‘Time is Over’: Postmodern Times

The Cold War and the nuclear threat made it as difficult, after 1945, to look forward affirmatively as to look back. Enlightenment ideas of a ‘project of modernity’ gave way to postmodern scepticism and stasis, reflected by Samuel Beckett and the nouveau roman, and in other ways in the fiction of Malcolm Lowry and Thomas Mann and the repetitive chronologies of Joyce Cary, Lawrence Durrell and others. After the 1960s, authors such as Muriel Spark confronted the Holocaust and recent history more directly, as in later decades did Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Graham Swift and others. In this fiction, and generally later in the century, concerns with the clock’s constraints were diminished by long familiarity and by several new factors. These included technologies of film, video, globalised media and the internet, along with increased international travel and encounters with less industrialised cultures. Science fiction, too, and imagination of time-travel, was both symptomatic yet partly redemptive of horological stress. There remained, however, numerous (often historical) novels by authors such as Gabriel García Marquéz, Salman Rushdie, Alasdair Gray and Thomas Pynchon – re-examining, in Mason & Dixon, C18th practices of global measurement – still concerned with the stresses clockwork chronology imposed on modern history.

‘Wheels within Wheels’: D. H. Lawrence, Industrial Time and War Time

Many factors in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – to an extent, ever since the industrial revolution – extended throughout everyday life forms of the rationalised temporality Conrad encountered so exactingly at sea. These included clocking-in for factory work, F.W. Taylor’s time-and-motion studies, and Ford’s introduction of production lines. Lawrence’s The Rainbow and Women in Love illustrate the spread of reifying forces involved, aptly summarised by Georg Lukács in 1923. The Great War added further to temporal rationalisations imposed on modern life, through military operations requiring still stricter co-ordination than industrial ones, and measures on the Home Front including the introduction of Summer Time in 1916. By 1919, when Armistice Day arrested the entire British population at 11am on 11 November, life and death in the modern world were controlled by the clock more stringently than ever previously. In broadly historical terms, too, the Great War had shattered a sense of continuity in ways reflected in the more fragmented or non-serial forms of fiction developing in the years that followed.

Introduction: Picnic Time, Prime Time, Story Time

France’s millennium celebration – l’incroyable pique-nique, marking the line of the Paris meridian – indicated the continuing relevance at the end of the C20th of issues of space, time and their global measurement, much discussed after the French Revolution and again at the end of the C19th. This chapter suggests that –in an increasingly industrialised age, and one more and more rigorously in thrall to exact and exacting temporalities – the demarcations and delineations involved figured as a set of fault-lines throughout C20th imagination, shaping the period’s fiction in particular. It outlines a set of narratological strategies through which their significance can be recognised and their effects on narrative and narrative form appreciated, defining the term ‘chronotype’ to describe historically-specific developments of narrative form.

Conclusion: Millennial Times, Perennial Times

The millennium and fears of its ‘bug’ confirmed how far the modern world remained in thrall to exacting temporalities. Some early C21st-century novels – e.g. by W.G. Sebald– extended the resistive strategies of modernism, alongside recent ones described in Chapter Six. Others – by Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon – suggested different strategies for evading temporal constraints, and also some of the latter’s origins in the eighteenth century ‘Age of Reason’ and Industrial Revolution. Examining this age clarifies how far the rise of the novel (in its modern mode) may be attributed to newly-exacting influences of the clock on contemporary life, and how extensively these were resisted by early practitioners of the form, particularly Laurence Sterne. Resistance to the clock’s orderings can of course be further retraced, though Shakespeare’s plays – even back to Roman times – with much C20th writing suggesting it shares in wider, perennial antinomies between human reason, or agency, and nature. Though perhaps perennial, such antinomies should be seen as historically specific in scale and nature, and particularly inflected within C20th imagination. Tracing this inflection, as this study has shown, offers a powerful means of understanding the century’s history and the ways this has shaped its imagination and narrative forms.

‘All Those Figures’: Joseph Conrad and the Maritimes

Conrad’s struggles with his Board of Trade Examinations – including in 1884, when Greenwich was established as the benchmark of global temporality – have much to suggest about the astronomical knowledge, aptitude with chronometers, general navigational expertise and reliance on Greenwich-based world measurements demanded by his career at sea. Demands concerned later affected his career as a novelist, too: not in provoking explicit resentment of Greenwich and its orders, but in some more covert resistance to them though anachronic narrative forms. New narrative temporalities introduced in novels including Lord Jim, Nostromo, and The Secret Agent anticipated and were a key influence on the modernist writing which followed in the next decades of the C20th.

Not Like Old Times: the 1930s to Mid-Century

1920s trends discussed in Chapter 3 continue to figure in the next decade, in which the work of J.W Dunne – loosely connected with the popularity of relativity, and proposing a visionary, pre-cognitive understanding of time – exercised an influence over several contemporary authors. Generally, though, 1930s writing moved away from resistance to the minutely-measured temporalities of the clock and towards broader, often nostalgic encounters of memory with history, with some of Virginia Woolf’s later fiction indicating the nature of the change. The long analepsis in Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier provides a paradigm for many nostalgic revisitings, in 1930s fiction, of the supposedly-idyllic Edwardian period – in novels by Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, George Orwell and others. Similar patterns of analepsis and idyllic recollection can be found in writing published during and after the Second World War, by authors including Evelyn Waugh, Joyce Cary, Rosamond Lehmann, L.P Hartley and others. Though still occasionally discernible in fiction later in the century, the pattern fades during the following decades, whose difficulties in recalling affirmatively any period within living memory may have constituted a problem for narrative fiction generally.

Times in the Mind: Modernism in the 1920s

Confirmed at the same time as arrangements for the first Armistice Day were announced, Albert Einstein’s theories indicate that the 1920s were marked not only by stringent temporalities, but also by reactions against them and by alternative ways of conceptualising time. In the work of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, Marcel Proust and others, this often took the form of a retreat from the social world into inner consciousness – into the minds of characters whose memories facilitated narrative structures evading everyday chronology in favour of freely following thoughts from the present into the past. Priorities involved can be compared with the work of recent and contemporary thinkers, including Henri Bergson as well as Einstein. Wyndham Lewis can be seen as an interesting if unreliable commentator on processes and possible influences involved, also providing an instructive counter-example in his own fiction. Modernist fiction itself, however, is far from comprehensively anachronic, but instead includes a strong element of conventional chronology as part of the complex interplay of contemporary temporalities its imagination seeks to contain.