Time Lord

by Clark Blaise

  CAILLEBOTTE’S COMPOSITION is chillingly impersonal, the figures anonymous. There is no anecdotal focus of interest. The viewer’s eye (mine, at least) is thus drawn to—of all things—the strollers’ feet. No pair of feet of the human figures is firmly planted on the pavement. If the heels are touching the cobblestones, the toes are up, or vice-versa. Each figure appears to be in motion. This obviously ungainly assault derives not from Salon standards but from the example of candid photography. The painter cannot “see,” truly see, how people walk; the eye blends the movement into one continuous action. And that is precisely the point. Paris Street, Rainy Day, with its muted colors, is the quietest impressionist painting in Chicago, but also the most dynamic.

  The impressionist revolution, we’ve been told, is all about light. Light means a self-lit subject, liberated from an external (or at least, identifiable) light source. It means overthrowing formalities—those of the posed subject, the play of light and shadow, and the illusion of perspective. Even when the impressionist subject was taken from nature, as so many were, it is a recomposed nature, nature stopped, stripped of academic signs of “naturalness,” and then re-seen. The impressionist canvas is nonnarrative (as its casual or flatly factual title often indicates), antinarrative, amoral, it flares on the wall, commanding the eye even before we figure out what it is “about.” It doesn’t “mean” anything, it is not an “illustration of” or an “allusion to,” there’s nothing to “get” except the pleasure of performance. And because of that, its significance is profound.

  Impressionists understood intuitively that energy—and it was energy that became the art of the age—was conveyed by radiated light, not by well-rendered form. Light is energy, as Einstein eventually showed, and to the impressionists, the Salon standards of form (like the Newtonian universe for Einstein) were the first impediment to the release of energy. Energy is released when light scatters form, not when form insists on its own perfection. It was a bold step for artists to take, but the only one in keeping with the times (“time was in the air”). It was alienating to the public at first, and to most critics, and it posed a challenge to received opinion and the finest standards of instruction that the Salon, quite properly by its lights, did not accept.

  The success of their revolution today renders a perfectly realized Romantic masterpiece like Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa dated, with its anatomically correct, tortured bodies on a storm-ravaged sea. The figures seem at best melodramatic, at worst cadaverous. Although the anecdote of the wreck is dynamic, the figures seem posed. The reason Caillebotte’s painting is provocative at nearly any depth of interpretation is precisely because it has no anecdotal subject. It is “about” a Paris street in the rain; that is, it is about nothing anterior or paraphrasable. It may be incidentally about forms of urban bleakness and sexual alienation, but it embodies something far grander: the capturing of a single anonymous moment on the tapestry of time. Like Bloomsday in Ulysses, or June 2, 1910, in The Sound and the Fury, the day of Quentin Compson’s suicide at Harvard, it is everything—and nothing. Any random day is shown to be, upon close examination, a microcosm of all human history.

  On his death in 1894, Caillebotte willed his collection of sixty-seven canvases by Monet, Renoir, Degas, Cézanne, Sisley, and Manet to the Louvre, only half of which, because of Salon pressure, were grudgingly accepted. France’s loss is the world’s gain. Those impressionist rooms around Caillebotte’s Paris Street, Rainy Day at the Art Institute of Chicago today suggest an expanded version of the walls in his own Paris studio, crammed with Salon rejects he’d bought from his friends a century ago.

  In The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Peter Gay reads a deeper complication than mere jealousy in Caillebotte’s bequest and the Louvre’s reluctance to accept it. It is yet another form of the rift between the received and the revolutionary, or, in terms already described, the natural and the rational:

  But the fundamental question of choice—whether to preserve the safe or make way for the risky—made for frictions that necessarily played themselves out in public disputes. And these disputes were, it seemed, growing less and less reparable. With the coming of modernism the breakup of a great if shaky bourgeois compromise was on the horizon, a compromise that had held culture together for decades.

  Caillebotte is an attractive and humane figure, like Pissarro, Seurat, Monet, or Cézanne, or Henry James, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, or Gertrude Stein, one of those apparently stable, confident figures we associate with the late-Victorian, Edwardian, and pre-World War I era who seems capable of living out Flaubert’s maxim to write (or paint) like a demon, while living like a bourgeois.

  And there are others, like Fleming, and Cleveland Abbe, and the Parisian spectroscopist Jules-César Janssen (who created the Paris Observatory in those same years), who are part of the same society, men and women of easy graces who were not reclusive or revolutionary but, in their way, bomb-throwers. Rebellion (or, as they saw it, reform) burned on a low flame within them, but they were nevertheless the loyal opposition to many received opinions. Cleveland Abbe worked tirelessly with the Freedmen’s Bureau and with General Oliver Otis Howard (the founder of Howard University) for what was called “Negro uplift.” The woman he married had spent the post-Civil War years as a volunteer teacher of Negro children in Mississippi. Abbe himself attended black churches during his years in Washington, and even brought Sandford Fleming with him when the latter was in town during the Prime Meridian Conference.

  In their personal lives they seemed to be able to contain conflicting beliefs in faith and science, in authority and freedom, in charity and acquisition, and, in some cases, between probity and abandon. They trouble us today, with our automatic association of modernism with rebellion, exile, imprisonment, and alienation, and of Victorianism with bland hypocrisy and guilty repression. They were radical moderates.

