Toil and Trouble: On the Materiality of Time

Ross Chambers

doi:10.5130/csr.v20i1.3829

Abstract

This article explores the nature of temporality, entropy and negentropy, drawing contemporary fiction by Graham Swift and Fiona McGregor as well as the autobiography of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, to ask questions about history, time and life.

Highlights

The form of study we call ‘history’, is an after-‐the-‐event ‘investigation’ or ‘story’ (Greek: ‘istoria’), of the changes in the material world of ‘nature’, on the one hand, and in the human or social world of ‘culture’, on the other—changes that we ISSN 1837-8692 call history
There’s an interesting essay by Roger Chartier, in which he shows that European universities, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, began to take in more students than the Church, with its monopoly on classical knowledge, could absorb.[1]
Of change in both the natural world and the social world of the human, history, is the name we give to the material, and perceptible, effects of time; those outcomes that make time available to the examination of the scholars we call historians

Summary

ROSS CHAMBERS

For Kane Race and Meaghan Morris, without whom. There’s an interesting essay by Roger Chartier, in which he shows that European universities, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, began to take in more students than the Church, with its monopoly on classical knowledge, could absorb.[1]. That’s why there’s always a Terror waiting around the corner.[5 ] (You will have gathered that the speaker is a history teacher, and that he is teaching a class about the French Revolution.) Ooze and silt, in Waterland, are manifestations of this ‘natural stuff’ that materialises the everyday passing of time, while a river in full flood sweeping everything it can out to sea is both the site of the novel’s most dramatic and destructive events, and its figure for entropy’s damaging power at the height of its effect—the narrator’s ‘natural stuff’ that tends always to build and accumulate until it is unleashed as a violent event It is the brewing of beer, Waterland’s key industry, that—like the witches brew in Macbeth—provides a central motif, or rather a figure, for the novel’s preoccupation with toil and more especially trouble: the stirring of the cauldron, or its overflow, that unleashes so much damage.

Fossil fuels

—NOTES