One decade is covered by each of the ten volumes in The Edinburgh History of Twentieth-Century Literature in Britain series. Individual volumes may argue that theirs is the decade of the century. The series as a whole considers the twentieth century as the century of decades. All eras are changeful, but the pace of change has itself steadily accelerated throughout modern history, and never more swiftly than under the pressures of political crises and of new technologies and media in the twentieth century. Ideas, styles and outlooks came into dominance, and were then displaced, in more and more rapid succession, characterising ever-briefer periods, sharply separated from predecessors and successors.

Time-spans appropriate to literary or cultural history shortened correspondingly, and on account not only of change itself, but its effect on perception. How distant, for example, that tranquil, sunlit, Edwardian decade already seemed, even ten years later, after the First World War, at the start of the twenties. And how essential, too, to the self-definition of that restless decade, and later ones, that the years 1900–1910 should seem tranquil and sunlit – as a convenient contrast, not necessarily based altogether firmly on ways the Edwardians may have thought of themselves. A need to secure the past in this way – for clarity and definition, in changeful times – encourages views of earlier decades almost as a hand of familiar, well-differentiated cards, dealt out, one by one, by prior times to the present one. These no longer offer pictures of kings and queens: King Edward VII, at the start of the century, or, briefly, George V, were the last monarchs to give their names to an age. Instead, the cards are marked all the more clearly by image and number, as ‘the Twenties’, ‘the Thirties’, ‘the Forties’ and so on. History itself often seems to join in the game, with so many epochal dates – 1918, 1929, 1939, 1968, 1979, 1989, 2001 – approximating to the end of decades.

By the end of the century, decade divisions had at any rate become a firmly established habit, even a necessity, for cultural understanding and analysis. They offer much virtue, and opportunity, to the present series.

Appearing in novels a hundred years apart, these comments characterise a century of fiction which amended regularly – often radically – temporalities ticked out by the clock, or measured out by the broader evolution of history. Reading the Times assesses these amended narrative temporalities in relation to historical pressures, throughout the twentieth century, which compelled the modern novel's resistance to ‘the power of time’. It also outlines origins of these pressures in the nineteenth century, and considers in conclusion their continuing consequences for the twenty-first.

Eminent commentators on the area might differ in their assessment of the scale of enquiry this aim demands. In Time and Narrative (Temps et récit, 1983–5), Paul Ricoeur identifies fiction in which temporality is unmistakeably an issue: novels such as Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (1925), which ensure that ‘it is the very experience of time that is at stake’. Ricoeur distinguishes fiction of this kind from the majority of novels: ones which offer ‘tales about time’ only in the straightforward sense that as their narratives develop, ‘the structural transformations that affect the situations and characters take time’. In About Time (2007), on the other hand, Mark Currie considers that fiction's ‘structural transformations’ not only take time, but inevitably entail perceptions about the nature of time and its passage, suggesting that ‘all novels should be viewed as tales about time’.

Reading the Times mediates between these positions, acknowledging that temporality is fundamental to the structuring of all fictional narrative – in ways outlined in Chapter 1 – but that certain novels make this structuring particularly conspicuous, sometimes also discussing explicitly the nature of time and its measurement. Novels of this kind – highlighting in subject or structure the measures of the clock, or the influence of wider movements of history – are the ones principally discussed in the chapters that follow.

‘Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It's abominable!’ Pozzo's exclamation – in Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot (En attendant Godot, 1953) – might be considered simply to extend into the latter half of the twentieth century attitudes to ‘accursed time’ familiar from literature in its opening decades. Beckett might be supposed a natural inheritor of these attitudes, acquired through his thorough acquaintance with modernist writing at the end of the 1920s. His earliest work includes an essay published in 1929 on James Joyce, whom he knew personally as well as through his fiction; a critical study, Proust, which appeared in 1931; and ‘Whoroscope’, the winner of a prize offered the previous year for the best poem on the subject of time.

