”.142 Thiele argues that an “all too literal
reading of the expression ‘The World without Others’”143 fails to capture the complexity
of Deleuze’s notion of becoming in terms of relationality. The becoming stands for the
ongoing return of the fracture that articulates the third synthesis of time, the eternal
return of difference which, in turn, breaks and structures the subject at once. Arguably,
becoming always implies “becoming-other,” thus casting new meaning to the relational
forces articulating the self and the other, even to a point in which the notion of the other dis-
solves somewhat. However, a proper philosophy of difference cannot construe the becoming
– again, the ongoing repetition of difference, the ceaseless process of different/ciation
inscribed in the eternal return – just as a straightforward assimilation of otherness,
thereby perpetuating the “(structurally violent) dialectics of self versus other”,144 but
rather it must affect the relational dynamics involved in every engagement of the self and
the other, so that these “can begin anew by imagining a situation in which the structure of
the Other (the dialectic of self/other and the Lacanian law of the Other) is no longer
simply taken for granted”.145 This is only natural in a political interpretation of pure differ-
ence and its correlative in repetition, to wit, time. Taking for granted a dialectical closure of
the self (i.e., privileging the self/other dialectical structure) would assume an anteriority, a
purported “legitimate version of the past, [which] could claim that this or that event or
emotion should hold sway over all others”,146 yet a political analysis of becoming-other,
as James Williams suggests, must “necessarily be a form of experimentation, since there
could be no template” for said “analysis”.147 In other words, becoming-other implies “to
encounter difference in a different manner”,148 changing the set of relational tools that
helps state the affirmation of becoming accordingly, for the “West is here to learn from
the other, but not in the modality of Western thought – rather, in the form of its collapse,
its return to ‘provincial’ status as one among many transversal becomings”.149 This “col-
lapse” in turn calls for “a practice of unlearning”,150 which, as Thiele upholds, is akin to
the abrogation of Western privileges in the context of postcolonial representation Gayatri
Spivak demands.151
140
Lorna Burns and Birgit M. Kaiser, 3.
141
Thiele, 56. Thiele explicitly agrees with Peter Hallward’s reading of Deleuze – thus indirectly with Spivak – in that the
“questions of otherness and relationality proper […] are at the most fundamental level of engaging with the postco-
lonial condition”. Ibid.
142
Ibid., 55.
143
Ibid., 56
144
Ibid.
145
Ibid., 65.
146
Williams, 18.
147
Ibid., 19. Williams specifically outlines the ideas of the representation of subjectivity and objectivity in the context of
the third synthesis of time, yet, these mirror the same problematic embedded in the relations between the self and the
other.
148
Thiele, 60.
149
Robinson and Tormey, 34.
150
Thiele, 57.
151
Ibid., 69-70.
130 E. V. OYARZUN
In defining the common affinities between Deleuze and Spivak, Thiele provides an
interesting theoretical ground to anchor a Deleuzian reading of Picnic at Hanging
Rock. As has been posited, the encounter with the new space is synthesised in a way
akin to the elemental rhythms of nature. The ascent and the vanishing episode constitute
the new selves through which the girls un-learn their cultural burdens and, thinking with
Thiele, learn to become-other. The girls’ disappearance arguably represents the un-learn-
ing inscribed into the notion of becoming, as well as the possibility of a new set of tools to
relate with the land – the other – anew.
Kathleen Steele posits a similar idea, and, with it, opens up the possibility of de-struc-
turing the European consciousness as a result of its encounter with the “bush”,
If one reads the disappearance of the girls as an attempt to assimilate a European presence
into the bush, one finds an intimation of Judith Wright’s insistence that such assimilation
may only be possible through the death of European consciousness. Viewing the death of
the girls in terms of sacrifice invites a contemplation of Miranda as both a bridge of possi-
bility between the emigrant and native-born Australian, and an offering to the land.152
“The bridge of possibility” echoes Deleuze’s idea of becoming as “[learning] to

