Time Lord (24 page)

(Faulkner should not be held to task. Finally, we don’t care if our hired mothers are racially, culturally, or linguistically different from ourselves, so long as they are demonstrably separated from us in time. We don’t want our nannies and housekeepers to show up wearing a Walkman and asking about cable programs; we want them to have “endured” or “prevailed” from an earlier era, where, presumably, maternal values were more central, less compromised, than in our own.)

In the great modernist novels,
The Magic Mountain, To the Lighthouse, Ulysses
, in most of Lawrence, most of Faulkner, in Proust, in Gertrude Stein, time is manipulated in order to keep the moral issues alive. In film, certainly the most extreme and most successful example of temporal manipulation in all the arts, the present moment is eternal. Cinema’s narrative compression suppresses time altogether. The filmgoer creates the temporal dimension, just as the gallery visitor mixes the impressionist palette in his head. All is surface, which is not to say they lack depth. They get where they’re going without time.

Is there a moral component to time? Faulkner certainly thought so. Günter Grass
knows
there is. There is Southern time, German time, African time, Irish time, Latin American time, all of them set to a different moral, that is, aesthetic, ideal. Contemporary Latin American novelists like Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, García Márquez, and Vargas Llosa have taken Faulknerian time, Proustian time, the Catholic calendar, and even a bit of pre-Columbian aboriginal time to keep history alive for the creation of their own sophisticated myths of eternal return. For writers of my generation, time as a subject, a dramatic event in itself worthy of a new form of telling, is forever associated with reading Borges for the first time.

The world was made conscious of Protestant time and the so-called
Protestant work ethic back in the nineteenth century. Protestant travelers and imperialists imposed their hyperconscious temporality wherever their influence spread. The Protestant clock, not the Catholic cross, was their god. To be prompt and reliable was the surest outer sign of an orderly and responsible inner life. They also reported back on their unsuccessful temporal conversions, the slackness of Catholics and Muslims and Hindus, of “native” people just about anywhere. The
mañana
mentality was a childlike moral failing.

“Cultural time” obviously differs from the clock, the calendar, or the civil day. In the same way that many contemporary Americans and Europeans live speeded-up lives, dipping in and out of many time zones in a single day, living only marginally within their own local time, there are other cultures that achieve the same freedom from local time by discounting it altogether. Robert Levine’s
The Geography of Time
, the same book that introduced the resonant phrase “temporal millionaire,” measures time consciousness across many societies, taking into account comparative estimates of elapsed time, chronological projections of likely time investment, degrees of reliability and tardiness, time obsession and time laxity—even pedestrian foot speed. In Brazil, Levine discovered a modern country that manages to live in “natural” time while observing the rituals of standardization. Business and legal hours are posted, class times are published, but only on special occasions are they expected to be observed. Every citizen is his own prime meridian.

And as for German time, here is Günter Grass, speaking in 1982:

The effect of standard time, that is to say “reason,” on a non-Western culture has been explicitly captured in one novel, Chinua Achebe’s
Arrow of God
. Achebe’s classic, in temporal terms, is a violent, deicidic clash between natural and rational gods, told in terms of colonialism and religion. Within the traditional Ibo religion, the priestly interpretation of the lunar calendar determines the proper moment for the planting of the village yams. Miss it, and the village loses a month; lose a month, and the crop is doomed. The starving village becomes ripe for plunder and takeover. Because the British colonial authority has imprisoned a village priest on a minor charge (largely to teach him respect for their own power), he is not available to signal the moment for planting the yams. Because the planting cycle is missed, the village starves, the old Ibo gods are discredited, and Christians gain a foothold.

It’s about time. It’s all about time. A change in the pace of change.

William Butler Yeats was another of the time-obsessed. His theory of the gyres, great, cyclical collapses and rebirths of civilization, are perhaps the broadest statement we’re likely to get, outside of Hinduism or quantum physics, of time consciousness. “Sailing to Byzantium” (1927) was published just a year before
The Sound and the Fury
, five years after
Ulysses
. The famous and often-quoted last stanza could have been whispered in the ear of Quentin Compson, or for anyone seeking release from the
ticking clock. While addressing the familiar issues of nature and reason, it also anticipates the next stage of the conflict. Once nature is replaced by reason, and reason fractured by subjectivity, how do we recompose reality, and a sense of self?

In Fleming’s eighty-eight years, the world redefined itself as profoundly as during any interval in human history. In their various ways, every significant figure or invention in the nineteenth century has been hailed as revolutionary. They did not build on previous knowledge or practice but, in effect, wiped them out. How did we move, lift, bore, before steam? How did we survive childhood before vaccination? What were newspapers good for before cable transmissions? The world could never go back, after Darwin, Pasteur, Edison, Seurat, Marx, James, Monet, van Gogh; or after steam engines, electric motors, motion pictures, X-rays, telephones, railroads, internal-combustion engines, wireless transmissions, photography; or after the birth of the natural and social sciences.

It is the privilege of each human generation to feel it has been born into the time of greatest speed, greatest confusion, greatest advance, greatest peril in all human history, and surely that generation is right. Claims for our era, however, fall a little short of those superlatives. My father drove his car as fast and as far in a day as I can; we flew (not as fast or as far, but with a compensating sense of luxury and adventure), we listened to radio and
could visualize the scenes and characters more vividly than on any television show. Only the computer and its applications have altered the velocities of our life, and given definition to the past twenty years. Victorians still win the competition for determined stability in a world of change.

TRACING THE
origins of modernism, picking out our ancestors from brittle, old class pictures, has become an intellectual vanity of our age. Each new biography, rediscovered painter, each retelling of fading events, each reconstruction of the mid- to late-nineteenth century pushes the frontiers of modernism back another year, or decade. The shifting temporal markers are like new archaeological finds, or new dinosaur bones, each new discovery pushing back the frontiers. And standing silently in the wings, rarely called on and barely introduced, are Fleming and Abbe and Allen and Dowd, and the giant issue of standard time.

