Postmodern or Most-Modern Time

Kane, Michael

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-37449-5_4

Michael Kane³

Part of the book series: Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies ((GSLS))

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Abstract

Opening with Jameson’s suggestion that postmodernism has involved a “waning” of the “high-modernist thematics of time and temporality”, this chapter explores the treatment of the topic of time in modern, postmodern and contemporary culture. The shift imputed to “postmodern” times was perhaps already noticeable in “high-modernist” times. The chapter is divided into two parts: “Modernist Times” and “More Recent Times”. Works referred to in the first part include Mann’s Buddenbrooks, Conrad’s The Secret Agent, Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Joyce’s Ulysses. The second part investigates whether the “postmodern” and contemporary sense of time is fundamentally new and different or part of longstanding trends associated with modernity and capitalist time. The human sense of time is perhaps now being altered fundamentally with increasing awareness of the troubled time of the planet.

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Notes

1.
Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”, in Tom Docherty (ed.), Postmodernism: A Reader, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993, p. 72f. Of course, Jameson gave the disorientating interior space of the Bonaventura hotel in Los Angeles as an example of what he termed postmodern “hyperspace”.
2.
E.P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism”, Past and Present, 38, 1967, pp. 56–97. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/649749.
3.
See Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003, p. 104f.
4.
Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks , Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1960, Part VIII, Chapter 7.
5.
Thomas Mann, however, continued to write narratives of degeneration and decay in the years leading up to World War I, including Death in Venice.
6.
One might, however, argue that what the novel really revolves around is love—the love of Winnie for her brother.
7.
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent , London: Penguin Classics, 2000, p. 70. Subsequent page numbers refer to this edition.
8.
R.W. Stallman, “Time and The Secret Agent ”, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 1, 1959, pp. 101–122, p. 103.
9.
R.W. Stallman, “Time and The Secret Agent ”, 1959, p. 122.
10.
Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003, p. 34.
11.
The irony pervading The Secret Agent may well extend to the dedication to Wells, as Martin Ray argues. Ray suggests that Wells’s political (socialist + eugenic) ideas may also have been parodied in the portraits of the anarchists in Conrad’s novel. Martin Ray, “Conrad, Wells, and The Secret Agent : Paying Old Debts and Settling Old Scores”, Modern Language Review, 81(3), 1986, pp. 560–573. https://doi.org/10.2307/3729180.
12.
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine , London: Penguin Classics, 2005, Chapter 1. For a discussion of Wells’s Time Machine and the many other “Time Machines” of modernism see Charles M. Tung, “Modernism, Time Machines and the Defamiliarization of Time”, Configurations, 23, 2015, pp. 93–121.
13.
Kern discusses Proust’s novel as an exploration of “private time”.
14.
Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life”, in Frisby and Featherstone (eds.), Simmel on Culture, London: Sage Publications, 1997, p. 175.
15.
Kern , The Culture of Time and Space, p. 24.
16.
Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life”, p. 177.
17.
David Harvey, “Money, Time, Space and the City”, in Harvey, The Urban Experience, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989, p. 172f.
18.
Kern , p. 14.
19.
David Cunningham mentions both along with Proust as examples of a genre “focused […] directly on the experiential contemporaneity of ‘time itself’” and suggests Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis might be considered as a contemporary example of the genre. The recent examples might be “best understood as attempts to grapple with the consequences of an “ever more congealed and futureless present”, and to wrest some kind of precarious “meaning” from it”. Cunningham, “Time, Modernism and the Contemporaneity of Realism”, in D’Arcy and Nilges (eds.), The Contemporaneity of Modernism, New York and Oxon: Routledge, 2016, p. 60.
20.
See the comparative study by Jefferson Hunter, “Joyce, Ruttmann and City Symphonies”, Kenyon Review, 2013, pp. 186–205.
21.
One might think also of the many references to the clock in Lang’s film M – Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder.
22.
For a discussion of the alarm clock and different kinds of time in “Metamorphosis” see Galili Shahar, “The Alarm Clock: The times of Gregor Samsa”, in A. Cools and V. Liska (eds.), Kafka and the Universal, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016, pp. 257–269. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvbkjt9v.16 (accessed 1.8.2019).
23.
Kern , p. 1.
24.
Kern , p. 66.
25.
Kern , p. 67.
26.
David Harvey, “Money, Time, Space and the City”, in Harvey, The Urban Experience, p. 173.
27.
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, in Benjamin, Illuminations (trans. by H. Zorn), London: Pimlico, 1999, p. 229.
28.