Yet Pozzos's outburst, and Waiting for Godot generally – while exhibiting some continuities with modernist writing – also reflect new and graver stresses following the Second World War. ‘When! When!’, Pozzo continues:

Temporality, for Pozzo, threatens not on account of the exacting clockwork that troubled the modernists. Struggling to find his chronometer, a much-prized heirloom, he protests instead, regretfully, that ‘surely one should hear the tick-tick’, remarking ‘damnation’ when only his heartbeat proves audible (46). Temporality, in this view, is troubling not because of its mechanical measurement, but because it scarcely seems meaningfully measurable at all – existing instead only in isolated fragments; days or seconds ‘like any other’, lacking distinction, extension or mutual relation. Life continues, in Waiting for Godot, and changes do occur – the heart beats on, the tree grows leaves, Pozzo becomes blind, and Lucky dumb – but independently of conventional, coherent continuity. In a setting as empty and featureless temporally as it is topographically – stage directions specifying only ‘A country road. A tree. Evening’ – words such as ‘yesterday’ or ‘tomorrow’ almost lose their meaning (7). Not surprisingly, Vladimir suggests it may not only be Pozzo's watch that has been lost, or ceased to tick, but rather that ‘time has stopped’ in general (36).

Not all the events surrounding the millennium were as celebratory as France's incroyable pique-nique. In one instance at least, they were thoroughly alarming. As the millennium approached, computer engineers predicted widespread problems when systems based on dates beginning in ‘19’ had to move on to ‘2000’. This potential ‘millennium bug’ threatened a disastrous global zero hour, as the century turned, disrupting or arresting air traffic, telecommunications, banking, power supplies, the internet, satellites and military systems – any or all of the innumerable agencies dependent on computerised clocks and controls. As it turned out, amended programming eliminated problems almost entirely, suggesting the risks might have been overestimated. Concerns about the bug nevertheless highlighted how comprehensively the world and its technologies had come to depend on mechanical and electronic systems of enumerating time. Global communications, computers and the internet had begun to offer some freedom from the clock, Chapter 6 suggested, but the systems and technologies involved remained thoroughly – even dangerously – in its thrall.

Concerns about the bug contributed to wider apprehensions sometimes shadowing the last hours of 1999. ‘Every New Year's Eve is impending apocalypse in miniature’, Zadie Smith suggests in her end-of-the-century novel White Teeth (2000): the eve of a new millennium naturally occasioned particularly profound concerns about epochal change and an uncertain future. Commentators often used W. B. Yeats's views of twenty centuries of the Christian era, in ‘The Second Coming’ (1921) – and of a contrary epoch which might succeed it – when looking nervously behind and ahead. ‘Mere anarchy’, increasingly evident in the twentieth century, seemed to add conviction to Yeats's apocalyptic vision of a worse period to follow, inaugurated not by some computer bug, but more grandiosely – when some ‘rough beast, its hour come round at last,/Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born’.

Anyone dreading a Yeatsian apocalypse nevertheless shared with computer programmers – and millions of revellers content simply to celebrate the millennium – a clear conviction that the stroke of midnight on 31 December 1999 constituted a defining moment in the world's experience. Commentators invoking Yeats seldom paused to wonder if ‘mere anarchy’ might not offer apocalyptic beasts a good excuse for turning up late, or early, or for not knowing the difference, or the correct place to appear.

On 14 July 2000 – the millennial Bastille Day – headlines and reports throughout the French press featured ‘l’incroyable pique-nique’. Plans for this ‘incredible picnic’ – a main event on the national holiday – had filled a special supplement in Le Monde the previous day. Huge numbers of French citizens, Le Monde explained – around 3 million – had been invited to sit down to lunch along a line spanning France from sea to sea: from Dunkirk on the Channel, southward through Paris, all the way to Prats-de-Mollo on the Mediterranean. Sections of pink-and-white chequered table-cloth – more than 600 kilometres of it – would mark out much of this picnic line. Extensive tree-planting, begun well in advance of the July holiday, would ensure that the line remained visible permanently, even from space, along its entire 960-kilometre length.

Le Monde also explained the motives shaping this ‘incredible’, nation-spanning celebration. According to one of the organisers, it was intended to ‘mobilise a whole family of memories’, celebrating liberty and the French Republic in general, and highlighting particular national triumphs in science and in the creation of the metric system. Those trees and tablecloths were obviously not placed at random, but strategically aligned in order to ‘matérialiser le méridien de Paris’: to revive and make visible the old meridian, centred on the Paris Observatory, running north–south throughout France. Established in 1667, the Paris Observatory and its meridian had acquired much-expanded roles a century or so later, contributing crucially to attempts to delineate a new world – through science, measurement and standardisation, as much as social and political change – following the Revolution of 1789. Early governments in the new French Republic sought to reform both the calendar and time-measurement generally – renaming the months, redefining weeks, and decimalising hours into 100 minutes, each made up of 100 seconds. These initiatives were discarded within a few years, but standardisations of spatial measurement were more successful. Despite the turbulence of the post-revolutionary period, surveyors were able to make observations, throughout France, which allowed them to determine the length of the Paris meridian – running from the Equator, through Paris, to the pole – and to establish a standard metre, equivalent to one ten-millionth of this length.

