Greenwich Meanings: Clocks and Things in Modernist and Postmodernist Fiction

Abstract

The clock inside the Gare du Nord read 11:17: Paris time minus five minutes, Belgian railway time plus four minutes, mid-Europe time minus 56 minutes. To Melanie, who had forgotten her travelling clock --who had forgotten everything -- the hands might have stood anywhere [. . .] By the cover of Le Soleil, the Orleanist morning paper, it was 24 July 1913. Louis Philippe Robert, duc d'Orleans, was the current Pretender. Certain quarters of Paris raved under the heat of Sirius [. . .] Melanie l'Heuremaudit was driven away down the rue La Fayette in a noisy auto-taxi. Historical stresses underlying much twentieth-century fiction are to be found in Chapter 14 of Thomas Pynchon's V., not least in the strange chronology described in its opening, quoted above, and echoed in Melanie's second name, which translates as 'the accursed hour'.[1] Typically of Pynchon's fiction, those clocks seem odd but have a firm historical basis. In A la recherche du temps perdu, Proust also refers to the survival of mid-European time, and even the Eastern calendar, into the early decades of the twentieth century. Within France, to help tardy travellers catch their trains, station clocks in 1913 still kept 'l'heure de la gare', five minutes slower, as Pynchon suggests, than the 'Paris time' shown on all the capital's other clocks. Belgian trains, on the other hand, still ran exactly on Brussels time, which differed from that of Paris in the early years of the century. Melanie's loss of her travelling clock at least saves her the irritation of having to reset it in the course of her journey from Belgium, a task often necessary for railway travellers in the nineteenth century and, as Pynchon shows, into the early part of the twentieth, at least on the Continent. Travelling clocks of a different sort had already ended this problem within Britain. Railway companies in the mid-nineteenth century sent officials with accurate chronometers up and down the country, resetting station clocks to eliminate local times in favour of a national standard, Railway Time, established more or less throughout the land by 1848. It was further institutionalized as part of the new global standards set up by the International Meridian Conference of 1884, which answered the needs of travel, shipping, telegraphy, and other commercial interests by placing the Prime Meridian at Greenwich Observatory, also established as the centre of a world-wide system of time zones and Mean Time. Contemporary public interest in the new arrangements is evident in Arthur Wing Pinero's The Magistrate, first performed the year after the Conference: when asked about the time, its hero cheerfully replies 'Hurray! Just half-past ten. Greenwich mean, eh Guv?'. Ulysses (1922) shows Bloom pondering in 1904 the technology through which the new standard time was disseminated throughout the British Isles when he notices a Dublin time-signal 'that falls at Greenwich time. It's the clock is worked by an electric wire from Dunsink'.[2] Ireland, however, did not fully accept Greenwich Mean Time until 1916, and other countries were similarly tardy, France particularly. For patriotic reasons, France had always favoured Paris over Greenwich as the location of the Prime Meridian, and was consequently dilatory and eventually devious in implementing the new arrangements. GMT was legally accepted as the time of France in 1896, but it was not until fifteen years later that much was done to implement it, and even then only by referring to it as 'Paris time minus nine minutes and twenty-one seconds', hence that nine-minute difference from Brussels, working on GMT since 1892, which Pynchon identifies.[3] Indeed, France's official time continued to be defined in this way until 1978, when it moved to Co-ordinated Universal Time, a measure (now generally accepted as the world standard at the end of the twentieth century) originally owing less to British efforts than to further conferences on time initiated by the French in Paris in 1912 and 1913. …