Time, Literature, and Cartography After the Spatial Turn

The Chronometric Imaginary

Adam Barrows

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781137571403
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137569011
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Time, Literature and Cartography after the Spatial Turn argues that the spatial turn in literary studies has the unexplored potential to reinvigorate the ways in which we understand time in literature.  Drawing on new readings of time in a range of literary narratives, including Vladimir Nabokov's Ada and James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Adam Barrows explores literature's ability to cartographically represent the dense and tangled rhythmic processes that constitute lived spaces.  Applying the insights of ecological resilience studies, as well as Henri Lefebvre's late work on rhythm to literary representations of time, this book offers a sustained examination of literature's "chronometric imaginary": its capacity to map the temporal relationships between the human and the non-human, the local and the global.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Adam BarrowsTime, Literature, and Cartography After the Spatial TurnGeocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies10.1057/978-1-137-56901-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Time and Literature After the Spatial Turn

Adam Barrows¹

(1)

Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

End Abstract

Time cannot be mapped. This, at least, was Henri Bergson’s claim in his influential nineteenth-century treatise Time and Free Will. ¹ To cartographically project temporal considerations onto spatial planes was to misunderstand the very nature of time, as if we could, in Bergson’s metaphor, “follow the process of psychic activity … like the march of an army on a map” (181). Yet despite Bergson’s insistence on the fundamental incompatibility between mapping and temporality, time had been and continues to be wedded to spatial imagination and cartographic manipulation. Indeed, even as Bergson was composing Time and Free Will, nineteenth-century statesmen, entrepreneurs, industrialists, astronomers, and geographers alike were uniting in an effort to marry temporal precision and global cartography in the movement that would ultimately standardize longitude and time-reckoning with Greenwich as the spatiotemporal global center. ² While Bergson claimed experimental writers like Marcel Proust as fellow travellers in a project of tearing aside the veils of spatiality and presenting readers with a close artistic approximation of “pure duration,” ³ even the time-obsessed Proust insists throughout In Search of Lost Time on time’s intimate relationship to space and place. ⁴ Proust understands that time resides in and around the traces of the material world, a lingering physical presence that he understands in Swann’s Way as equivalent to “the Celtic belief” in souls held captive in inanimate objects. ⁵

Time, Literature, and Cartography after the Spatial Turn explores a range of imaginative fictions, all of which interrogate the idea that time and mapping need be mutually exclusive practices or that time necessarily frustrates spatial imagination. I argue not only that literature is ideally suited to spatially conceptualize temporal experience, but that in so doing, narrative fiction can intervene meaningfully in the problems of mediating between locality and globality, place-based and planetary existence, and spatial conception and temporal transformation. Geocritical inquiry and spatial literary studies, as this book series has shown, have opened up provocative new directions for understanding the cartographic imaginary in literary narrative. The present volume argues for a sustained return to the problem of temporality in light of this relatively recent interest in literature as a cartographic endeavor. Far from advocating a swinging of the pendulum back from the spatial to the temporal, Time, Literature, and Cartography after the Spatial Turn argues that the spatial turn reinvigorates the ways in which we understand time in literature; the ways in which narrative gives form to what I call a chronometric imaginary.

The status of time in the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences remains ambiguous, with the critical concept of time left often nebulous and untheorized, or else derided as an outdated and even reactionary frame of reference. ⁶ The spatial “turn,” after all, was as much a turn away from temporality as a privileged locus of study as it was a turn toward more complex ways of thinking about spatiality. As spatial studies offered ever more creative and compelling readings of the ways in which culture and history had been implicated in spatial constructs and cartographic imaginaries, a lingering interest in time marked one as a proponent of a crudely conceived pre-Althusserian Marxism, a quasi-mystical vitalism a la Bergson, or a universalizing and teleological progressivism. In part, this palpable resentment toward time and temporality on the part of spatial theorists was justified in an intellectual climate still dominated by a Bergsonian contempt toward space and spatialization as breeds of vulgar materialism threatening to corrupt the intrinsically aesthetic and ephemeral human quality of time. Marxist faith in the power of historical currents to transform the existing state of affairs similarly cast suspicion upon metaphors of spatiality as indices of reactionary stasis, with Ernst Bloch notoriously declaring in 1962 that “the primacy of space over time is an infallible sign of reactionary language.” ⁷ Given the powerful intellectual contempt toward space that had to be overcome in order for the spatial turn to be made in the first place, it is perhaps unsurprising that the story of spatial studies remains framed in stubborn contrast to time and temporality. In his forward to a volume of essays on geocriticism in 2011, for instance, Bertrand Westphal begins with the claim that before the spatial turn of the late twentieth century, “Time was aristocracy” while space was “only a rough container, a plebeian frame for time.” ⁸