Paul Ricoeur introduces his term ‘monumental time’ specifically, and appropriately, in discussing Mrs Dalloway (1925). Virginia Woolf's novel addresses many of the issues summed up at the end of the previous chapter, extending in doing so several features of her writing which emerged distinctively during the period following the Great War. One of these is the growing prominence her fiction accords to clocks and their unsettling influences. Night and Day (1919) describes ‘mellow strokes … of the hour … a message from the great clock at Westminster’ falling fairly benignly across London, offering a reminder only of ‘the just and inexorable nature of time … the unhasting and unresting march of that divinity’. In Jacob's Room (1922), ‘the worn voices of clocks’ are heard rather more regularly and insistently, dividing ‘time into quarters’ or asserting ‘the fact of the hour’. The ‘large white clock of Westminster’ also makes a significant reappearance, its chimes described as resonating throughout the institutions of government, adding to the ‘inexorable gravity’ of authorities who ‘decreed … the course of history’.

Clocks – the ‘clock of Westminster’ particularly – proclaim their iron measures still more intrusively in Mrs Dalloway, and at every stage of the day the novel describes. An opening salvo from Big Ben resounds as early as its second page: ‘out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air’. This ‘great booming voice’ returns repeatedly thereafter, its ‘extraordinary vigour’ even figured on one occasion ‘as if a young man, strong, indifferent, inconsiderate, were swinging dumb-bells this way and that’ (55, 54). Big Ben's vigorous influence is regularly supplemented through being ‘blent with that of other clocks’ – ones which, echoing its magisterial divisions of the day, likewise ‘counselled submission, upheld authority’ (104, 113). Those in Harley Street have a particularly invidious role. The passage quoted in Chapter 1 goes on to explain how their ‘shredding and slicing, dividing and subdividing’ of the June day is reinforced by

Reminiscing about their profession, mariners in Joseph Conrad's Chance (1913) recall sharp disparities between the ‘glamour’ and ‘romantic associations’ promised by a career at sea and the ‘rational and practical grounds’ of the work actually involved. In Lord Jim (1900), Conrad's narrator Marlow likewise highlights difficulties awaiting anyone whom ‘cherished glamour’ has attracted towards a career in the Merchant Navy. ‘In no other kind of life is the illusion more wide of reality’, Marlow remarks, ‘the disenchantment more swift – the subjugation more complete’. Troubling the novel's central figure, first attracted to the sea by ‘a course of light holiday literature’, disenchantment of this kind may also have been experienced by the author himself. According to his friend Ford Madox Ford, Conrad ‘always declared that it was reading Peter Simple and Midshipman Easy that made him wish to go to sea’, and that he considered the author of these popular 1830s stories, Captain F. Marryat, ‘the greatest English novelist since Shakespeare’.

Conrad at any rate recalls in one of his Last Essays (1926) how sharply some of his own values – including romantic or imaginative ones required in his second career, as a novelist – conflicted with the ‘rational and practical grounds’ of his years of work in the Merchant Navy. In the intriguingly entitled memoir, ‘Outside Literature’ (1922), he reflects on how thoroughly this work depended on ‘fidelity to … the ideal of Perfect Accuracy’, vividly encapsulated in the Board of Trade's ‘Notices to Mariners’. Used to communicate crucial information to ships and sailors, these Notices offered ‘good prose’, but in a ‘language expounding the truth’, whose aims and style could hardly have been further outside literature. The Notices, Conrad emphasises,

Among the rational, practical grounds and responsibilities Conrad encountered at sea, the pursuit of ‘Perfect Accuracy’ in chronometry and navigational systems – based comprehensively on Greenwich's Mean Times and meridians – would inevitably have occupied a central role.

