Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time

by Clark Blaise

  He liked the girls that were walking along the other side of the street. He liked the look of them much better than the French girls or the German girls. But the world they were in was not the world he was in. He would like to have one of them. But it was not worth it. They were such a nice pattern. He liked the pattern. It was exciting. But he would not go through all the talking. He did not want one badly enough. He liked to look at them all, though. It was not worth it. Not now when things were getting good again.

  (from “Soldier’s Home”)

  It was raining. The rain dripped from the palm trees. Water stood in pools on the gravel paths. The sea broke in a long line in the rain and slipped back down the beach to come up and break again in a long line in the rain. The motor cars were gone from the square by the war monument. Across the square in the doorway of the café a waiter stood looking out at the empty square.

  (from “Cat in the Rain”)

  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.

  When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight o’clock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather’s and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire.… I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it.

  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.”

  (Faulkner should not be held to task. Finally, we don’t care if our hired mothers are racially, culturally, or linguistically different from ourselves, so long as they are demonstrably separated from us in time. We don’t want our nannies and housekeepers to show up wearing a Walkman and asking about cable programs; we want them to have “endured” or “prevailed” from an earlier era, where, presumably, maternal values were more central, less compromised, than in our own.)

  In the great modernist novels, The Magic Mountain, To the Lighthouse, Ulysses, in most of Lawrence, most of Faulkner, in P
roust, in Gertrude Stein, time is manipulated in order to keep the moral issues alive. In film, certainly the most extreme and most successful example of temporal manipulation in all the arts, the present moment is eternal. Cinema’s narrative compression suppresses time altogether. The filmgoer creates the temporal dimension, just as the gallery visitor mixes the impressionist palette in his head. All is surface, which is not to say they lack depth. They get where they’re going without time.

  Is there a moral component to time? Faulkner certainly thought so. Günter Grass knows there is. There is Southern time, German time, African time, Irish time, Latin American time, all of them set to a different moral, that is, aesthetic, ideal. Contemporary Latin American novelists like Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, García Márquez, and Vargas Llosa have taken Faulknerian time, Proustian time, the Catholic calendar, and even a bit of pre-Columbian aboriginal time to keep history alive for the creation of their own sophisticated myths of eternal return. For writers of my generation, time as a subject, a dramatic event in itself worthy of a new form of telling, is forever associated with reading Borges for the first time.

  The world was made conscious of Protestant time and the so-called Protestant work ethic back in the nineteenth century. Protestant travelers and imperialists imposed their hyperconscious temporality wherever their influence spread. The Protestant clock, not the Catholic cross, was their god. To be prompt and reliable was the surest outer sign of an orderly and responsible inner life. They also reported back on their unsuccessful temporal conversions, the slackness of Catholics and Muslims and Hindus, of “native” people just about anywhere. The mañana mentality was a childlike moral failing.

  “Cultural time” obviously differs from the clock, the calendar, or the civil day. In the same way that many contemporary Americans and Europeans live speeded-up lives, dipping in and out of many time zones in a single day, living only marginally within their own local time, there are other cultures that achieve the same freedom from local time by discounting it altogether. Robert Levine’s The Geography of Time, the same book that introduced the resonant phrase “temporal millionaire,” measures time consciousness across many societies, taking into account comparative estimates of elapsed time, chronological projections of likely time investment, degrees of reliability and tardiness, time obsession and time laxity—even pedestrian foot speed. In Brazil, Levine discovered a modern country that manages to live in “natural” time while observing the rituals of standardization. Business and legal hours are posted, class times are published, but only on special occasions are they expected to be observed. Every citizen is his own prime meridian.

  And as for German time, here is Günter Grass, speaking in 1982:

  Everything that has thus far become a book for me has been subservient to time or has chafed under it. As a contemporary, I have written against the passage of time. The past made me throw it in the path of the present to make the present stumble. The future could only be understood on the basis of past made present. First and foremost, I found myself harnessed to German time, constrained to steer a course cutting obliquely across the epochs, disregarding the convenience of chronology. Epic moraines had to be cleared away, reality sloughed off again and again. There’s no end to it. So many dead. And everywhere, even where life might release joy, and pleasure might take its fling, the great crime casts its shadow, which time cannot efface.

  The effect of standard time, that is to say “reason,” on a non-Western culture has been explicitly captured in one novel, Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God. Achebe’s classic, in temporal terms, is a violent, deicidic clash between natural and rational gods, told in terms of colonialism and religion. Within the traditional Ibo religion, the priestly interpretation of the lunar calendar determines the proper moment for the planting of the village yams. Miss it, and the village loses a month; lose a month, and the crop is doomed. The starving village becomes ripe for plunder and takeover. Because the British colonial authority has imprisoned a village priest on a minor charge (largely to teach him respect for their own power), he is not available to signal the moment for planting the yams. Because the planting cycle is missed, the village starves, the old Ibo gods are discredited, and Christians gain a foothold.