encounter difference in a different manner”,153 “not an Other, but something wholly
other”,154 which not only implies the assertion of a new-type of subject – “the already-
Overman whose scattered members gravitate around the sublime image” – 155 that is,
a broken, multifarious “I”, as opposed to its purportedly fixed and stable Cartesian
counterpart – but also calls for a completely new set of relations to assemble the
fleeting, broken series of new selves and the land proper, or “the native-Australian”.156
“To rethink relation”, as Thiele expounds, and more specifically to “rethink it differently
instead of reproducing the same”, that is, “to rethink it in order to relate anew”157 lies
behind the assertion of multiplicity the temporal structure of becoming unravels. In
this context, Steele also construes Miranda as an “offering to the land”, an idea which
also has its Deleuzian correlative: the dissolution of a Euro-centric self inevitably leads
to a new becoming, not a refurbished anteriority or originality, but the affirmation of
a new self. It is with this new self that “encountering the other does not necessarily
imply imperialist domination of that other, but instead can lead to a process of learning
an-other world”.158
This interpretation lies precisely behind the dominant reading the text forces into the
narrative when dissociating the metafictional and the diegetic plane through the dialogue
with the “you”. However, this “preferred meaning” can be undercut by foregrounding the
Deleuzian reading that articulates time and the becoming in the diegetic plane. Paradoxi-
cally enough – or maybe consequently enough for a novel that “embraces ambiguity”159
152
Steele, 49.
153
Thiele, 60.
154
Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 324; my emphasis.
155
156
Steele, 49.
157
Thiele, 56.
158
Ibid., 61. I would argue the term “learning” still bears connotations of a fixed subject capable of assimilating otherness,
rather than a phenomenological self that changes invariably in the face of the other. The latter idea is perhaps closer to
Deleuze’s theory, but Thiele states the former in order to bring the possible affinities between Spivak and Deleuze to
the fore.
159
Gibson, 17.
ENGLISH STUDIES 131
systemically – the metafictional plane appears to be ambivalent as to the “preferred”

meaning enhanced therein. As the next section will show, “the spreading pattern of dis-
ruption and violence”160 that becomes apparent – and pervasive – via the metafictional
plane in the second half of the novel, actualises the possibility of the texts reflecting a
Deleuzian broken subject. And the unremitting tension between the said “dark
pattern”161 and the structure of “chronicle” the narrator purports to convey mirrors
somewhat, in the metafictional plane, the resistance of the Victorian subject against
the manifestation of its instability – in accordance with its fractured nature, as
expounded by the Deleuzian reading; but also the possibility of a new type of relationality
implicit in the affirmation of the broken self.
5. The Metafictional Patterns of Picnic at Hanging Rock. Conclusions

