MPmark pegrum

STOP ALL THE CLOCKS :
The Postmodern Assault on Time

Mark Pegrum
The University of Western Australia

In Angela Carter's 1969 novel Heroes and Villains, the central character, Marianne, who has escaped from the world of the professors, guardians of civilisation in a post-apocalyptic era, finds that she has "lost the very idea of time, for the Barbarians did not segment their existence into hours nor even morning, afternoon and evening".1 In the same year, John Fowles gives his novel The French Lieutenant's Woman alternative endings, a pattern followed two years later in E.L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel. The narrator in Salman Rushdie's 1981 Midnight's Children, noting that "time has been an unsteady affair, in my experience, not a thing to be relied upon",2 decides not to correct an error in chronology in his account of the birth of India: "in my India, Gandhi will continue to die at the wrong time";3 and by 1984, it hardly comes as a surprise to hear from one of Don DeLillo's characters in White Noise that past, present and future exist "[o]nly in our verbs".4 In 1996, a character in J.H. Macdonald's The Free World states: "Time [...] doesn't have to be linear",5 thus succinctly, if perhaps somewhat naively, summing up this ongoing theme.

The artistic deconstruction of the concept of linear time is clearly an insistent strain wending its non-linear way through much of the recent literature of the West, dite postmodern. Linear time is of course a traditional bastion of Western thought, into which other really existent or imaginary concepts of time have begun to make incursions in postmodern literature. But how did we arrive at this stage where the necessity of the deconstruction of linear time has come to seem so obvious that it has begun to take on the banality of a cliché by virtue of its constant re-statement?

The mobilising of time as history, to borrow a phrase from Anthony Giddens,6 is a characteristic of post-oral cultures which actively pursue transformation, and is a factor which increases in importance over the centuries of Western European history. The concept of a history where linear progress can be witnessed and measured, and the ability of human beings to situate themselves in this history with a view to progressing towards a better future, is of course absolutely crucial to the utopian projects of modernity which begin to emerge around the time of the Enlightenment. Nietzsche's 1882 declaration that God is dead7 is effectively a prise de conscience of a profound revolution under way in human sensibility since the Enlightenment: no longer will people resign themselves to a fate sealed and justified by the presence of God as the ultimate signifier, the place from which meaning descends, but rather will follow the Kantian call to use Verstand, reason, in the construction of their own destinies.8

"Quand on coupe la tête de Louis XVI en janvier 1793 sur la place de la Révolution", Lyotard points out, "c'est à Dieu qu'on coupe la parole".9 For the first time in history, the attempt is made to install the Enlightenment, with its "récit aufklärer de l'émancipation de l'ignorance et de la servitude par la connaissance et l'égalitarisme"10 - summarised under the slogan liberté-égalité-fraternité - in the politics of a Western nation. The Enlightenment metanarratives, Lyotard's term for the new kind of forward-looking myths which come to replace the pre-Enlightenment God-oriented myths of origin,11 may have very varied individual forms, but their common goal is universal emancipation. The capitalist metanarrative will promise freedom from poverty; Marx, reacting against the asperities of Capitalism, will establish a metanarrative promising emancipation from exploitation and alienation. Indeed with the exception of Nazism and reactionary traditionalism, all of the political currents of the last two hundred years - liberalism, Marxism, socialism, anarchism - will grow out of this idea of progress toward human emancipation.12

It is within modernism, burgeoning at the end of last century, that the concepts of linear time and progress so essential to the new metanarratives begin to collapse. This collapse owes a certain amount to the widely-read Henri Bergson, expounding his theory of durée and Intuition over and against the clock time of external reality, and much to the relativistic Nietzsche and to Freud's early psychological writings, as well as to the scientific discoveries and theories of the likes of Thomson, Rutherford, Planck and Einstein, whose work necessitates an almost complete overhaul of our concept of the stable Newtonian universe. But perhaps most important of all are the observations of ordinary individuals living out their daily lives in the expanding metropolises of Europe and America at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, and witnessing first-hand the transformation of Tönnies' Gemeinschaften into Gesellschaften, and the chaotic expansion of new technologies, forms of communication, modes of transport and ways of life. These experiences are reflected in works of art, literary, visual and musical, which abandon traditional narrative and structuring techniques in order to more closely approach the apparent flux of life.

The mid-century structuralist movement which develops ultimately out of the linguistic theories of Saussure also engenders an anti-historical stance largely as a result of its spatialised conceptions of the deep structure of reality. And although the poststructuralists and postmodernists of our own time fiercely attack structuralist hermeneutics, they inherit the anti-historicism of the latter and render it much more pronounced. For a postmodernist such as Baudrillard, for example, history - the era of linear time, of cause and effect - has given way to posthistory, where there is no perspective of development or major change:

While other postmodernists do not necessarily agree that no change is possible, their theories are just as opposed to concepts of linearity, causality and progress, emphasising rather the discontinuity and disunity of historical time. Foucault writes that "le vrai sens historique reconnaît que nous vivons, sans repères ni coordonnées originaires, dans des myriades d'événements perdus"14 and argues strongly against the imposition of a logic and teleology on history.

As seen at the beginning of this essay, the postmodernists' theoretical rejection of linear conceptions of time has clear parallels in the literature of recent decades, where traditional Western ideas of time are constantly challenged, twisted and thwarted. Some of the most striking examples include the books of William Burroughs which can be recomposed in any order, the spatialisation exploited by concrete poets, or the increasingly common fractured narratives found in sections of the works of young writers such as Irvine Welsh ("The Acid House" of 1994) or Dean Kiley ("I panicked so I hit him with a brick" or "The Diligent Archivist", both of 1995). These latter examples often evince a strong resemblance to simultaneous collages. Contemporary film is also replete with characters who perceive no linear sense or progression in their lives, as seen in the following excerpts from Sex, Lies and Videotape and North of Vortex:

The poet's life was a trail of disconnected moments and each moment was composed of some small gesture captured as if in mid-flight. He would try to discern some meaning in them, but he would be overtaken by a violent eddying feeling - exhilarating as it was pointless.16

These ideas find their visual counterparts in artists such as David Salle or Julian Schnabel whose works explore the fragmented, chaotic and atemporal nature of existence in the present.

The rejection of linear time is, for many postmodern thinkers, closely interwoven with two other crucial issues. Firstly, it is linked to a profound disillusionment with the metanarratives which were supposed to realise themselves within and through a linear history. All of these projects of modernity - from Marxism, "l'ultime grand récit critique",17 and Freudianism through to the emancipatory myths of modern science - which promise progress towards a future utopia are rejected by the postmodernists in view of what Lyotard sees as an increasingly widespread suspicion that: "l'histoire universelle ne conduit pas sûrement 'vers le mieux', comme disait Kant, ou plutôt que l'histoire n'a pas nécessairement une finalité universelle".18 This realisation is accented by Auschwitz, the crime which, because of its reneging on the ideals of modernity in favour of pre-modern mythologies, opens the era of postmodernity and which cannot be aufgehoben, sublimated, fitted into a general pattern of progress towards human emancipation.19

The disillusioned comments typical of the post-Ellis generation of youth culture novels demonstrate clearly the extent to which such a view is also making itself heard in literature; thus the Greek-Australian writer Christos Tsiolkas comments:

Vietnam is history. Auschwitz is history. Hippies are history. Punks are history. God is history. Hollywood is history. The Soviet Union is history. [...] I will become history. This fucking shithole planet will become history. Take more drugs.

Here even Auschwitz, which for Lyotard represents the end of modern history and the beginning of posthistory, is seen as having become history - not however in the sense of having taken its place in an historical continuum leading up to the present, but rather as being obsolete and irrelevant to the perpetual unchanging present. A character in the Scottish author Irvine Welsh's 1993 Trainspotting, the book which forms the basis for one of the defining cult movies of the nineties, states:

...the socialists go on about your comrades, your class, your union, and society. Fuck all that shite. The Tories go on about your employer, your country, your family. Fuck that even mair.21

These sentiments resemble those expressed in many contemporary nihilistic teenager/twenty-something movies like Gregg Araki's Totally Fucked Up or Paul Anderson's Shopping. Lost is any perspective of change, of progress, let alone of the kinds of utopias envisioned by the children of the Enlightenment such as Marx and Freud. Linear progression has been replaced with a nihilistic posthistorical present.