One might say that all forms of art have always provided a sense of being in two places at the same time, of transporting the viewer, reader, listener somewhere else. This is the liberating effect of art that, for example, Jacques Rancière pays much attention to. One might also point out that some of the earliest films of the Lumière brothers—such as La Sortie de l’Usine and Arivée à la Gare—actually show the “free” movement of people being determined by precise markers of public/clock time.
29.
Kern , p. 70.
30.
This is parodied in the Aeolus episode of Joyce’s Ulysses , set in the offices of The Freeman’s Journal and peppered with facetious newspaper headlines. The title of the episode suggests some affinity between the journalistic prose of the day and wind.
31.
Quoted by Richard Ellmann in Ulysses on the Liffey. London: Faber and Faber, 1984, p. 187.
32.
Marshall McLuhan’s comments on Joyce and “the electric age” are referred to in a later chapter.
33.
Umberto Eco, “The Artist and Medieval Thought in the Early Joyce”, in James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man , ed. by J.P. Riquelme, New York: WW. Norton & Co., 2007, p. 332.
34.
Richard Ellmann, Ulysses on the Liffey, London: Faber and Faber, 1984, p. xvii.
35.
In an essay entitled “The Medieval Sill: Postcolonial Temporalities in Joyce”, David Lloyd discusses Joyce’s mingling of the modern and the medieval, pointing out that the “very structure of Ulysses , as later of Finnegans Wake ” is largely based on “an intricate set of patterns determined by a medieval system of resemblances”. David Lloyd, Irish Times: Temporalities of Modernity, Dublin: Field Day, 2008, p. 84.
36.
James Joyce, Ulysses , London: The Bodley Head, 1960, p. 798.
37.
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake , London: Faber and Faber, 1975, p. 582 and p. 3.
38.
J.F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (trans. by Bennington and Massumi), Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984, p. xxiii f.
39.
See Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991.
40.
Zygmunt Bauman, Life in Fragments, Oxford: Blackwell, 1995, p. 83.
41.
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2001, p. 14.
42.
See Rory Mulholland, “Flashboys return: the transatlantic war for milliseconds”, The Irish Times, October 3, 2015.
43.
Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus , London: Nick Hern Books, 1996, Act V, Scene 2, Lines 68–74.
44.
Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000, p. 111.
45.
Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb (trans. by C. Turner), London: Verso, 2005, p. 8.
46.
Walter Benjamin, “Thesis IX of Theses on the Philosophy of History”, in Benjamin, Illuminations (trans. by H. Zorn), London: Pimlico, 1999, p. 249.
47.
Henry A. Giroux, “In the Twilight of the Social State: Re-thinking Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History”, Truthout, 4.1.2011, https://truthout.org/articles/in-the-twilight-of-the-social-state-rethinking-walter-benjamins-angel-of-history/ (accessed 13.8.2019). See also Christian Beck, “The Storm, Benjamin and Neoliberal Progress”, in Beck, Spatial Resistance: Literary and Digital Challenges to Neoliberalism, London: Lexington Books, 2019, pp. 30–34.
48.
Bauman , Liquid Modernity, p. 9.
49.
Bauman , Life in Fragments, p. 89.
50.
Karl Marx, Selected Writings, ed. by McLellan, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 248.
51.
Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life (trans. by Charvet), London: Penguin, 2010, p. 17.
52.
Virilio , The Information Bomb, p. 116.
53.
Peter Boxall, “Late: Fictional Time in the Twenty-First Century”, Contemporary Literature, 53(4), 2012, pp. 681–712, p. 690. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41819533 (accessed 1. 8.2019).
54.
Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”, in Docherty (ed.), Postmodernism: A Reader, p. 72f.
55.
See Charles M. Tung, “Modernism, Time Machines and the Defamiliarization of Time”, Configurations, 23, 2015, pp. 93–121.
56.
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine , Chapter 11.
57.
Douglas Mao, “Our Last September: Climate Change in Modernist Time”, in D’Arcy and Nilges (eds.), The Contemporaneity of Modernism, New York, Oxon: Routledge, 2016, pp. 31–48, p. 31. Mao draws some parallels between the “portents of decline and apocalypse” of early-twentieth-century literature and the contemporary situation. Interestingly, he compares the common contemporary reaction to climate change to the life strategy of deliberate “not noticing” adopted by the aristocratic Anglo-Irish family in the midst of the Irish War of Independence depicted in Elizabeth Bowen’s novel The Last September (1929).
58.
To quote the title of a book by Slavoj Žižek—Living in the End Times, London: Verso, 2011.
59.
Simon L. Lewis, Mark A. Maslin, “Defining the Anthropocene”, Nature, 519, 2015, pp. 171–180. Bibcode:2015Natur.519..171L. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14258.

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Dublin Business School, Dublin, Ireland
Michael Kane

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Kane, M. (2020). Postmodern or Most-Modern Time. In: Postmodern Time and Space in Fiction and Theory. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37449-5_4

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37449-5_4
Published: 15 January 2020
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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