Saramago’s narrator is in a deep state of frustration here because in this novel, and germane to everything about this novel, he wants to describe, with the simultaneity with which he says they happen, three random happenings which all seem to have contributed to a crack appearing in the fabric of things, a piece of Europe breaking off from itself — the Iberian Peninsula — and floating away on its own terms. He wants to describe communally — in a uniting fashion, what you might call a harmony — a metaphor of terrible isolation. In the course of this novel, about whether men and women are islands or not, he examines both time’s terrible political, historical, and environmental consequences (he does this in almost every novel he writes) and the things which really do seem to endure in the face of change between human beings — and not just human beings, but between humans and other species too.
Juan Pablo Villalobos’s 2010 novel, Down the Rabbit Hole (translated by Rosalind Harvey), is narrated by a seven-year-old called Tochtli (or Rabbit), who is growing up surrounded by guns in a drug cartel in Mexico where the people his father has shot are literally thrown to the big cats they keep on the premises for eating the evidence:
Books don’t have anything in them about the present, only the past and the future. This is one of the biggest defects of books. Someone should invent a book that tells you what’s happening at this moment, as you read. It must be harder to write that sort of book than the futuristic ones that predict the future. That’s why they don’t exist. And that’s why I have to go and investigate reality.
This, in a novel about a child coming of age and learning by direct experience the meanings of beastly and manly, suggests a moral imperative to do with the meeting place of literature and time.
If the Roman historian Sallust could write, in his work on storytelling and myth, On the Gods and the World, summing up the paradox that comes about when fiction meets time, ‘these things never happened, but are always,’ what JG Ballard suggests all the centuries later is that the relationship between time and artful fictiveness has flayed itself inside out. In an introduction to his 1973 novel Crash, written in the 90s, he describes this upside-down world — suggests that now it’s more a case of these things happen, but never were. We now ‘live inside an enormous novel,’ he writes, ‘a world ruled by fictions of every kind — mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television screen.’ Now we need our novelists to ‘invent the reality.’ His own novels tick like bombs.
But whether it involves a portrait locked away that changes and ages so that a man doesn’t, or a little sweet cake that releases memory, or an arrow that flies backwards and undoes history, or a machine that can travel, or a ghost from the past, present, or future making a miser be generous, or a handmaid from the future, a Cromwell from the past: either way, anyway, it is always about now, both the now in which it is being written and the now in which it is being read. In Aspects of the Novel you can almost sense excitement beyond his customary charming diffidence when Forster writes about how Gertrude Stein ‘has smashed up and pulverised her clock and scattered its fragments over the world like the limbs of Osiris, and she has done this not from naughtiness but from a noble motive: she has hoped to emancipate fiction from the tyranny of time.’ It doesn’t last; Forster’s far too urbane for that kind of violence or primal rite. And such rites of modernism, though they still look alarmingly experimental to the mainstream eye, are old hat to us now a hundred years on, so post is a post is a post is a post. We’re well past the end of the century when time, for the first time, curved, bent, slipped, flashforwarded and flashbacked yet still kept on rolling along. We know it all now, with our thoughts traveling at the speed of tweet, our 140 characters in search of a paragraph. We’re post-history. We’re post-mystery.
5: Please Mr. Post Man, Look and See: Remembrance of Things Post
The twentieth century was wedded to the remembrance of things past, with Proust making the act of remembrance an art of sensory timeslip in the first texts which would become A la Recherche du Temps Perdu in 1913 and with Joyce making an epic forever out of a single passing ordinary day with the serialization of the first chapters of Ulysses not long after.
Then at its center the twentieth century pivots on a vision like this one from Victor Klemperer, the Jewish academic and diarist whose career at the University of Dresden was interrupted in the 1930s by Nazi anti-Semitic laws, who lived out the war years on a knife edge, and who, having survived, just, writes the following in his diary on November 8, 1945, about sitting, not long after the defeat of Hitler’s regime, listening to a talk on the radio (translated here by Martin Chalmers):
Radio Beromünster: Reddar (that’s what the magic word sounded like), the English ray invention, which allowed them to see U-boats and guide air planes by wireless, and gave them victory at sea and in the air. Inserted in the talk a piece of a Hitler speech, the very piece I once myself heard standing outside the offices of the Freiheitskampf. And if the war lasts 3 years — we’ll still have our say! — and if it lasts 4 years…and if 5, and if 6…we will not capitulate! It was his voice! It was his voice, his agitated and inflammatory furious shouting, I clearly recognised it again…And with it applause and Nazi songs. A shatteringly present past…[To think] that this is past, and that its presence can be restored to the present, always and at every moment!
Almost as though he can’t believe such repetition possible, Klemperer apes it here, repeats himself: ‘It was his voice! It was his voice…’ But it’s the phrase ‘a shatteringly present past’ that reveals a vandalism in this particular repetition. Old stories repeat themselves, but always to new ends and always to this end: a renewal of vision. What Klemperer — terribly — doesn’t know is that this past will still be playing in its endless numbing loop on all our tv screens sixty years later in a new century. The god technology, as Klemperer suggests sitting by the radio speaker, is a Pandora of a box; it can make the invisible visible, do wonders, help win and stop foul wars, and out of the same place comes the first shattering, then numbing power to make history repeat until it becomes banality (to use the word Hannah Arendt did to describe Nazi evil).
Its knowing brings with it, like all knowledges, a twin forgetfulness, and the most recent form this forgetfulness takes is made visible here in the following poem by Jackie Kay, whose subject is a poet searching — doing an online search — for an old poem of hers which happens to be about another pivotal moment in time, the time when one century turns into another. Its title is http://www.google.co.uk/
I thought I’d cut and pasted my poem about the year 1999
but when I pressed paste all that came up was
http://www.google.co.uk/
so I decided to look up Mahler symphony no 7 in Wikipedia
but when I went on line Wikipedia was blacked out for 24 hours
and they wanted me to twitter my support
And when I hit google a message said google isn’t your default