In Chapter 12 of the novel, Mlle. De Poitiers brings Irma Leopold back to Appleyard
College in order to meet her fellow students for the first time after being rescued from
the Rock. The schoolgirls are assembled in the gymnasium, dancing to the inexorable
beat of a military march.162 As Irma enters the room, the class turns silent. Evocative
images of the picnic then emerge, yet again, with Miranda placed at the centre. The evo-
cation then turns dark and harrowing, “the shadow of the Rock” grows “darker and
longer” until it becomes “a living monster lumbering” towards the missing girls whilst
the schoolgirls go into a fit of hysteria. Turmoil ensues. The schoolgirls then bully
Irma into revealing what happened at the Rock: “Tell us, Irma”, demands Edith, who
remarkably enough has taken over Miranda in the “role of ringleader”, to which the
poor Irma dismally replies a dispirited “I can’t tell you. I don’t know”.163
The passage overtly re-enacts the enigma of the Rock in the form of loss, anxiety and, ulti-
mately, trauma. It also brings to the fore the impossibility for the Victorian subject to affix a
solid, dependable identity that could eschew trauma by way of repression. The Victorian,
purportedly unified subject can no longer find shelter – let alone solace – in the carefully
arranged, if stifling customary world Appleyard College represents; not for lack of trying
though, but rather because no “suffocating routine”164 can prevent the fracture of the self
from becoming apparent once it gets involved in the time structure, or rather, here, the rep-
resentation thereof. Repression still represents the force through which the Victorian subject
holds onto its illusory, linear, unified form. Eloquently enough, the governesses at Appleyard
College make use of a “small brass gong” to restore “silence and order”,165 yet to no avail too,
and aptly forgetting that no “brass gong” (i.e., form of repression) can turn into “golden
silence” (i.e., a unified, affixed and comforting Victorian identity).166
The girls shouting at Irma and demanding her to unveil the enigma of the Rock can be
construed, paraphrasing Wilde, as “the rage of Caliban not seeing his face in a glass”,167
160
Steele, 49.
161
Gibson, 16.
162
Lindsay, 135.
163
Ibid.
164
Ibid., 5.
165
Ibid., 135.
166
Ibid., 135, 5.
167
The complete aphorism runs thus: “The nineteenth century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his
face in a glass”. Wilde, 1.
132 E. V. OYARZUN
for once the glass – as the correlative of the “optical illusion” of unitary subjectivity, laden
with a cultural identity168 in the structure of time – has been shattered by means of a
caesura,169 the trauma that joins time and becomes apparent in the form of an
enigma. The only thing left here is a void, a lacuna of memory that cannot give
account of a narrative which, in turn, could not affix and ground neither subject nor
identity. The scene, too, plays out as a metafictional representation of a manifold subjec-
tivity in connection to a time “out of joint”. Irma and Edith – and the other schoolgirls
for that matter – coexist on the same narrative plane. One, Irma, stands for a torn “I” who
cannot pinpoint how but must accept that she has become an-other.170 The other, Edith,
relentlessly tries to project meaning, or rather, to close the ongoing and persisting de-
centring of perceptions, ideas, feelings, affections and passions which constitute the
experience of the “I”. In coexisting, both subjects perform the tragedy of Victorian sub-
jectivity the novel enacts: taken together (Irma and Edith), they both stand for the frac-
tured, illusive and deceptive condition of the Victorian identity as a unified narrative,
whilst a part of this illusive unity (Edith) still denies and rages against its blatant multi-
plicity. Even on a symbolic level, the scene renders Victorian subjectivity as manifold,
insofar as both “I’s” (Irma and Edith) share a common ground of Victorianism, but
differ in the expectations they project onto the future, depending on their accepting –
or not – their torn condition as well as the possible new ways “to relate anew”171 the
said condition entails. The coexistence of both symbolically performs what being a mul-
tiplicity in time, namely a “becoming”, involves, to wit, the eternal return of difference –
the becoming – represented by the enigmatic link, or “caesura […] the unique and tre-
mendous event which is adequate to time as a whole”.172
In Picnic at Hanging Rock, memory and dream effectively lay out the multiplicity of
