Reading the Times. Temporality and history in twentieth-century fiction

Abstract

Reading the Times explores our struggle against the relentless power of time. It shows hownovels resist or reorient the passage of time as we turn the pages, allowing the present to unfold at our discretion. At the same time, Stevenson notes that this practice may change as we increasingly scroll through e-books, altering our sense of control. Irrespective of its form, however, the novel offers a sense of security that is lacking in lived experience as it provides an “overall pattern and closure, structured through the controlling vision of the author” (p. 22). By celebrating areas of natural beauty, unspoiled wilderness or ocean, fiction highlights its opposition to the clock. It preserves the sense of natural time (measured by sunset and sunrise) that was so threatened by the growth in the nineteenth century of towns, industry, and the railway network. As chapter one demonstrates, temporality is fundamental to the structuring of all fictional narrative. Some novels make this structure particularly conspicuous. Advancing technology and industrialisation were perceived differently across the globe, but especially sharply within Britain, the first country to experience an industrial revolution. For this reason, Stevenson focuses on novels published in Britain, starting with Joseph Conrad and D.H. Lawrence. Chapter four goes on to study time in modernist novels, including Virginia Woolf’sMrs Dalloway and Orlando and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Ulysses. Chapter five addresses the 1930s to the middle of the century, concluding that by 1950 people felt that time had failed them; there was a decline in love for the present and a reduced zest for the future. Stevenson claims that “[a]fter mid-century, memory seemed more likely to offer pathways towards deeper stresses, historical and often personal, rather than much prospect of escape from them” (p. 159). Chapter six, with the ominous title “Time is Over”, addresses the postmodern period, between 1950 and the end of the century. Samuel Beckett’s Endgame is representative of this literature, where past and present are intertwined and time is cyclical. With these works came a lack of faith in the power of words. It became increasingly urgent to face traumatic events of the past, such as World War Two, the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Muriel Spark’s The Mandelbaum Gate is evidence of this need. By the 1990s, global media and communications opened up alternatives to clock-defined time, numerous worlds elsewhere could be explored, and science fiction could revisit past idylls. Global communications, computers and the internet began to offer some freedom from the clock. Stevenson concludes that fiction registers and resolves the antimonies between chronometry and natural domains that are beyond any system of measurement or calculation. This is an important part of the novel’s negotiation with modern life and history. Fiction is also an expression of authors’ “ever-urgent desires, in every sense, to wind up the clock” (p. 238). Reading the Times is elegantly written and amply referenced. Stevenson’s study leaves us with a sense of optimism as it suggests that the novel will continue to do what it is so very good at, namely negotiating with the past and the present through the lens of natural time.