As much as sophisticated contemporary theorists of spatiality recognize that time and space cannot reasonably be separated, rightly insisting—as does Westphal in that same introduction on spatiotemporality as a fundamental geocritical concept (“no spatial analysis may avoid temporal concerns,” he writes (xv))—it is difficult not to understand such gestures of belated inclusion toward an old enemy as somewhat perfunctory. Hyphenating space and time may gesture toward the astrophysics of Einstein, according to which, at the extreme limits of the mathematical imagination, such a thing as space-time can be meaningfully said to exist. But, such a compounding erases too easily the kinds of political and cultural connotations that adhere differently to time than to space, as well as potentially ignoring the ways in which time and space have been uncomfortably wed in particular ways in the histories of scientific development, economic imperialism, and globalization. ⁹ Inviting time back to the spatial party without more carefully delineating and untangling those cultural and historical lineages ultimately leaves time as not only a poor relation, but one that in its insufficient conceptualization retains its dangerous edge, threatening always to upset the apple cart and resume its old role of antagonist toward any meaningful attempt to think through spatiality. Eric Prieto, in his reading of Westphal’s work, suggests that geocriticism ultimately rests on the assumption that “space has become more important than time and geography has become more important than history as a guiding metaphor for the postmodern era.” ¹⁰ Yet, separating and privileging one term over the other simply invites the return of the repressed and thus a frustration of the entire geocritical enterprise. Derek Schilling, for example, in his insightful debunking of Franco Moretti’s cartographic project to literally map the nineteenth-century European novel finds time to be the ultimate fly in Moretti’s ointment, suggesting that the very idea of mapping fiction ignores the inherently temporal nature of the reading experience. “It is invariably the ‘fourth dimension’ of literary narrativity that matters the most,” Schilling concludes. “Stories are fundamentally about change, and as a temporal art fiction has difficulty finding a suitable home on a map.” ¹¹ Time returns here as a disruptive force in any attempt to think through the ways in which spatiality and spatial orientation work as important interpretive frameworks for understanding place, location, and culture. Diachrony frustrates synchrony and mapmaking becomes obsolete and reductive in the face of time’s flux. The old opposition of space and time rears its ugly head.

To a certain extent, one cannot simply wish away that antagonistic relationship or ignore the different kinds of political impulses driving spatial—as opposed to temporal—conceptions of art, history, or even existence itself. Yet theoretical models of productively relating spatial configuration and temporal process do exist, albeit largely outside of the humanities and social sciences. Ecological resilience studies demonstrate that ecosystems involve a constant negotiation between large, slow processes and small, fast ones: the health of an arboreal forest depends as much upon the seemingly static trees that live for millennia as it does upon the life cycle of insects that live for only a matter of days. ¹² At the microscopic level, all is change, flux and instability, while at the geological level one has the impression of longevity, timelessness, stability. In fact, both the fast and slow, the continuous and the ephemeral depend upon each other. Any lasting spatial relationship is made up of and dependent upon a series of constitutive temporal processes, just as the ability for those temporal processes to occur in the first place depends upon the structural stability of the spatial configuration that enables them. To see only the forest at the expense of the trees is to potentially miss the crucial insight that the macro is always at the mercy of the micro, the global always a provisional structural configuration that uneasily holds together a series of unstable transformations and adaptations. Leaving chronometry out of cartography, in other words, potentially enshrines the existing state of affairs or the current spatial configuration as timeless and static, outside of the forces of historical change. Timothy Brennan argues that the turn to space in globalization discourse, for example, demonstrates a conviction—sometimes morbid, sometimes triumphal—that the “conflicts of history” have already been “decisively decided,” supplanting the question of what will happen in the future with the prognosis of “when it will extend itself over a vast but finite territory.” ¹³ Alternately, fixation on flux, change, and ephemerality can lead to a solipsistic faith in the powers of transformation independent of the world systems, structures, and institutions that substantially delimit those powers. Such a fixation is arguably what drove the persistent meditation on temporal infinity and boundlessness in the spatial imaginary of literary modernism, which Fredric Jameson identified as the index of a culture simply unable to visualize—and thus spatialize—the global economic system on which it depended. ¹⁴

The history of modernity is in part a history of the global management of spatial and temporal relations. Of all the theorists associated with the spatial turn of the late twentieth-century, it is perhaps Henri Lefebvre who kept most vividly alive a sense of the politics of time as having been crucially at stake in the production of the spaces of modernity. In his influential The Production of Space, the abstraction of time from social space haunts the text as the great violent act of modernity, driving the polemical force of Lefebvre’s investigations. The separation of time from space was a form of murder, Lefebvre argues, that bred a multitude of “lies.” ¹⁵ Yet time remains nebulous in The Production of Space, lingering in its margins as a spectre. As is the case in many of the key texts of spatial theory, time enters the discussion as that which has already been violently erased, murdered, flattened, compressed, or distantiated, rendering the spaces of modernity as lavishly wrought crime scenes with the victim sketched only in the faintest of chalk outlines. It is not until his much later work on rhythm that Lefebvre devoted the same theoretical attention to temporality as he had to spatiality. Yet his posthumously published Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life has had nothing like the influence on contemporary thinking that The Production of Space had on Marxist geographers like David Harvey and Neil Smith, or that his multivolume The Critique of Everyday Life had on the discipline of cultural studies. ¹⁶

This is a shame, because in addition to being as bracingly ground-clearing a work as those earlier books, Rhythmanalysis marks the only example of a major spatial theorist returning to revise his earlier postulates in light of a sustained examination of temporality. Far from having been a casualty of modernity, temporality emerges in Lefebvre’s last book as an indestructible component of its very fabric, unable ever to be fully abstracted from social spaces or entirely harnessed, disciplined, and tamed. Lefebvre’s time is not the conundrum-inducing theoretical abstraction that it is in so much of the Western philosophical tradition, from Aristotle and Augustine to Bergson and Paul Ricouer. Not principally a product of consciousness, the time that matters in modernity is the time that is rhythmically created by the interaction between human beings and spaces. Involving a continual negotiation between human and non-human rhythms, Lefebvre’s time is lived rather than conceptualized, inscribed upon and inherently complicated by the bodies that beat out a variety of arhythmical, uneasily harmonized temporal patterns. Even within the same space, time is variable and multiform, dependent as much upon individual biorhythms as it is upon the cosmic rhythmic cycles with which the everyday is shot through. This is why Lefebvre’s conception of a rhythmic space is so much richer a conceptual model than the more frequently-cited Bakhtinian concept of a chronotope which, at least in Bakhthin’s examples, appears to be understood by him to be a generically fixed relationship between a particular kind of space and the types of temporal experience that such a space makes possible. ¹⁷ For Lefebvre, a space is a much denser and more dynamic temporary harmonization of a multitude of irregularly repeating rhythms, all of which are constrained by the spatial configuration within which they occur. However, any one of these rhythms holds the subversive potential to break free and forge different harmonic relationships. Modernity, then, is not the story of how space murdered time, but is rather the narrative of a necessarily provisional and uneasy harmonization of a host of arrhythmic temporalities which, although produced by particular spaces, threaten always to reshape and remake them.

Any theoretical model of the relationship between space and time in geocriticism must attend to the history of the ways in which space and time have been, over the course of recent human history, manipulated, merged, and sometimes wrested apart in order to forge the global structures within which we live and theorize. The most hubristic and grandiose project to reshape and restructure the diversity of human temporal rhythms went hand in hand with the spatial appropriation that constituted nineteenth-century imperial expansion. As Giordano Nanni describes in his book, The Colonisation of Time, the British Empire managed indigenous spaces by regulating indigenous rhythms and vice versa. The inculcation of time-discipline as a crucial means of managing labor power in expropriated lands could be visually appreciated in the architectural construction of colonial stations and missions. “Within the planned mission environment,” Nanni writes of the Coranderrk mission in the Australian settler colony of Victoria, “the location of the bell on the mission grounds was a clear indication of its centralising authority, a reminder that the control of time was paralleled by geographies of spatial power.” ¹⁸ Nanni explains that the production of space and the control of time were intrinsically linked in the imperial project, whereby the ostensibly unregulated rhythms and temporal routines of non-European populations could be managed by strict spatial demarcations and the mobility of bodies through space managed by temporal legislation. Nineteenth-century Pass Laws in South Africa “regulated and maintained ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: Time and Literature After the Spatial Turn
• 2. Crossing the Date Line: Global Mapping and Temporal Allochrony
• 3. Modernist Panarchies: Woolf, Joyce, and Rhythm
• 4. Mapping Our Tomorrows: Time in Nabokov’s Ada
• 5. The Road I’m On: Mapping the Time of Fantasy in the Work of Salman Rushdie
• 6. Conclusion: Narrative and Other Technologies of Global Mapping
• Backmatter