  THE STIRRING in the arts called modernism—“the breakup of a great if shaky bourgeois compromise,” in Peter Gay’s words—is really the implanting of time inside all artistic constructions. And it is time, in the form of velocities, that forced the breakup. The Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa claims Flaubert as the father of all modernists: “With Flaubert the novel appeared for the first time not only as a moral task or the creation of a story but also as a purely technical problem, the problem of the creation of a convincing language and the organization of time and also the problem of the function of the narrative in the novel.” Raymond Williams made the same claim for Dickens. He did not report on social change (as George Eliot had), he found ways of embodying it in plot and character. In impressionist terms, they found ways of capturing an internal light source (time); not recording the illusion of passing time, but of entering it.

  Embedding the narrator inside the novel as early as the 1850s, is at the very least protomodernist—but also temporalist. Flaubert had to construct a time machine for Madame Bovary and, very consciously, find ways through voice and language to place a story inside it. We are back again in that moment, identified by Henry Adams in 1844, when the world changed perceptibly, due to railroads, ships, and the telegraph; or perhaps it is the moment of Britain’s standardization, noted by Dickens; or of Thoreau’s retreat to Walden Pond. We are back to the generation of Melville’s Bartleby, and the struggle to mold time, language, and character into a single coherent story. We are back to Fleming’s “chronometer” buried in the middle of the earth.

  The photographer Eadweard Muybridge with his horses, the motion-picture pioneer Étienne-Jules Marey with his blended vision, the physicist Ernst Mach, who caught the muzzle discharge of a bullet on film, the experimental colorist Georges Seurat, who demonstrated the eye’s subservience to the brain in mixing color (his Sunday on the Island of the Grande Jatte hangs a few rooms away from Caillebotte’s Paris Street, Rainy Day in Chicago). The impressionists and their successors all broke “natural” movement into stills, then recomposed the disjointed frames into the semblance of unity, or of moti
on.

  Technical inventions such as Frederick Taylor’s stopwatch and the high-speed camera demonstrated our inherent physical frailty, our unconscious reliance on habit, and our physiological capacity for self-deception. Those vulnerabilities foretold the intellectual enterprise of the new social sciences—sociology, anthropology, scientific management, political science, psychology. For the most part, the social sciences brought unwelcome news: we’re less in control than we thought we were; less free, less virtuous, less enlightened. They also broke down the apparently natural continuity of observed human activity and interaction into discrete stills, stopped-time frames that would, ideally, yield up a clearer picture and deeper understanding of our unconscious motives. The ideal mode of analysis for sociologists and psychologists is the candid observation (Taylor hid his stopwatch inside hollowed-out books), the ability to stop time, to interrogate the “natural” with theories of the rational, like the skinsman in jazz.

  Paris Street, Rainy Day would not convey its special tension if the feet of its subjects were fully in contact with the cobblestones. It would not inhabit its scene, à la Flaubert, if the various subjects had actually existed that day, just as the artist saw them—it would have been, rather, just another composition about a Paris street in the rain. In 1877, photography and impressionism came together in Caillebotte’s studio. Light and time were captured and released. In using the latest technology to release time from nature, Caillebotte also released its darker, uninvited shadow, urban anomie, alienation. The Caillebotte composition is Flaubertian, not merely representational.

  The need to manipulate time is central to every technical, intellectual, and artistic discovery of the twentieth century. Technologies seek to “save” time by speeding up connections or increasing efficiency and load capacity; artists look for ways of extending the moment, “saving time” in the sense of preserving it. Stopping time, extending the perceived present and challenging the “flow of time” (a notion as old as St. Augustine), defying the Salon palette and its disciplined command of highlight and shadow, is the aesthetic counterpart to the standard-time movement. Artists, writers, and scientists all learned the tricks of temporal manipulation. They absorbed the central lesson of the temporal revolution: time is not given by God, it is taken by man. Bell and the telephone, Otis and the elevator, Edison and the lightbulb, Pullman and his luxurious dining and sleeping cars, Caillebotte’s breathtaking vistas and Seurat’s adaptation of psychochromatic theory—all of their inventions and masterpieces manipulate time. Pursue any of them, a priori or a posteriori, and you challenge the limits of natural, local time. The time zones themselves are innovations of the same Industrial Age. Each hour punches in like a worker at a time clock. The earth revolves like a giant cog, its teeth biting into a larger cosmic wheel. The neat divisions between the zones have the effect of compartmentalizing time arbitrarily, as though we are capable of keeping only one hour at a time, a thousand miles, fifteen degrees of longitude, in our minds. What standardization did was reduce the number of time standards in the world downward from infinity to twenty-four. It expanded the bubble of identical time from twelve miles to a thousand. (The next step will be to reduce the Industrial Age’s twenty-four down to one.)

  Artists took the temporal revolution much further than the engineers intended. They reacted to rationality, especially to the smug rationality imposed by industry and capital. Standard time, once it was constructed by diplomats, astronomers, and engineers for the benefit of industry and management, had to be artistically, subjectively, demolished. True clarity and understanding could be achieved only in the deliberate restructuring of time and space. Liberation from nature and religious dogma is a fine goal, but slavery to a time clock is no great improvement. The dreadful progress of Victorian will and order could be opposed most effectively not on the streets, nor in the bars and bedrooms, but in the ateliers and garrets, by subverting the very tools of logic itself in the artistic derangement of form and language.

  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 fo
r 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: