Recessional - Or, the Time of the Hammer
By Tom McCarthy
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About this ebook
The latest edition in Diaphanes’s THINK ART series, which explores the cultural and theoretical impact of artistic processes, Recessional—Or, the Time of the Hammer opens with an essay by McCarthy on recessional time as an aesthetic element and literary device. This essay is followed by an interview with McCarthy, in which he further discusses his own writing process, taking his most recent novel, Satin Island, as the starting point and casting new light on both avant-garde and realist literature.
Praise for Remainder
“An avant-garde challenge. . . . [McCarthy is] one of the great English novelists of the past ten years.”—Zadie Smith
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Recessional - Or, the Time of the Hammer - Tom McCarthy
Tom McCarthy
Recessional—Or,
the Time of the Hammer
Edited by Elisabeth Bronfen
diaphanes
Series THINK ART of the Institute for Critical Theory (ith) – Zurich University of the Arts and the Centre for Arts and Cultural Theory (ZKK) – University of Zurich
ISBN (ePub) 978-3-03734-615-0
ISBN (Mobipocket) 978-3-03734-616-7
© diaphanes, Zurich-Berlin 2016
All rights reserved.
Layout: 2edit, Zurich
www.diaphanes.com
Contents
Recessional—Or,
the Time of the Hammer
Obsessed with buffering
Questions to Tom McCarthy
Something that is not nothing
Zurich seminar
Editorial Note
Tom McCarthy
Recessional—Or,
the Time of the Hammer
Towards the end of Thomas Pynchon’s mammoth 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow, the stumbling ingénue of a hero Tyrone Slothrop sets off on a commando raid. The territory he and his cohorts move through is a giant metropolis, a factory-state
in which capital, technology and power, perfectly co-calibrated, send airships drifting through urban canyons, past chrome caryatids and roof-gardens on skyscrapers that themselves shoot up and down on elevator-cables: a conurbation Pynchon calls the City of the Future
or Raketen-Stadt.
The raid’s target, though, is not a building; nor is it a person; it is, rather, time. Slothrop has been dispatched to rescue the Radiant Hour,
which associates of a villain known only as the Father
have abstracted from the day’s 24.
As Slothrop, suiting up and setting out, is handed a note informing him, in matinee adventure style: The Radiant Hour is being held captive, if you want to see her …,
the bullets zinging past his head conveniently
give over to a clock face, drifting, like the airships, through the sky.
How do we digest or get a bearing on this bizarre episode? The fact that one of the Floundering Four
commandos is a very serious-looking French refugee kid
named Marcel, a mechanical chess-player dating back to the Second Empire
given to long-winded monologues, might point us towards Proust, inviting us to view Slothrop’s escapade as a reworking of that other raid on lost (or misappropriated) time, stage-managed by a writer who has put something extra in his madeleines. The intention was probably there on Pynchon’s part—yet as I re-read the sequence a few weeks ago, my mind kept drifting (maybe it was the Franco-Germanic mix of Marcel and Raketen-Stadt, the general elevation of the setting) to another scene, another half-occluded precedent; one that plays out, like this evening’s talk, in Switzerland.
Thomas Mann’s equally-mammoth work The Magic Mountain announces, right from the outset, an obsession with time. As Hans Castorp (another ingénue protagonist) winds his way up through mountains to the Davos sanatorium to visit his tubercular cousin, the space through which his train chuffs starts to take on the powers we generally ascribe to time.
Numerous temporal meditations follow—on duration, on persistence, continuity, recurrence. As though foreseeing that Davos would become the seat of the World Economic Forum, Mann has one of Hans’s teachers, Naphta, explain the global financial market to him as a temporally-grounded system, a mechanism for receiving a premium for the passage of time—interest, in other words.
At the outset of a chapter titled By the Ocean of Time,
the form and very possibility of the book we are reading become similarly index-linked to time, For time is the medium of narration.
Can one tell—that is to say, narrate—time, time itself, as such, for its own sake?
Mann wonders. No: That would surely be an absurd undertaking.
Yet he concedes that any narrative contains two kinds of time: that of its actual time, the time it takes to iterate itself; and that of its content, which is extremely relative,
such that a narrative that concerned itself with the events of five minutes might take up hundreds of hours, and, conversely, the contents of a moment’s iteration might expand beyond the extreme limit of man’s temporal capacity for experience.
The latter, expansive instances, he claims, are possessed of a morbid element
and are akin to opium dreams in which something had been taken away
from the brain of the sleeper, like the spring from a broken watch.
Hans plans to stay at the sanatorium for three weeks; but, himself diagnosed with TB on arrival, is held up there for seven years. His illness not only forces an extended delay, time off from his work as an engineer, a general time-out from his life; it also imposes its own temporality. When you are ill in bed, Mann writes,
All the days are nothing but the same day repeating itself—or rather, since it is always the same day, it is incorrect to speak of repetition; a continuous present, an identity, an everlastingness—such words as these would better convey the idea. They bring you your midday broth, as they brought it yesterday and will bring it tomorrow; and it comes over you—but whence or how you do not know,