Cyril Connolly and Wyndham Lewis outline a late 1920s ‘obsession with the passage of Time’ quite strong enough simply to have continued into the next decade. Any such continuity was nevertheless marked by new emphases and by significant mutations within established ones. Some of these can be traced in Virginia Woolf's writing, discussed in this chapter's second section. Even before the end of the 1920s, they were apparent in other ways in J. W. Dunne's popular An Experiment with Time, published in 1927 and reissued in several further editions by the mid-1930s. Though Dunne's views often seem odd or implausible, the widespread interest they aroused in the late 1920s and 1930s makes them worth considering further, as an intriguing symptom of some of the concerns of his times.

Future Present

J. W. Dunne had been a pilot and aircraft engineer during the pioneering days of aviation, designing the first British military aircraft in 1906, three years after the Wright brothers had first achieved powered flight. He later took his friend H. G. Wells flying, around 1912. He describes his first flights – ‘the sensation was most extraordinary’ – in An Experiment with Time, and discusses temporal dimensions in terms which might be considered to resemble the aloof vision of spatial landscapes afforded by his earlier work as a pilot. Experience of precognitive dreams persuaded Dunne that the sleeping mind could rise above the ‘first-term world, where time appears as a succession of simple three-dimensional scenes, with the future entirely hidden’. Dreams, Dunne believed, could allow access to a ‘second-term world … brilliant and real’, in which ‘your past and your future lie stretched out before you like an unrolled scroll’. Like another thinker seeking to divide time into various series, John McTaggart – whose study, The Nature of Existence, also appeared in 1927 – Dunne's interest in a ‘second-term world’ led him on towards further, timeless, ontological planes, and ultimately towards asserting the eternal existence of the soul. Though arcane diagrams and semialgebraic formulations make sections of An Experiment with Time difficult reading, affirmative accounts of vision and the soul carry an obvious appeal.

Antipathies to the clock Gudrun Brangwen expresses are as vehement as any in English literature. Extending over several pages in Women in Love (1921), they suggest that ‘bondage’ to measured time gripped the society D. H. Lawrence portrays still more strongly than it had the world Joseph Conrad describes in The Secret Agent (1907). Factors contributing to this tightening grip – hardening the influence of those considered in the previous two chapters – can be traced throughout the writing Lawrence began in 1913, variously entitled ‘The Sisters’ or ‘The Wedding Ring’. This was eventually divided into two long novels: The Rainbow (1915), following several generations of the Brangwen family in the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth, and the work Lawrence considered ‘more or less a sequel’, Women in Love, set in the troubled years around the Great War. Analysis of this extended fictional history, and of differences in mood and structure between the two novels, helps suggest why ‘the terrible clock’ had come to seem so threatening by the time Women in Love was published – on the threshold of the 1920s, modernism's major decade.

Circle and Line

Early pages of The Rainbow record how the Brangwen family ‘had lived for generations on the Marsh Farm’: on ‘horizontal land’ in Nottinghamshire, beneath an ‘empty sky’ whose horizon is broken only by the distant church tower of a country town. Life for the family has long remained almost as featureless temporally as it is topographically, changing only through the kind of ‘age old rhythms’ or eternal circles considered in chapters 1 and 2 – natural, annual cycles of ‘earth and sky and beast and green plants’.

One decade is covered by each of the ten volumes in The Edinburgh History of Twentieth-Century Literature in Britain series. Individual volumes may argue that theirs is the decade of the century. The series as a whole considers the twentieth century as the century of decades. All eras are changeful, but the pace of change has itself steadily accelerated throughout modern history, and never more swiftly than under the pressures of political crises and of new technologies and media in the twentieth century. Ideas, styles, and outlooks came into dominance, and were then displaced, in more and more rapid succession, characterising ever-briefer periods, sharply separated from predecessors and successors.

Time-spans appropriate to literary or cultural history shortened correspondingly, and on account not only of change itself, but its effect on perception. How distant, for example, that tranquil, sunlit, Edwardian decade already seemed, even ten years later, after the First World War, at the start of the twenties. And how essential, too, to the self-definition of that restless decade, and later ones, that the years from 1900–1910 should seem tranquil and sunlit – as a convenient contrast, not necessarily based altogether firmly on ways the Edwardians may have thought of themselves. A need to secure the past in this way – for clarity and definition, in changeful times – encourages views of earlier decades almost as a hand of familiar, well-differentiated cards, dealt out, one by one, by prior times to the present one.