When I entered college, modernism was thought to have been invented by the generation born in the 1880s, who came to maturity early in the twentieth century—Einstein, Joyce, and Picasso, and the major innovators in Paris dance and music. Roger Shattuck’s
The Banquet Years
served as the handiest guide. Now modernism is already alive in 1880, created by figures in science and the arts born at mid-century or even earlier. We didn’t know much about Vienna and Berlin, and America didn’t count at all. Modernism had something to do with the techniques of cinema, and with the use of the telephone, with the popularity of Freudian analysis, and with relativity and the demographic shifts from country to city and ghetto to mainstream. It had to do with forty years of peace on the European continent, from about 1875 to 1915, and with the rising expectations of newly urbanized minorities in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It had to do with many things, all vaguely synergistic, all loosely interrelated. And, of course, with a generalized sense of breakdown—sexual, religious,
social, and political. But standard time was never mentioned.

When looked at closely, modernism never really conformed to any single convenient description. Discontinuity is a major factor, a rebellion against the Victorian notions of rounded connectedness, the “well-stuffed” ideal. The “art for art’s sake” credo, the notion of the artist standing apart from society and owing it nothing, clearly derives from a rebellion against the Victorian notion of serving society and of being, above all things, useful. But that attitude is as much Flaubertian as Joycean, despite the gap of fifty years. Modernism has been pushed back another generation and a half, to the 1870s, traced (by Kern and Everdell, notably) through physics and mathematics. Modernism, at least in spirit, was there all along, in medicine, in poetry, in a series of remarkable inventions, but mainly in the new perception of accelerated speed, the challenge to the time-space continuum.

As I’ve tried to suggest, modernism is also about the cutting and faceting of time, breaking up continuity, or flow, in favor of emphatic shards, away from nature and toward abstraction. Everdell has settled on a seemingly simple but endlessly complex definition. Modernism, he suggests, might only be “a change in the pace of change.” That statement contains much of modern science, for it assumes a universe in constant motion, and no fixed point to measure it from. It looks not at content but at the framing of content. Modernism is about speed and the expectation of even greater speed, and about the attempt to hold on to a fleeting familiarity before it slips away. What modernism replaced was slowness, or the natural.

Sir Sandford Fleming had passed from the scene when novelists and poets, half a century after the Decade of Time, began agonizing over its dominance, and ways to transcend it. He could have helped Quentin Compson and Nick Adams, and might
have understood Yeats and Woolf. His concerns, after all, became their obsessions—how to live in the moment while keeping an eye on eternity. How to live, in short, in a duality of time. The fussy Victorian contrivance that was the Fleming watch-face, taken to its most abstract level, placed its user both in time and in space, both locally and globally, both alone and in community.

He was, finally, just a Victorian. He wanted to tame and to humanize the great adventure of his era, the new reach of speed, power, and distance. He could not have foreseen its legacy, an inheritance of alienation and loneliness.

WHAT WAS A
Victorian? A moralist, a reformer, a scientific progressive, probably a racist (although, like Cleveland Abbe, they can pleasantly surprise us), a colonialist, and often an imperialist (but with the best of intentions, as they often qualified it), a religious secularist, an intense (even sentimental) nationalist, probably an unthinking and rather narrow-minded Protestant. (Even Abbe’s tolerance was strained when it came to Catholicism.) Because of their confidence and security, they were grand and glorious forecasters—the future would be like the present, only better. As the always enthusiastic Abbe had written from Russia in 1866: “Every year the world seems to me to be growing smaller and smaller: steamliners across the oceans, Atlantic and Pacific and Mediterranean; railroads across America and Europe; telegraph from San Francisco to San Francisco all the way around. If we do not hitch onto the moon and quarry our granite there it won’t be the fault of the Yankees.”

These Victorians make us feel like visitors to Donald Bar-thelme’s “Tolstoy Museum,” weeping paper streamers from our eyes, weeping for the sheer scale of their achievement, weeping for the world that abandoned them, weeping for the heroic burden of their understandable vanity. So much accomplishment, so much confidence, such touching ignorance.

Fleming’s greatest single achievement in later life, after time
had been settled, was his single-minded oversight of the worldwide sub-Pacific cable. In 1902, from his home in Ottawa, he sent two messages to Australia: one via London, the other via Vancouver. The responses were received back in Ottawa some eight hours later after twin circumnavigations of the world, through Fiji and Sydney, then back through India, Egypt, Malta, Gibraltar, and London, a proudly “all-red” route never straying from British soil. It was a miraculous moment—around the world in eight hours (and perfectible to even fewer). It must have reminded him of the moment five years earlier, now infinitely expanded, when he’d sent a message from Ireland to London and received a response an hour later, eight miles down the tracks.

When the cable was finally operating, in 1902, it seemed a miracle, but it would soon be trumped by Marconi’s wireless, leaping the Channel, and then the Atlantic within the decade. His great dream for the cable was imperial unity, the “real time” transmission of political “intelligence” (meaning information). He had shrunk the world in time and in space; all that was now left in his great project of reforming the world was to use the wondrous technologies of the new century to reduce the real costs of distance, and the psychological damage of isolation. To that end, he undertook the destruction of the British cable monopoly, the Eastern Extension Company, in the name of a fair price for the cost of Australian and New Zealand cable transmissions. He could not have foreseen that standard time would help loosen community cohesion and encourage, in time, a kind of rootless anomie. And never could he have imagined the breakup of his beloved British Empire just thirty years after his death.