Postmodern Time and Space in Fiction and Theory

Michael Kane

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030374488
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030374495
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Postmodern Time and Space in Fiction and Theory seeks to place the contemporary transformation of notions of space and time, often attributed to the technologies we use, in the context of the ongoing transformations of modernity. Bringing together examples of modern and contemporary fiction (from Defoe to DeLillo, Frankenstein to Finnegans Wake) and theoretical discussions of the modern and the post-modern, the author explores the legacy of modern transformations of space and time under five headings: "The Space of Nature"; "The Space of the City"; "Postmodern or Most Modern Time"; "The Time and Space of the Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction"; and "Travel: from Modernity to…?". These five essays re-examine the meanings of modernity and its aftermath in relation to the spaces and times of the natural, the urban and the media environment.

© The Author(s) 2020

M. KanePostmodern Time and Space in Fiction and TheoryGeocriticism and Spatial Literary Studieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37449-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Michael Kane¹

(1)

Dublin Business School, Dublin, Ireland

Michael Kane

End Abstract

This book is an attempt to make some sense of the present, particularly in relation to suggestions that notions of time and space have relatively recently undergone an extraordinary transformation. Like most attempts to grasp the present, this one involves a return to the past in order to review where we’ve come from and how we got to where we are, wherever that is (and it may seem increasingly difficult to figure that out!). The past—and the present—here explored is that of Western Modernity and its cultural, literary, theoretical legacy—a modest undertaking indeed. This author seeks to trace connections between some modern(ist) literature and theoretical discussions of modernity and contemporary literature and theoretical discussions of postmodernity, the posthuman—or whatever we call the contemporary period—in order to place that “contemporary” in the wider context of modernity. Indeed, as the term “postmodern” has perhaps seen its day, in the words of Andreas Huyssen, the “discourses of modernity and modernism have staged a remarkable comeback” and this has been accompanied by the “rise to prominence” as David Cunningham puts it, “of a category of ‘the contemporary’ as a somewhat unstable means of defining the distinctive character of ‘our’ historical present”.¹ “The contemporary” may seem a particularly empty and shifting label, but then so also, one might say, is “the modern”—empty until one begins to fill it with whatever one sees as its “distinctive character”. Putting together “the modern” (going back a couple of 100 years) and “the contemporary” may be the best way of beginning to grasp “the distinctive character of ‘our’ historical present”—and indeed the historical character of our apparently so distinctive (and perhaps distinctively distracting, all-consuming and ahistorical) present.

This “putting together” may lead to a (perhaps illusory) sense of narrative continuity or continuities—or just a series of thought-provoking connections, some perhaps surprising juxtapositions and new readings of classic literary texts that do nonetheless add up to a review of some of the significant trends of modernity. This author seeks to re-trace some of the cultural genealogies of the present cultural moment and understand how it has evolved out of the ‘classically’ modern. “Mapping modernist continuities” is the title David James gives his introduction to The Legacies of Modernism; this book could be said to attempt to map some modern (and not necessarily just modernist) continuities—and mutations.² However, it is not intended as some kind of grand narrative of modernity; rather, it offers essays on different, overlapping, intersecting topics all relating to the mutation of notions of space and time through modernity to the present: “The Space of Nature”; “The Space of the City”; “Postmodern or Most-Modern Time”; “The Time and Space of the Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction” and “Travel: from Modernity to…?”. Writers and theorists have been offering insights into the meanings of modernity in relation to the natural and the urban environment and indeed time and space for a very long time. This book brings many of these insights and interpretations together—to review and to inspire further interpretation of modernity and of the “contemporary”.

The essays assembled here are, indeed, “essays”—attempts to explore certain key aspects of the legacy of modernity.³ They may, of course, be read in isolation, but they are parts of the broader discussion of transformations in notions of space and time in modernity … postmodernity … the “contemporary”. Several works of literature are drawn on, referred to and commented on throughout; some writers—such as Defoe, Mary Shelley, Kafka, Conrad, Joyce, DeLillo and Houellebecq—feature prominently, providing certain leitmotifs in these explorations of modernity. The overall focus is, however, not so much on individual works of literature, or writers, as on constellations of ideas, particularly on what Raymond Williams termed “the residual”—residues of the past that linger on and continue to exert influence, in some form or other, in the present cultural moment. As Williams writes, “the residual, by definition, has been effectively formed in the past, but it is still active in the cultural process, not only and often not at all as an element of the past, but as an effective element of the present.”⁴ Such residues are often rather complicated and even contradictory; teasing out some of those complications and contradictions is what the author seeks to do in the book.