  It’s about time. It’s all about time. A change in the pace of change.

  William Butler Yeats was another of the time-obsessed. His theory of the gyres, great, cyclical collapses and rebirths of civilization, are perhaps the broadest statement we’re likely to get, outside of Hinduism or quantum physics, of time consciousness. “Sailing to Byzantium” (1927) was published just a year before The Sound and the Fury, five years after Ulysses. The famous and often-quoted last stanza could have been whispered in the ear of Quentin Compson, or for anyone seeking release from the ticking clock. While addressing the familiar issues of nature and reason, it also anticipates the next stage of the conflict. Once nature is replaced by reason, and reason fractured by subjectivity, how do we recompose reality, and a sense of self?

  Once out of nature I shall never take

  My bodily form from any natural thing,

  But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

  Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

  To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

  Or set upon a golden bough to sing

  To lords and ladies of Byzantium

  Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

  In Fleming’s eighty-eight years, the world redefined itself as profoundly as during any interval in human history. In their various ways, every significant figure or invention in the nineteenth century has been hailed as revolutionary. They did not build on previous knowledge or practice but, in effect, wiped them out. How did we move, lift, bore, before steam? How did we survive childhood before vaccination? What were newspapers good for before cable transmissions? The world could never go back, after Darwin, Pasteur, Edison, Seurat, Marx, James, Monet, van Gogh; or after steam engines, electric motors, motion pictures, X-rays, telephones, railroads, internal-combustion engines, wireless transmissions, photography; or after the birth of the natural and social sciences.

  It is the privilege of each human generation to feel it has been born into the time of greatest speed, greatest confusion, greatest advance, greatest peril in all human history, and surely that generation is right. Claims for our era, however, fall a little short of those superlatives. My father drove his car as fast and as far in a day as I can; we flew (not as fast or as far, but with a compensating sense of luxury and adventure), we listened to radio and could visualize the scenes and characters more vividly than on any television show. Only the computer and its applications have altered the velocities of our life, and given definition to the past twenty years. Victorians still win the competition for determined stability in a world of change.

  TRACING THE origins of modernism, picking out our ancestors from brittle, old class pictures, has become an intellectual vanity of our age. Each new biography, rediscovered painter, each retelling of fading events, each reconstruction of the mid- to late-nineteenth century pushes the frontiers of modernism back another year, or decade. The shifting temporal markers are like new archaeological finds, or new dinosaur bones, each new discovery pushing back the frontiers. And standing silently in the wings, rarely called on and barely introduced, are Fleming and Abbe and Allen and Dowd, and the giant issue of standard time.

  When I entered college, modernism was thought to have been invented by the generation born in the 1880s, who came to maturity early in the twentieth century—Einstein, Joyce, and Picasso, and the major innovators in Paris dance and music. Roger Shattuck’s The Banquet Years served as the handiest guide. Now modernism is already alive in 1880, created by figures in science and the arts born at mid-century or even earlier. We didn’t know much about Vienna and Berlin, and America didn’t count at all. Modernism had something to do with the techniques of cinema, and with the use of the telephone, with the popularity of Freudian analysis, and with relativity and the dem
ographic shifts from country to city and ghetto to mainstream. It had to do with forty years of peace on the European continent, from about 1875 to 1915, and with the rising expectations of newly urbanized minorities in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It had to do with many things, all vaguely synergistic, all loosely interrelated. And, of course, with a generalized sense of breakdown—sexual, religious, social, and political. But standard time was never mentioned.

  When looked at closely, modernism never really conformed to any single convenient description. Discontinuity is a major factor, a rebellion against the Victorian notions of rounded connectedness, the “well-stuffed” ideal. The “art for art’s sake” credo, the notion of the artist standing apart from society and owing it nothing, clearly derives from a rebellion against the Victorian notion of serving society and of being, above all things, useful. But that attitude is as much Flaubertian as Joycean, despite the gap of fifty years. Modernism has been pushed back another generation and a half, to the 1870s, traced (by Kern and Everdell, notably) through physics and mathematics. Modernism, at least in spirit, was there all along, in medicine, in poetry, in a series of remarkable inventions, but mainly in the new perception of accelerated speed, the challenge to the time-space continuum.

  As I’ve tried to suggest, modernism is also about the cutting and faceting of time, breaking up continuity, or flow, in favor of emphatic shards, away from nature and toward abstraction. Everdell has settled on a seemingly simple but endlessly complex definition. Modernism, he suggests, might only be “a change in the pace of change.” That statement contains much of modern science, for it assumes a universe in constant motion, and no fixed point to measure it from. It looks not at content but at the framing of content. Modernism is about speed and the expectation of even greater speed, and about the attempt to hold on to a fleeting familiarity before it slips away. What modernism replaced was slowness, or the natural.