What we are in fact witnessing, argues the Marxist thinker Fredric Jameson, is a move away from the modernist concern with temporality and towards an increasing spatialisation of culture. One of the basic features of this culture is "the fragmentation of time into a series of perpetual presents"22 with no narrative or progressional connection, so that postmodern perception is analogous to that of a schizophrenic who lives in an intense continual present severed from the past and the future, with no projects and no sense of identity.23 Such a fragmented mode of perception disallows the formation of an overall picture, and avoids historical considerations or the development of teleologies, focused as it is entirely on the here and now. Metanarratives cannot take hold to link the splinters of information perceived by the schizophrenic postmodern subject. While it might be argued that such a state need not necessarily be entirely negative - although Jameson views it very unfavourably - an examination of contemporary texts such as those mentioned above indicates a strong tendency in this direction, linking up with the inherent negativity with which many critics reproach Baudrillard and his theory of posthistory.

The second crucial issue linked by postmodernists to the rejection of unitary linear history is a turning away from the centre towards the margins. Taking up Walter Benjamin's concept of history as the history of the victors, Gianni Vattimo remarks that:

In other words, the unitary history projected by the West is the history of its victors and rulers who have suppressed marginal histories. Thinkers such as Lyotard and Foucault who attempt to give the margins a voice are thus working at undermining this unitary image of the West, reducing its one monolithic history to a plurality of minor histories.

This turning towards the margins is reflected in the recent explosion not only of theories of feminism, queer culture or post-colonialism, but in the art produced within and around these movements. Here again we witness a clear rejection of the linear temporality associated with the Western metanarratives. The fractured time schemes in the work of Dean Kiley or Dale Peck represent just such a challenge to straight culture from the point of view of gay culture, the result of a minority internal to the West clashing with the dominant discourses of the latter, and linking up more generally with a disenfranchised youth culture represented by the likes of Irvine Welsh, as discussed above.

A very different kind of challenge to Western temporality is the return to circular or mythical concepts of time often seen in postcolonial literatures which emphasise traditional societal beliefs over and against the rationalistic linear concept of time imposed by (former) conquerors. One noteworthy early example is the walk through the forest described in the Guinean writer Camara Laye's Le Regard du roi of 1954, where the white Clarence, induced into a somnambulant state by the odour of the forest, discovers that his concept of linear progress and linear time seems to have collapsed, and suspects that his black guides are leading him in circles, so that they cover the same path day after day:

N'est-ce pas aux environs de cette même heure, se demande-t-il, qu'hier et qu'avant-hier, et que depuis des jours et des jours, on me signale cette souche plantée au milieu du sentier, ou cet arbre renversé en travers de la piste?25

Although Clarence wishes to escape this "cycle infernal",26 he does reflect that "en somme il importe peu que le temps passe d'une façon plutôt que d'une autre",27 and he drinks in the evening in search of the forgetfulness "qui le délivre d'aujourd'hui, d'hier et de demain".28 It is highly significant that the native guides are not rocked into the same drowsiness as the white Clarence; they are at home in the forest, which he can only traverse in a state where his faculty of reason, so important to the Enlightenment and linear time, is befuddled by sleepiness - and yet his personal "sueño de la razón", to borrow from Goya, produces not monsters, but merely a concept of reality which is other than that of the West.

The Nigerian writer Ben Okri also draws on his African heritage in novels such as The Famished Road of 1991, where there is constant slippage between the spirit world and that of humans, and where the nature of temporality is clearly established in the early pages by references to "the cycle of rebirth",29 "cyclical rebellion"30 and "the great cycles of time".31 Past, present and future, far from being in the defined relationship to each other familiar to Westerners, blur into one; the spirit narrator, speaking of a series of images, tells us for example:

When I was very young I had a clear memory of my life stretching to other lives. There were no distinctions. Sometimes I seemed to be living several lives at once. One lifetime flowed into the others and all of them flowed into my childhood.32

An echo of African belief systems which revolve around cyclical and mythical time is to be found in the works of the latter-day descendants of African slaves in America and the Caribbean. Striking examples include the African-American Toni Morrison's Beloved of 1987 where, once again, the dimension of the spirits and that of humans overlap and intersect, and the Guadeloupean writer Simone Schwarz-Bart's Ti Jean L'horizon of 1979, where time is malleable to such an extent that the central character, Ti Jean, is able to venture into the mouth of the world-devouring beast, only to find himself transported from the Guadeloupe of our own century to the Africa of his ancestors, whence he must return via France to a past Guadeloupe and then eventually, completing the cycle, to the Guadeloupe of the present.

The recognition, then, that "[t]ime [..] doesn't have to be linear" pervades both contemporary theory and art, especially literature. It takes a wide variety of forms which range from the fractured narratives common to marginalities internal to the West on the one hand, to the return to or play with cyclical, mythical or malleable time often witnessed in non-Western and post-colonial literature on the other.33

And yet, however far "i vinti" may acquiesce in the general belief that linear time is an illusionary concept, and however far they may fracture or twist time, or return to circular or mythical concepts in a move which distances them from the unitary histories of the victors, there is one important respect in which they must have recourse to unitary linear time.

After all, even though there may be a strong feeling in the postmodern West - bearing in mind that most of its principal theorists are white males who are relatively highly placed in socio-economic terms - that we have arrived in a posthistorical age, the formerly marginal have in many cases only just begun to write their own histories. Thus, while the unitary history of the victors is gradually being eroded by a plurality of emancipatory histories in which the margins are revindicated, a process in which the postmodernists happily collaborate, each of these emancipatory histories requires a concept of linear time which renders progress towards a state of emancipation possible and pursuable. In other words, each minority group is turning its own history into a metanarrative. Moreover, these individual discourses are being forged within a new kind of unity, a kind of meta-meta-narrative, obviously not one where the dominant discourses of the West force them into silence, but where a utopia of mutual tolerance and diversity is under construction. Such a utopia is indeed implicit in the work of both Lyotard and Foucault.

Those contemporary theorists and artists who completely abandon linearity, and who suggest that no change is likely or even possible, often slide quickly into nihilism, an accusation which, as suggested earlier, can easily be levelled at theorists such as Baudrillard, as well as at many young novelists and film-makers. Fortunately there are many others who, however strident their overt rejections of linear time and history, tacitly accept that on a deeper level they are involved in constructing an emancipatory narrative - which will revindicate generations of suffering on the margins of society and finally give a voice to Guadeloupean peasants or recognition to African systems of mythology or respect to those whose gender, or sexuality, or youth and social status has traditionally made them second-class citizens. At the same time, they are helping to shape a larger international utopian metanarrative of tolerance. It is in this latter group that we, still children of the Enlightenment despite all our postmodern protestations, must place our hopes for a better and brighter future.

Footnotes
1. A. Carter, Heroes and Villains. London: Penguin, 1981, p.41.
2. S. Rushdie, Midnight's Children. London: Vintage, 1995, p.79.
3. S. Rushdie, Midnight's Children, p.166.
4. D. DeLillo, White Noise. London: Picador, 1986, p.24.
5. J.H. Macdonald, The Free World. Sydney: Flamingo, 1996, p.184.
6. A. Giddens, Social Theory and Modern Sociology. Cambridge: Polity, 1987, p.96.
7. F. Nietzsche, "Die fröhliche Wissenschaft", III, 108, in Werke in drei Bänden, vol.2. Munich: Hanser, 1955, p.115. This is perhaps the most famous of Nietzsche's references to the death of God but many others are to be found both in "Die fröhliche Wissenschaft" and in later works.
8. I. Kant, "Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?" in Immanuel Kants Werke, vol.4. Berlin: Cassirer, 1922, p.169. It would be misguided to see Kant's famous essay as the beginning of the Enlightenment move towards use of reason; rather it signals the fact that the Enlightenment has become conscious of itself and of modernity.
9. J.-F. Lyotard, Moralités postmodernes. Paris: Galilée, 1993, p.180.
10. J-F. Lyotard, Le Postmoderne expliqué aux enfants. Paris: Galilée, 1986, p.47.
11. Although Lyotard will later (Le Différend, Paris: Minuit, 1983; Tombeau de l'intellectuel, Paris: Galilée, 1984, and subsequent works) distance himself from the term métarécit in order, he says, to avoid suggesting a hegemony of narrative over other forms of discourse (see Le Postmoderne expliqué aux enfants, esp. pp.37 & 40-41), he will not substantially alter the concept it designates. In Le Postmoderne expliqué aux enfants and later works he tends to drop the prefix méta- and simply refers to récits. This new term does not of course escape the problem of suggesting the dominance of narrative forms, but is simply a slightly toned-down version of the old term. In the wider postmodern literature, especially in Anglo-Saxon countries, the term metanarrative continues to be extensively employed.
12. J.-F. Lyotard, Le Postmoderne expliqué aux enfants, p.129.
13. J. Baudrillard, "Game with Vestiges" in On the Beach, vol.5, 1984, p.25.
14. M. Foucault, "Nietzsche, la généalogie, l'histoire" in Dits et écrits 1954-1988, vol.2. Paris: Gallimard, 1994, p.149.
15. Graham to Ann in Sex, Lies and Videotape, 1989, directed by S. Soderbergh.
16. The narrator in North of Vortex, 1991, directed by C. Giannaris.
17. J.-F. Lyotard, Moralités postmodernes, p.70.
18. J.-F. Lyotard, Moralités postmodernes, p.84.
19. J.-F. Lyotard, Moralités postmodernes, pp.39-41, 50-51, 53 & 123.
20. C. Tsiolkas, Loaded. Sydney: Vintage, 1995, p.87.
21. I. Welsh, Trainspotting. London: Minerva, 1996, p.30.
22. F. Jameson, "Postmodernism and Consumer Society" in H. Foster (ed.), Postmodern Culture. London: Pluto, 1985, p.125.
23. Jameson's account can be found in F. Jameson, "Postmodernism and Consumer Society", esp. pp.118-123, and also in F. Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 1991, esp. pp.25-31.
24. G. Vattimo, La fine della modernità. Milan: Garzanti, 1985, p.17. See also W. Benjamin, "Geschichtsphilosophische Thesen" in Illuminationen: Ausgewählte Schriften. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1961, pp.268-279.
25. C. Laye, Le Regard du roi. Paris: Plon, 1954, p.92.
26. C. Laye, Le Regard du roi, p.93.
27. C. Laye, Le Regard du roi, p.94
28. C. Laye, Le Regard du roi, p.95.
29. B. Okri, The Famished Road. London: Cape, 1991, p.5.
30. B. Okri, The Famished Road.
31. B. Okri, The Famished Road, p.6.
32. B. Okri, The Famished Road, p.7.
33. It is interesting to note that this rejection of linearity may sometimes experienced as a loss; thus a writer from the Ivory Coast, Véronique Tadjo, comments: "Bien sûr, j'aurais, moi aussi, aimé écrire une histoire sereine avec un début et une fin. Mais tu sais bien qu'il n'en est pas ainsi. Les vies s'entremêlent, les gens s'apprivoisent puis se quittent, les destins se perdent. " (A Vol d'oiseau. Paris: Nathan, 1986, p.2).

Mark Pegrum was awarded a Distinction for his doctoral dissertation on the relationship between Dadaism and postmodernism. He is currently teaching French and German at the University of Western Australia. His PhD dissertation has been accepted for publication by Berghahn Books and should be available in 1997.

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