Four Phases of Time and Literary Modernism

“Isn’t time the essential dynamic of the West?” This was the rhetorical question put to me by a Rumanian sociologist in New York City a few years back. Having just completed a book whose subject was that very thesis, I could not disagree. And indeed it does seem that whenever there is a new stirring of this dynamic, time as a concept becomes extremely active in literature. In Jacqueline de Romilly’s Time in Greek Tragedy, the Sorbonne classicist argues that time and a sense of history emerged together and were integral to the great age of Greek tragedy.1 This book, incidentally, should be read in order to counter the hasty assumption that the Greek sense of time was uniformly cyclical. My own The Renaissance Discovery of Time shows the many ways that time entered quite specifically into the re-awakening and quickening of life among the European countries in the Renaissance, and retrospectively indicated how many of the Renaissance sources for their inspired addresses to time were from Roman literature.2 One notices the gap of the Middle Ages; this is not because I deplore that period of our cultural history — quite the contrary is true (although it might represent my ignorance of it) — but rather my scholarly belief, which has not yet been countered, that in the Middle Ages, this dynamic lay fallow and, as a consequence, the concept of time as we have later come to regard it was largely non-existent. And whenever in public gatherings I express this belief, medievalists immediately become angry, as if I am shortchanging their period. When asked, however, to cite some instances similar to those I show in the Renaissance, and even when given several days advance notice they normally can muster only two or three relatively minor and even disputable utterances. From the Renaissance, however, if one were called to such a presentation, within a few minutes one could cite some thirty major works where the sense of time is a central, vital and dynamic concept. When we come to Victorian society, a society on the move if there ever were, time was again something of an obsession, as Jerome Buckley’s The Triumph of Time attests.3 Time has been, and should be, treated as a major theme of Western literature; I can be more specific and refer to it as an indicator-theme, one that clearly points to and is even instrumental in the surges and sags of Western society.