subjectivities that characters actually become in the form of narrative patterns.
Dreams are very adept at enforcing subjectivity through the negotiation of selves, chan-
ging the “suet-grey mask”173 of subjectivity with every different recurring self. “Sara’s
little face,” for instance, “is illumined […] by a dream of Miranda so filled with love
and joy that she carries it about with all next day”.174 The present tense suggests the syn-
chrony of the self that is enforced by the dream and Sara’s own experience of the self. This
changes with every new iteration of the self that resonates in the character. Likewise,
“Mike is awake after a restless night, productive mainly of dreams of banking and
packing,” but “once he dreams” – present tense – “of Irma hurrying towards him
down the corridor of a swaying train”175 only for him to reject her advances and
become master of his own desires. Irma, on the other hand, asserts her love for Mike
after reliving the “picnic afternoon” in a sort of epiphanic dream.176
168
Widder, 405.
169
170
Interestingly, Irma is dressed in a carnal “scarlet cloak” as opposed to the black and white colours of her schoolmates’
uniform, thereby actualizing – visually – the idea of her being another. The sensual connotation of Irma’s attire serve as
timely reminder that she appeared in the Rock unscathed but without her stays. Lindsay, 135, 94.
171
Thiele, 56.
172
173
Lindsay, 128.
174
Ibid.
175
Ibid.
176
Ibid.
ENGLISH STUDIES 133
Dreams convey the negotiation of subjectivity in synchrony with a given mask of iden-
tity (i.e., a non-unified subject “taking a bird’s eye view of events”177 on the multiplicity of
their selves). Memory, on the other hand, proves even more productive to a certain
extent, for it manages to overcome a single synchrony and projects the negotiation
onto larger periods of time. The “I” appears to carry its own time along with itself, its
own “fragments of eternity”178 which constitute the selves that are synthesised by
memory. The only conversation between Albert Crundall and Irma (in which the
latter shows her gratitude to the former for having rescued her on the Rock) finishes
at “exactly at three o’clock.” It was a “brief conversation” but it “would inevitably be
expanded, in memory, during [Albert’s] fairly long life, to fill the entire content of a
summer afternoon”.179 The three selves that inform Albert’s identity (the character at
three o’clock, the character in brief conversation with Irma, and the character in an
undefined, long future) arise thanks to the synthesis of memory, and resonate in the
same “present” narrative level. And yet, they are discontinuous, fragmented, so to
speak, insofar as they constitute different timelines (a moment in time, the “entire
content of a summer afternoon” and Albert’s “fairly long life”) and necessarily prompt
“a multiplicity of subjects living different temporalities within the same not-so-unified
being”.180 Irma, similarly, would remember Mike “most clearly” “watching a swan
rising gracefully out of the reeds ahead” and “flapping away over the water until it dis-
appeared amongst the willows”. The self that is produced in that particular timeframe
then crops up, time and again, all of a sudden, in such places as “the Bois de Boulogne”
or “under the trees in Hyde Park”.181 Sara Waybourne, who “sometimes” feels “as if” she
“was hundreds of years old”, still has character-defining nightmares about her life in the
orphanage, most particularly when she declares she wanted to become a “lady circus rider
on a lovely white horse in a spangled dress” and got her head shaved in punishment
instead.182 Mlle. De Poitiers, who in fact would change her name by becoming
Madame Montpelier in a later future, recasts her old self anew by telling “her grandchil-
dren the strange tale of panic in an Australian schoolroom”;183 and seamlessly triggers a
pivotal flashback in chapter 15 by pondering on the relationship between Sara Way-
bourne and the vanished Miranda.
These pasts, all these “fragments of eternity”184 memory synthesises consistently make
up for a new realisation of the present. Each time around, the “new” present decentres the
identity that defines the subjectivity of the character by bringing up future manifestations
or past re-writings of the said identities. This dynamic punctuates the idea of discontinu-
ity and fragmentation and calls for a third synthesis of time in order to constitute its
proper structure. The synthesis of trauma, as has already been stated, finds its expression