These essays have been inspired and influenced by very many different cultural critics—often those associated with the Frankfurt School but also by thinkers such as Zygmunt Bauman, Anthony Giddens, Paul Virilio, Stephen Kern, Fredric Jameson and Jacques Rancière. The idea for the book partly arose from reading suggestions from several quarters that we have only very recently witnessed an utter transformation of our sense of time and space and feeling that this needs to be put in the context of the continuing transformations of modernity itself.

Such words as “time” and “space” may seem rather meaningless, abstract concepts until we come to realize how much we constantly attempt to make sense of our actual day-to-day experience by measuring it against some—perhaps vague, perhaps shifting, sketchy—patterns referring to wider temporal and spatial contexts. Those wider notions themselves are not usually colourless, empty abstractions either, but are deeply influenced by experiences and perceptions of history, culture, geography, but ultimately, of course, by the material conditions, as Marx would say, of people’s lives, by how they live. In the early twentieth century the playwright J.M. Synge noticed how inhabitants of the Aran Islands often left the door on the southern side of their cottages open to let in the air, and told the time of day by the position of the door’s shadow on the floor. If the wind was coming from the south, however, they closed that door and opened a door on the northern side of the house, leaving everybody at a loss as to the time of the day. As Synge writes, “When the wind is from the north the old woman [of the house] manages my meals with fair regularity, but on the other days she often makes my tea at three o’clock instead of six.”⁵ At the dawn of the twentieth century, in one remote part of Europe, at least, the sense of time could depend on the direction of the wind—this precisely at a time when clock times and time zones were being officially standardized around the globe. In his book The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1918, Stephen Kern shows how it was particularly technical innovations in transport and communications around that time that led to a wide-ranging transformation of the senses of time and space.⁶ At the same time, of course, local, traditional, geographically, historically and culturally specific senses of time and space persisted, and still do, just as the wind still blows on the Aran Islands.

While Kern focused on the period around 1900, it has more recently been suggested that we are currently experiencing a thorough-going—and thoroughly disorientating—transformation of our perceptions of time and space. Fredric Jameson, for one, noted how late-twentieth-century “postmodern” culture seemed to involve a decline of the sense of time—and particularly of the past, of history—and a corresponding rise in the awareness of space. He claimed we are “today dominated by categories of space, rather than by categories of time”.⁷ But then even the spaces of postmodernity, as Jameson described them, were particularly disorientating. Jameson described the confusing interior of the Bonaventura hotel in Los Angeles as a classic example of “the latest mutation in space”, of what he termed “postmodern hyperspace”, that “has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world”. For Jameson, of course, this was a “symbol and an analogue of that even sharper dilemma which is the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentred communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects” (p. 83). This “waning” of a sense of time and this disorientating “mutation in space” were evidently significant aspects of “the cultural logic of late capitalism”.

Around the year 2000, Paul Virilio was writing alarmingly about a profoundly disorientating transformation of humanity’s senses of time and space. The use of new information, communication and media technologies tends, according to Virilio, to abolish “the reality of distance” as well as of time intervals to such an extent that we are witnessing a breakneck—and dangerous—“acceleration of reality” and nothing less than the “end of geography”.⁸ While Jameson suggested we were increasingly “dominated by categories of space, rather than by categories of time”, Virilio declares at one point: “Here no longer exists; everything is now” (p. 116). “Now” may well be a category of time, but “everything is now” implies there is, literally, “no time like the present”, no awareness of a dimension of time linking the present with the past, no sense of time passing. Our senses of both time and space, Virilio appears to suggest, have “now” been superseded by this one word (and one focus): “Now”.

Not long after Virilio’s “Now”, the geographer Nigel Thrift—no fan of Virilio—wrote of the development of a new “awhereness” (sic), a new sense of space arising out of a “posthuman” realization that we cannot now separate out the human from the technological so easily. According to Thrift: “What was called ‘technology’ has moved so decisively into the interstices of the active percipience of everyday life that it is possible...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Space of Nature
• 3. The Space of the City
• 4. Postmodern or Most-Modern Time
• 5. The Time and Space of the Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction
• 6. Travel: From Modernity to…?
• 7. Conclusion
• Back Matter