From: Rich Puchalsky Subject: Re: The Bridge: spoil-o-thon Date: Thursday, May 10, 2001 9:59 AM Eighteenth post Metamorphosis: Oligocene (part 1 of 2) In the third and last "meta" section of the book, the chapters are labeled with geologic era names instead of with a simple One, Two, Three, Four. So this seems like the best time for a disquisition on the chapter names. Metaphormosis, the first section, is mainly concerned with the extended metaphor of The Bridge. Metamorpheus, the second section, is named after Morpheus the Greek god of dreams. In this section, Metamorphosis, the narrator will finally change. The first and last chapters are Coma (the starting car crash) and Coda (the passage at the end of a composition that brings it to a formal close); those have obvious enough meanings. The remaining chapter names are all geologic periods of time: Triassic and Eocene are the first two separating chapters; the four chapters within Metamorphosis are Oligocene, Miocene, Pliocene, and Quaternary. So why these names? The geologic time scale is hierarchically broken up into the following divisions of time: eon, era, period, epoch, age. The Triassic Period was the time between 245 to 208 million years ago (henceforth "mya") when the dinosaurs evolved; it's the first of three periods in the Mesozoic Era, the "age of the dinosaurs". From this you might expect the next separating chapter, Eocene, to also be a period, but it's not: it's an epoch -- the second of six epochs in the Cenozoic era. It extends from 54 to 38 mya. So, let's say that Banks wanted to symbolize changes in the narrator with changes in geologic era. Triassic begins the age of the dinosaurs, that's fine. But why Eocene rather than, say, Tertiary, the first period of the Cenozoic Era, or Paleocene, its first epoch? It may just be because of the sound and other connotations of the names. But the Eocene is the first geologic period when fossils of all the major orders of modern mammals are found (specifically, it's named after horses). If Banks wanted to go from dinosaurs to mammals it's not a bad choice, since the first primitive mammals were actually found in the age of the dinosaurs, which would get confusing. The first three sub-chapters of Metamorphosis, Oligocene (38 to 23 mya), Miocene (23 to 5 mya), and Pliocene (5 to 1.8 mya), are the next three epochs after the Eocene. That makes sense; Banks wants to make his chapters go forwards in time, and though he could have used the names of ages -- the last smaller division of time than epochs -- most of them have odd-sounding names, like Rupalian or Messinian, that would not be recognizable to people as the names of geologic time periods. So Banks has to use these three names if he wants three more names after Eocene; they are the only ones available. The last of the sub-chapters, Quarternary (1.8 mya to 11,000 years ago), is the name of a period, not an epoch. Why did Banks suddenly go back to the name of a larger time unit, a period? Probably because the Quarternary period contains only one epoch, the Pleistocene, so they are both the same length, and both start after the Pliocene. Banks had the choice of whether to use Quarternary or Pleistocene, and he chose Quarternary -- why? Well, I'd guess it's because Quarternary means fourth, and this is the fourth sub-chapter, and also because Quarternary sounds like more modern period of time. Why geologic periods of time at all? Because the narrator thinks in terms of geology, that's one reason. Second, because it is evocative of a recapitulation of evolution back to the present, and mirrors the slow awakening of the narrator back to real life. Lastly, why should the four sub-chapters of Metamorphosis have geologic names when the subchapters of the earlier "meta" areas don't? Two reasons that I can think of: first, because it makes the list of chapters look like a geologic time chart, which always has more divisions of time grouped together at recent time than at times further in the past. (Roger Gray also pointed out that the chapter list looks like the supports of The Bridge itself). Second, because all of the chapters named after geologic time periods are largely about the real life of the narrator, as opposed to the others, which are largely about The Bridge and other dreams of the narrator. And these four sub-chapters are much more about the narrator and less about his dreams. Well, that's taken long enough so that I'll save any actual discussion of the contents of Oligocene for another post.