in the mystery lurking behind the vanishing episode. Notice that it is not determined or
caused, but rather represented by the enigma lying at the centre of the “spreading
177
Ibid., 111.
178
Ibid., 120.
179
Ibid., 119.
180
Widder, 411.
181
Lindsay, 121.
182
Ibid., 149-50.
183
Ibid., 137.
184
Ibid., 120.
134 E. V. OYARZUN
pattern”.185 The pattern coalesces in the picnic, but it belongs to the structure of the text
from the beginning:
The reader taking a bird’s eye view of events since the picnic will have noted how various
individuals on its outer circumference have somehow become involved in the spreading
pattern: Mrs Valange, Reg Lumley, Monsieur Louis Montpelier, Minnie and Tom – all of
whose lives have already been disrupted, sometimes violently. So too have the lives of innu-
merable lesser fry – spiders, mice, beetles – whose scuttlings, burrowings and terrified
retreats are comparable, if on a smaller scale. At Appleyard College, out of a clear sky,
from the moment the first rays of light had fired the dahlias on the morning of Saint Valen-
tine’s Day, and the boarders, waking early, had begun the innocent interchange of cards and
favours, the pattern had begun to form. Until now, on the evening of Friday the thirteenth of
March, it was still spreading; still fanning out in depth and intensity, still incomplete. On the
lower levels of Mount Macedon it continued to spread, though in gayer colours, to the upper
slopes, where the inhabitants of Lake View, unaware of their allotted places in the general
scheme of joy and sorrow, light and shade, went about their personal affairs as usual, uncon-
sciously weaving and interweaving the individual threads of their private lives into the
complex tapestry of the whole.186
The pattern arises timely, at the onset of the representation of the “College mystery”.187
It locates trauma at its centre whilst spreading as an overarching structure of repetition
– of rhythm – comprised by “individual threads” – pending the term “segment”.188
These threads, in turn, refer to individual subjectivities which comprise a multiplicity
– not a Cartesian unit of the self – constitutive of a rhythmic structure of becoming,
the ongoing return and affirmation of pure difference. The structure echoes the organic
arrangement of boulders, “crags and pinnacles” at Hanging Rock,189 casting the
elemental rhythms of nature onto the rhythms of memory, trauma and the represen-
tation thereof through narrative. The passions, affections, desires and frustrations,
gains and losses of different characters fold and unfold by virtue of and in accordance
with the pattern. Ever so subtly, the novel is concerned with “differential interrelations
among elements which are all on the same plane”,190 i.e., the pattern, and constitute
the structure of repetition by performing their different subjectivities as segments of
the said pattern. Characters “involved in the spreading pattern” such as “Mr.
Valange, Reg Lumley, Monsieur Louis Montpellier, Minnie and Tom” as well as
Mlle. De Poitiers, Michael Fitzhubert, Albert Crundall, Sara Waybourne or Mrs.
Appleyard herself endure a somewhat violent disruption in their lives that “had
begun to form” already “on the morning of Saint Valentine’s Day”.191 Much like
the “millions of cells” and “millions of seconds”,192 the inconspicuous synthesis of
differences Marion Quade pointed out, turned Edith into an (id)entity, these broken
subjectivities constitute the spreading pattern of repetition that underpins the
narrative.
185
Ibid., 111.
186
Ibid.
187
Ibid., 99, 101
188
Ibid., 152, 161.
189
Ibid., 34.
190
Miller, 6.
191
Lindsay, 111.
192
Ibid., 30.
ENGLISH STUDIES 135
The temporal fracture of individual subjectivities also suggests the pattern never gets
completed and that a single, privileged narrative line cannot account for all the subjec-
tivities embedded in the manifold of temporal linearities the novel comprise:
Although we are necessarily concerned, in a chronicle of events, with physical action by the
light of day, history suggests that the human spirit wanders farthest in the silent hours
between midnight and dawn. Those dark fruitful hours, seldom recorded, whose secret
flowerings breed peace and war, loves and hates, the crowning or uncrowning of heads.
What, for instance, is the plump little Empress of India planning in bed in a flannel night-
gown at Balmoral, on this night in March in the year nineteen hundred, that makes her smile
and purse her small obstinate mouth? Who knows?193
The impossibility to close a singleness of purpose or intent, an affixed subjectivity that

