(Another very nice comment from Matt on untimely conversations, an interesting reflection by Jodi on the temporality of blogging, and various reflections on the recent summer solstice have inspired the following meditions on time and untimeliness).
In a famous scene in Charlie Chaplin’s The Pawnshop (1916), a customer brings Chaplin (playing a pawnshop owner’s assistant) an alarm clock to be pawned, and then watches in horror as Chaplin’s character inspects the clock by dismantling it piece by piece. At the end of the lengthy operation, he announces he will not purchase the clock, and returns it (now a pile of completely useless pieces) to the dumbfounded customer.
A pawn shop represents a rather peculiar hybrid of a monetary, barter, and gift economies. Commodities are exchanged for immediate cash, and at the same time constitute an implicit promise of future returns. What is amusing about the scene in Chaplin’s movie is that it is precisely at the moment in which the potential exchange value of the clock as commodity is being evaluated, that its use value is quite literally destroyed. What the customer gets in return for the lengthy inspection is his own alarm clock, returned to him in pieces, no longer able to tell time but itself constituting an indexical marker of the elapsed time of the pawn shop evaluation itself.
In “Commodity Time,” the latest fragment of his “Age of Aesthetics” project, Steven Shaviro argues more generally that “rhythms of consumption” help constitute the temporal fabric of contemporary society, even as the commodity itself represents, he agues, an immediacy (“an eternal now, a perpetual present”) which essentially challenges the integrity of the temporal order itself:
Commodities bring us into a special relationship with time. That is to say, commodities are at the heart of how we relate to ourselves. For time is the privileged medium of our inner lives; it is the very substance of introspection. As Kant puts it, ”time is nothing but the form of inner sense, i.e., of the intuiting we do of ourselves and of our inner state.” And in the world of commodities, this “inner sense” is organized around the rhythms of consumption — or, more precisely, of buying. Commodities seem to beckon to us from an eternal now, a perpetual present.
Steven’s remarks have led me to think about the temporal status of a very specific kind of commodity: the clock itself, and more specifically the ways in which broken clocks are positioned in several recent Chinese-language novels I have discussed in recent posts: Li Yongping’s 1992 Haidong qing, Yu Hua’s Brothers (2006), and Yan Lianke’s Ding Village Dream (2006).
Over and over again in the latently pedophilic Haidong qing, for instance, the adult male protagonist Jin Wu obsessively checks the time on the watches of his young female companions. This seemingly innocent gesture of telling time from young girls’ wrist watches metonymically has the effect of endowing the girls with precisely the same temporal continuity that their own intellectual precocity, and potentially sexualized bodies, would appear to threaten.
On particularly revealing instance of this sort of temporal parasitism occurs when Jin Wu gazes out of his taxi window and sees that that the clock on the wall on the National Parliament building reads 4:05. Even after having seen the parliament building clock, however, Jin Wu immediately proceeds to look at the wrist-watch of his young female friend, Ya Xing, and, seeing that it reads four o’clock, he notes that the parliament building clock appears to be five minutes fast. Ya Xing replies that, actually, the public clock has been stopped at five past four for many years now. The coincidence that the frozen time of the Parliament clock happens to coincide almost precisely with the time on the watch worn by the young Ya Xing, and the resulting uncanny synchronicity suggesting a pattern of transtemporal transferances between missing mothers and young girls—which together symbolize a very attenuated and self-contradictory attitude, in Taiwan as a whole, for the Chinese “motherland.”
A similar figure of a broken watch also figures in Yu Hua’s Brothers. At one point in the latter half of the novel, Li Guangtou attempts to give his step-brother Song Gang a broken watch he had found collecting scraps ten days earlier. He excitedly explains to Song Gang:
“Look at the foreign words on the watch: this is a foreign brand. The time it tells is not Beijing time, but rather Greenwich Mean Time. I found it in some trash.”
Song Gang didn’t see any watch hands, and asked, “Why are there no hands?”
“You can attach three pieces of metal wire to serve as watch hands,” Li Guangtou answered. “Spend a little money to fix it, and it will tell Greenwich Mean Time again.”
Suddenly, Li Guangtou put the watch in Song Gang’s pocket, and generously said, “This is for you.”
Song Gang was surprised, not having expected Li Guangtou to give him something which he, Li, treasured so much. Therefore, he embarrassedly took the watch out of his pocket and handed it back to Li Guangtou, saying, “You keep it.”
