Time Lord (23 page)

The touchstone literary confirmation was supplied by Joseph Conrad in
The Secret Agent
(based on an actual event of 1894), in which a band of anarchists set out to destroy the viability of British society, not by the bombing of Buckingham Palace, the Inns of Court, or the Houses of Parliament, but by blowing up the Greenwich Observatory. “The attack must have all the shocking senselessness of gratuitous blasphemy,” explains Mr. Vladimir, their philosophical leader. In a mercantile society, a single, unified time, everywhere and indivisible, is the invisible but omnipotent God. It must be assassinated. Conrad’s anarchists, though extreme in their planned violence, capture the modernist tone exactly: opposition at any cost to the established order. The fundamental order is temporal.

THE MODERNISTS
’ ways of rendering reality make our
fin-de-millennium
writing seem simplistic by comparison. James,
Woolf, Conrad, Lawrence, Joyce, Stein, Pound, Eliot, Dreiser, Hemingway, Faulkner—just staying within the English-language tradition—pose difficulties we’re still trying to unravel. Add the others—Proust, Mann, Kafka, Musil, Broch—and readers of serious early-twentieth-century fiction are confronted with an apparent epidemic of temporal obsession.

Time was in the air
. New time standards had swirled around the childhoods of Mann and Proust, Woolf and Kafka, Einstein and Joyce, all of whom were born in the Decade of Time. Their works are all about time, but standardization addressed only the most superficial complaints of temporal instability. Standardization rationalized time for the industrial worker and the railroad passenger and the managerial elite, and made the same laws and the same time apply over wider and wider areas, but it did not eliminate temporal anxiety, especially in the various artistic undergrounds. In fact, it freed them to call attention to an unfinished temporal revolution. Standard time could not penetrate the subjective layers of memory and repression. Exposing the layers of repression and secret motivations became the new literary and theatrical agenda.

In 1885, while still working in Antwerp, Vincent van Gogh began decorating his studio with Japanese prints of “little women’s figures in gardens.” When van Gogh arrived in Paris two years later, he invested all he could in Japanese woodblock prints. Their appeal, he explained to his brother, lay in the unmodulated planes of color and exaggerated perspective. That same year, he organized two exhibitions of Japanese woodblock prints in a Montmartre café. Japanese style can be seen in the bold, unmodulated colors of the “Irises” series, which he began in Arles the following year and continued in the urgent last paintings before his 1890 suicide. “Unmodulated” means unshadowed and nonperspectival; color dominates form, urgency transcends pictorial illusion.

Just as Victorian rationality had led confident researchers into
the depths of the irrational, so did temporal freedom lead artists to the distortion of all received notions of social and psychological reality. Painting took on the stark geometry, the chaos and the commercial glitter of the urban palette. The arts in general—painting, writing, music, dance—tried to get inside the pulse of the city. Entering the frame of the story, discreetly, like Flaubert, seemed tame indeed compared with the appropriations of
Ulysses
. Even the brightest impressionist paintings paled against the colors of van Gogh. Cubism in painting and its extensions into poetry and fiction collapsed the three-dimensional timespace continuum into two. “Not seen in nature,” which might have been a charge of opprobrium in an earlier era, became the new sign of genius.

And the cities themselves were transformed, packed with newly liberated, newly empowered, freshly expectant immigrants. Their pasts wiped out, their futures were suddenly before them. The stories by now are familiar, how a window of tolerance beginning at the start of the century permitted Jews from eastern regions to find legal residence in Vienna and Berlin, how the generational leap from
shtetl
to university—from Talmudic to secular learning—unleashed an energy source that had lain dormant, and helped bring about the Continent’s intellectual rebirth, and how others from southern and eastern Europe, Catholics and Jews, did the same for the open cities of the New World.

THE IDEA
of the modern has undergone considerable revision in the past several decades and, on the authority of William Everdell’s
The First Moderns
, can now be pushed back to the mid-1870s, and to fields far outside the arts. The dyed-in-the-wool Victorians, by comparison, those progressive thinkers of an earlier era, like Fleming, remained resolutely objective, impatient with subjectivity, suspicious of private emotions and un-supportive of arts that threatened to undermine confidence or
grow morbidly introspective. In 1878, at a time when Fleming’s London circle of contacts had expanded, and when his colonial timidity had sufficiently receded, the cultural figure he chose to visit was his aged fellow Scot and one-time Kirkcaldian, Thomas Carlyle (born 1795), a coeval of Keats. They spoke not of Carlyle’s darker fulminations but of memories of Kirkcaldy, and of stirring events on the Canadian Pacific Railway. For engineers like Fleming, the objective world of undiscovered and unexplained nature, not the seething unconscious, still beckoned.

FAULKNER AND
Hemingway were born a year apart at the close of the nineteenth century. Their names are inevitably linked, their achievements endlessly compared and contrasted. One wrote memorably of suicide; the other committed it. One captured America’s celebrity fancy; the other rarely traveled and is associated with only one town, one state, in which he led a reclusive life. And later judgments on both have been harsh: on Hemingway for his macho posturing, on Faulkner for his resistant regionalism and the racist residue it included. Both were enamored of time, and took their fascination in opposite directions. In the case of America’s two greatest writers of the twentieth century, the ancient gods of time looked forward to death, or backward to history.