Victorianism cannot even pin down in the ultimate symbol of imperialism – the
Queen herself, whose dreamtime-self eludes and defies representation – ultimately inti-
mates that the patterns of becoming the story comprises work as means to query the rela-
tional dynamics between the land and the settlers. As Hayden White posits, a “chronicle
of events” eventually – and despite its “naiveté” – morphs into a history that reflects the
“possible sets of relationships […] those events can be demonstrated to figure”.194 “These
sets of relationships”, which govern both the deeds recorded in the chronicle as well as
the selves that perform said deeds, do not reside “in the events themselves”, but are actu-
ally “present as the modes of relationships conceptualized” in the “historian’s own
culture”,195 then projected onto the history. The collapse of the chronicle in Picnic
thus suggests a fundamental impossibility to enclose the novel within the limits of a
single “fictional emplotment”196 and, alternatively, hints at a virtual (new) set of relations
– a “bridge of possibility”197 – ingrained in the elemental processes of becoming the text
unfolds. Arguably, these new relationships are not spelt out as stratified, ideological dis-
courses, but precisely because the rhythmic pattern the novel lays out intimates a process
of becoming that cannot be pinpointed as an identity or an ideology, it is only fitting the
text eludes an explicit representation of said relationships.
Nevertheless, it is worth remembering at this point, with Kathrin Thiele, that “pro-
cesses of becoming […] first of all mean unbecoming oneself by unlearning what ‘privi-
lege’ in Spivak’s sense means”, namely, “to see the itinerary of the silencing”.198
“Becoming in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense”, Thiele goes on to argue, “never starts by
opposition”199 but rather “‘unlearning’ one’s own habits and, thus, opening up new
spaces for both experimentation and negotiation, which then might lead to macropoliti-
cal changes”.200 The context of a multidimensional structure of time – and the self – that
replicates pervasively from the elemental rhythm of nature to the rhythm of represen-
tation imbues Picnic at Hanging Rock with an open set of potentialities, virtual multipli-
cities grounded – and ungrounded! – on the eternal return of differences which must
necessarily do away with the privileges and cultural dynamics borne by previous
193
Ibid., 128.
194
White.
195
Ibid., 94.
196
Ibid.
197
Steele, 49.
198
Thiele, 70.
199
Ibid.
200
Ibid.
136 E. V. OYARZUN
realisations of said virtual multiplicities. These are, arguably, the “many [other charac-
ters] who do not appear in the book” but are, admittedly, part of it.201 The mystery at
the core of Picnic at Hanging Rock thus comes off as the cultural un-burdening of
Victorian identit(ies), the entropic “un-becoming” that spreads out to retrace and un-
walk “the itinerary of silencing” down to its elemental pattern of difference.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Funding
This work was supported by the research group Contextos Literarios de la Modernidad (Complu-
tense University of Madrid Research Group, ref. 941542). I would like to thank, deeply, professors
Emma Ingala and Gavin Rae from Complutense University of Madrid for their insightful feedback
and useful suggestions.
ORCID
Eduardo Valls Oyarzun http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6626-8921
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English Studies

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Deleuzian Time and the Elemental Rhythms of

Eduardo Valls Oyarzun

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Deleuzian Time and the Elemental Rhythms of Nature in Joan

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

CONTACT Eduardo Valls Oyarzun evallsoy@ucm.es

orderliness of Mrs. Appleyard’s College”.4 Similarly, the conﬂation of cultural identities,

in the novel. Time can be read as a synthesis, a contraction of diﬀerences in repetition.

2. Synthesis of Habit and the Elemental Rhythms of Nature

Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy on diﬀerence and repetition provides a suitable model to

Appleyard College, a Victorian establishment that in turn serves as an outpost of Vic-

3. Second and Third Synthesis of Time. Memory and Trauma as

somehow works akin to a meta-narrative. It implies the negotiation of a subject and

4. Beauty and Completeness or The Eﬀacement of Time. Unloading

In this context, the text works as a “line of ﬂight” or a “movement of deterritorializa-

“The bridge of possibility” echoes Deleuze’s idea of becoming as “[learning] to

systemically – the metaﬁctional plane appears to be ambivalent as to the “preferred”

5. The Metaﬁctional Patterns of Picnic at Hanging Rock. Conclusions

The impossibility to close a singleness of purpose or intent, an aﬃxed subjectivity that

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