This curious gift (or attempted gift) marks several important transitional points in the novel. First, it coincides with the beginning of Li Guangtou’s scrap-collecting business—a very humble enterprise which quickly leads to his becoming a wealthy businessman. Second, this attempted gift coincides with Song Gang’s acknowledgement that, with the deaths of their respective surviving parents, there are no longer any fixed legal kinship ties binding the two stepbrothers together. Third, this is also the period during which Li Guangtou begins an affair with Song Gang’s wife—an affair which will lead eventually to Song Gang’s suicide.
After Song Gang refuses to accept the watch, Li Guangtou then proceeds to meticulously add three pieces of iron thread to the watch face—making it look as though the watch has hands, though they do not move. Li Guangtou then wears this watch proudly, and whenever anyone asks him why the time on it is incorrect, he explains that it is because the watch is set to Greenwich Mean Time rather than Beijing time. Soon, however, Li Guangtou gives his foreign watch away to a local madman, and starts wearing a domestic model instead.
This broken foreign watch, in the novel, functions not as a record of temporal continuity, but rather as a marker of temporal rupture. The fact that it is broken only reaffirms, if anything, its status as a commodity with very specific cultural connotations. The armless watch face becomes a cipher, an empty signifier of the temporal-cultural fabric within which it is embedded.
Yan Lianke’s Ding Village Dream, meanwhile, concludes with the narrator’s grandfather visiting his nephew’s home, and discovering that it is filled with furniture and other artifacts that have been looted from the village school where the grandfather worked most of his life. In particular, the grandfather was charged with ringing the school bell, and it is this same bell that he finds abandoned behind the nephew’s front door. “Bell” (钟), in Chinese, also means “clock,” and the grandfather’s bell did indeed serve quite literally as a clock, used to mark the hours of the school day. Stolen from the school and being used—on account of the sheer weight of its iron—as a mundane doorstop, this “bell” has been robbed not only of ability to make sound, but also of its ability to function as a clock for this small community.
Though the same character, 钟, can mean either "bell" or "clock," these latter two temporal technologies work in very different ways. As Wu Hung explains in Remaking Beijing, the “basic conception and function of time [in traditional China] gave birth to two separate systems of technology known as time-telling and time-keeping.” Traditional bell and drum towers, he explains, served the first purpose, but not the second:
There towers were not “clocks,” because the did not compute time and didn’t record the passage of time. They came alive only at designated moments, when they amplified signals from an official clock and transmitted these signals to the public. What the towers presented to the public, therefore, was not a continuous, even and unidirectional movement of time, but an official schedule of projected operations and recurring events.
Even poached, dislocated, and discarded, the grandfather’s school bell still has the capacity to symbolically mark a temporal juncture, a moment of transition from one state to another—which is to say, it appears that it is precisely this alienated reencounter with the discarded bell which previously represented his very livelihood, which spurs the grandfather, as much as anything, else, to go through with his determination to murder his own son.
In addition to signaling moments of transition, therefore, broken clocks in each of these three contemporary novels function as metaphors for a certain inversion of the natural socio-temporal order. Just as, in Dream Village Dream, the abandoned bell/clock closely anticipates with the grandfather decision to murder his own son; and in Brothers the (failed) gift of the watch between (step)brothers coincides with both the discussion of the end of the fraternal relationship, as well the act of betrayal and infidelity which will literally lead one to his death; similarly, in Haidong Qing the stopped parliament clock signifies a Taiwanese political-temporal order that is in stasis, nostalgically looking over its shoulder at its Chinese origins—a political ambivalence which is then overlaid onto the novel’s discrete fascination with pedophilic attraction for preternaturally mature “motherly” girls.
This question of the nature of time, and the function of mechanical of time-pieces, finally, is memorably explored in Thomas Mann’s classic The Magic Mountain. Hans Castorp, the protagonist of that work, travels to a mountain sanatorium to visit his cousin, whereupon Castorp himself is unexpectedly diagnosed with TB as well, and ends up having to stay at the sanatorium for another seven years.
The relationship between objective and subjective time is a recurrent theme throughout this work, and is articulated most succinctly in a discussion of a dream Castorp has soon after arriving. The dream represents a distillation of synthesis of the Castorp’s experiences after arriving at the sanatorium, and concludes with an allusion to an account, from earlier that day, how some patients would attempt to manipulate their temperatures (particularly in order to hid the fact that they have actually recovered and therefore must now leave the sanatorium) by heating up the thermometers to the desired temperature while the nurses are not looking. For those recalcitrant patients, the sanatorium staff provides a special kind of thermometer, a “silent sister” with no visible markings (thereby ensuring that the patient will not be able to bring it to the desired temperature. At the end of the dream, Castorp is
unexpectedly vouchsafed a signal insight into the true nature of time; it proved to be nothing more or less than a “silent sister,” a mercury column without degrees, to be used by those who wanted to cheat.
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