Modernist Clockwork

Like the Cyberdyne Systems model 101 cyborg in James Cameron’s The Terminator who suddenly materialises in a crackling time-displacement sphere in 1984 Los Angeles, the machine-human entity in E. V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man appears abruptly in the middle of a cricket match in an English village, having time-travelled to 1923 from 8,000 years in the future. In Odle’s text, which Brian Stableford and David Langford call ‘the earliest major cyborg novel’, this future human is ‘capable of going not only someplace but also somewhen’, because a special kind of clock has been implanted in his brain (Stableford and Langford 2018; Odle 1923: 90). By means of this internal ‘mechanical contrivance’, the clockwork man is not locked in the world of mechanistic linearity but freed from it – the clock allows him to access ‘a multiform world … a world of many dimensions’ (Odle 1923: 180, 146–7). While the novel’s anxieties about the cyborg’s loss of humanity tilt the narrative’s sympathies toward the ‘Makers’ rather than their clockwork, toward humanist finitude and freedom over slavish mechanism, The Clockwork Man also seizes ‘upon the clock as the possible symbol of a new counterpoint in human affairs’, a device for thinking beyond the usual conception of historicity and its limitations, the ‘old problems of Time and Space’ (Odle 1923: 80). Odle’s character Gregg, who considers the clock as an element in the final stages of human development, remarks that the ‘clock, perhaps, was the index of a new and enlarged order of things’, a symbol of speculative insights beyond what ‘his limited faculties could perceive’ (Odle 1923: 110, 111).

As an index of the order of things, the clock appears so frequently in early twentieth-century cultural production that, as Michael Levenson has said of the trope’s encompassing theme of temporality, ‘it can be taken as a cultural signature’ (Levenson 2004: 197). However one calculates the exact bookends of canonical modernism, the period’s time obsession lands squarely within what the historian Alexis McCrossen claims was ‘the height of the public clock era in the United States and indeed throughout the world’ (McCrossen 2013: 6).