Pub Date : 2019-07-01DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474431330.003.0003
Charles M. Tung
This chapter begins with the way Wesely’s record-breaking pinhole photographs from Open Shutter (2004) use the effect of blur to connect relative rates of movement to larger histories as such. Similarly, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929) is focused on racialised time lag not simply between two points on a single historical line, but between different histories that move at different rates and go their own ways. Here, the temporal aspect of double consciousness – of always living in someone else’s time and yet also located in a distinctive history marked by laggy access – connects with postcolonial treatments of time lag and the way in which historical behindness opens onto the tangle of histories that appears synecdochically in the plane of the present as heterogeneity. Finally, Hagedorn’s Dream Jungle (2003) stages the collision, overlap and differences between the story of Magellan’s ‘discovery’ of the Philippines, the 1970s hoax of the uncontacted ‘Stone Age’ Tasaday people, the filming of contemporary US history in Apocalypse Now in Mindanao, and the long-running Moro insurgency. Each of these texts contains a bullet-time scene in which the dilation of the encounter of disjunctive rhythms reveals a heterochronic assemblage of time-paths and historical frames.
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Pub Date : 2019-07-01DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474431330.003.0005
Charles M. Tung
The idea of unilinearity is not a shibboleth solidifying an aesthetic and historical period dialectically; rather, unitary time – its putatively isochronic character, its anthropocentric narrativity and its monochronic nature – is a phenomenon that arose in particular technological and cultural conditions, and which provoked or was met with a hotchpotch historicity expressed in certain aesthetic and cultural objects, political orientations and scientific theories. Time is a stable backdrop in other conjunctures, and time has been conceived as unstable in other cultural and historical currents in the past. However, the difference this study underlines comes from the insistent attempt to think of timespace and history as literally multiple – with irregular internal consistency and pace, variable scales and distinctive frames of reference. To hold apart timespace and history analytically, and to keep individual experience separate as well, has often resulted in the preservation of unitary time as the fundamental base layer, as that which underlies narrative sense-making at the level of chronology of fabular order, on which we deploy tropes and figures in rendering both individual and collective experience to ourselves. But there are many base layers, many times.
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Pub Date : 2019-07-01DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474431330.003.0004
Charles M. Tung
This chapter links the period’s visions of the far future with modernism’s engagement with deep time in order to show how the big historicising that begins in the nineteenth century is not solely about the expansion of historicity but the multiplicity and alternative futurity that follows from it. While the heterochrony of modernist temporal zoom includes the dissolution characteristic of immense expansions of perspective, it is not centred solely on the absorption of a small frame into some more certain, fundamental backdrop. The incongruity between the aesthetic’s imperative to scale itself to what we care about and the immensity of things that can only be registered from far away – temporal hyperobjects, speculative outsides, far-futural risks – is valuable not only for the critique of modernity’s compressed timescapes that it enables, but also for the way it reveals the plurality of times that cannot be nested within one another. This chapter constructs a relationship between genre fiction’s scope and modernism’s long-range aesthetics – the connection between SF’s literal movement away from earthly temporal units (days,years, events, lives, the career of the human as such) and modernist attempts to picture human life from an estranging distance.
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Pub Date : 2019-07-01DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474431330.003.0006
Charles M. Tung
This chapter addresses the aesthetic exploration of historical alternatives by thinking about strange conceptions of historicity and the fantasy of alternate histories in three different texts: Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962) and Nolan’s Interstellar (2014). Each of these texts not only thematises the condition of temporal alongsidedness but also formally structures itself by means of crosscut parallel plotlines that de-synchronise from one another. Nolan’s film uses parallel editing, normally deployed to construct simultaneity, to represent the de-synchronisation among reference frames. Woolf’s modernist text is an early model of this very specific sort of alternate history, a text that is likewise a kind of post-apocalyptic meditation on a variety of rhythms in a present interpenetrated by what might have been and what comes next. Dick’s text is like Woolf’s novel, featuring two main characters who never meet and live in timelines with differing pace, duration and sets of possibility. All of these texts are not interested simply in a mutation of a past sequence that produces a forking historical path with an altered present and future, but in the reconfiguration of alternativity, historicity and the present in the context of diverging concurrent trajectories.
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Pub Date : 2019-07-01DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474431330.003.0001
Charles M. Tung
This introduction returns to modernism’s incipient moments as the “Jonbar hinge” or pivot point for an alternative history of the period’s well-known time fixation. Using Lefebvre to reconsider aestheticism and impressionism in light of multiplicity rather than ephemerality, this new time-story expands the cultural significance and function of Wells’s foundational trope of the time machine to show how twentieth-century culture was defined not just by a Bergsonian repudiation of the clock but also by a proliferation of clocks. The rise of the time-travel trope, from the late nineteenth century to our contemporary moment, can be reconsidered not only as a symptom of the “eternal present” of late capitalism or our lost sense of history, but also as a component in a larger network that produces heterochrony—time’s multiple rates, scales, and reference frames. Our current political desire to revise history and envision other histories in contemporary discourses connects to the century-wide imaginative contestation of historical progress and the earlier openness to history’s irregular rhythms, its variety of scales, and its divarication of branches.
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Pub Date : 2019-04-01DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474431330.003.0002
Charles M. Tung
At the beginning of the twentieth century, primitivism and paleomodernism appeared to reflect primarily those conditions out of which both modernism and SF have been shown to emerge: evolutionary and imperial conceptions of history. Modernism’s complex engagement with late-nineteenth-century time culture went beyond a simple turn toward the past and produced alternative conceptions of time and history. This chapter explores the idea of heterochrony derived from evolutionary biology’s knowledge of the body’s hodgepodge of disjunctive timings and times in order to reexamine two canonical orientations toward the past—Eliot’s tradition and Picasso’s primitivism. Drawing a connection with Murray Leinster’s “Sidewise in Time” (1934), which features a jumbled and patchwork geography comprising a “Post-Cambrian jungle left in eastern Tennessee,” a Russian Alaska and California, and preindustrial Chinese settlements around the Potomac, this chapter reconfigures modernist “pastism” against the notion of a single, progressive, evolutionary history justifying racist imperial schemes, as well as the shallowing of time by capitalist space-time compression.
在二十世纪初，原始主义和古现代主义似乎主要反映了现代主义和科幻小说所产生的条件:进化的和帝国的历史观。现代主义与19世纪晚期时间文化的复杂接触超越了对过去的简单转向，并产生了时间和历史的另类概念。这一章探讨了从进化生物学对身体的分离时间和时间大杂烩的认识中衍生出来的异时性观念，以重新审视过去的两种典型取向——艾略特的传统和毕加索的原始主义。穆雷·伦斯特(Murray Leinster)的《时间的一边》(Sidewise in Time)(1934)描绘了一个杂乱拼凑的地理，包括“田纳西州东部留下的后寒武纪丛林”、俄罗斯的阿拉斯加和加利福尼亚，以及波托马克河周围的工业化前中国定居点。这一章重新配置了现代主义的“怀旧主义”，反对单一的、进步的、进化的历史为种族主义帝国计划辩护的概念，以及资本主义时空压缩对时间的肤浅化。
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