In Our Time
(not to push the title) is the most influential collection of stories in American writing. With
Dubliners
(and, to stretch the same point,
Winesburg, Ohio)
it defines one polarity of modernism. Fragments of time, place, and character—with none of the logical or linguistic unity of an earlier age—are narrated in the clearest and simplest of language. Hemingway’s famous style denies continuity; it fragments time, sentence by sentence:

Only one comma intrudes in the two selections. Commas are like Band-Aids, protective adhesions permitting transition, and here none are needed. Hemingway’s prose style of the early 1920s owes to his journalistic training and obvious opposition to Edwardian fussiness, but also to the internalization of death or, in my terms, the anxiety of time. (No wonder he admired Gary Cooper as an actor, the same shuddering delivery, courting slowness, emphasizing the discontinuity between lines.) Time is present in the stuttering progress of the sentences themselves, stopped-time frames of activity where self-consciousness intrudes to disrupt all continuity. His sentences, devoid of shadowing, are the literary equivalents of van Gogh’s unmodulated planes, or of Caillebotte’s strolling Parisians. They dazzle but do not illuminate, they reflect light but surrender none of their own. They retain their meaning, spitting out only the seeds. His characters, at least in the early stories, are devoid of a temporal element;
they are (like the girls in “Soldier’s Home”) part of a pattern, but not part of this world.

Those simple, repetitive sentences with virtually no movement between them are the metronomic ticks of a life running out. Hemingway often stated that death was dealt a hand at a serious writer’s table. His sentences claw for a grip, reaching for a future that’s forever retreating.

STANDARD TIME
, as Conrad implied, is a secularized religion. Time has a moral character; our conscience keeps it eternally present, it won’t go away, won’t bury itself in the past, where it belongs. When we think of time, of histories and cultures and lives that have preceded our own, when we hold their artifacts, or read their records, we are likely to be filled with a secularized form of awe that is akin to worship, what the religious feel in the presence of God. Like Simon Schama, when we think of time, we’re brought back to our personal Pook’s Hill, where “lucky Dan and Una got to chat with Viking warriors, Roman centurions, Norman knights, and then went home for tea.” Or, if not for a cup of tea, to a shot of bourbon, to Yoknapatawpha, ruled by an unforgiving time lord.

The nineteenth century struck down God but didn’t bury him, as my friend, R. W. Rexford, likes to say; it erected standard time in his place. Works of art that take time as their theme are sublimated works of religion, taking the Bible as their narrative frame. (How did we start so innocently and become what we are? How did this social, political, environmental mess come about, and how can we atone for it?) The past is never over, it’s continually enacted, like the herds and priests on Keats’s Grecian urn.

In Faulkner, modernism reached its American apotheosis, at least in terms of temporal derangement, as well as in overt time consciousness. The two faces of time are fused, the dead come to life, the past becomes again the present, the “backward-looking ghosts,” as Quentin Compson calls them in
Absalom, Absalom!
die again for their sorry failure to redeem a precious drop of spilled, ancient blood. In
Light in August
Joe Christmas, being run to ground by a lynch mob, reflects on the sheer dumb majesty of being born
here
, and
now
, and not some other place in the tapestry of time. The past is alive, it is palpably present, because the present, the contemporary characters, have no moral force, no sustaining life.

The Sound and the Fury
can be read temporally as a war between the blighted “natural” world of the “idiot” Benjy and the narcissistic, hyperrational world of his brother, the Harvard student, Quentin, against the ferocious mechanical reductionism of their brother Jason. Benjy lives in an eternal moment, undifferentiated by civil concerns. Quentin exists on the day of his suicide in a temporal straitjacket he’s trying to escape (which, of course, he does), and Jason in a crude rationalism that he turns to pitiless power and profit. By ending the book on the character of Dilsey, Faulkner implies there’s yet another way out of the three-cornered temporal tragedy, but it’s the way of endurance, of “prevailing,” the way of love and patience and forbearance, the exercise of mammy-spirit.

In Faulkner’s ethos, rationality is a fatal disease, for which the only antidotes available to white Southerners are idiocy or cold, calculating brutality. Quentin wants to escape civil time, the reminder of his sister’s marriage and his shame, and to enter eternity. He smashes his pocket watch, and avoids looking in the jeweler’s window, which is filled with sample clocks. “Because Father said clocks slay time. He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.”

What Faulkner describes is the Southern tragedy in temporal terms. There was a natural time and a natural order, the world of the forest and the Bear and “the people.” Civilization, or rationality, marched into that natural world in the form of the Sartorises,
and then the Sutpens and Compsons, who brought with them their laws and pianos and grandfather clocks and slaves—the original sin—and because they were dependent on their slaves, their dependence brought the war and the Reconstruction, and then the shadow of slavery called segregation, and no redemption for the sin. The fever had broken, but the virus remained in the blood.

And so, even into the 1920s, the sins were repeated, a “redeemed” white man had yet to be born, and only the lower forms of Southern white humanity, the Jason Compsons and the proliferating Snopeses, could slip undetected under the moral screen, like mink or weasels. And those reappearing blooms of Southern manhood born with the grace, strength, or sensitivity to lead, like Sutpen’s quarter-Haitian son, Charles Bon, or Joe Christmas, or Quentin Compson, were doomed.

In other words, human time, what we’d call history, is polluted. And natural time is not available to whites. From Faulkner’s perspective, time has a moral dimension, and only those who had been spared the immorality of slave ownership escape the temporal judgment of cyclical return. Dilsey, the Negro servant, is the true mother of the Compson clan. Only she can settle the howling Benjy and master the moments of marriage and burial. Only she can turn aside Jason. The famous words Faulkner applied to the Negroes of Mississippi, praise for their “endurance,”
and that they “prevailed,” are temporal judgments of the highest order. Their historic victimization rendered them in our terms timeless, but in the jazzman’s language, “in time.”