UC Irvine FlashPoints Title The Cosmic Time of Empire: Modern Britain and World Literature Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/11b4j2kv Author Barrows, Adam Publication Date 2010-12-01 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California The Cosmic Time of Empire flashpoints The series solicits books that consider literature beyond strictly national and disciplinary frameworks, distinguished both by their historical grounding and their theoretical and conceptual strength. We seek studies that engage theory without losing touch with history and work historically without falling into uncritical positivism. FlashPoints aims for a broad audience within the humanities and the social sciences concerned with moments of cultural emergence and transformation. In a Benjaminian mode, FlashPoints is interested in how literature contributes to forming new constellations of culture and history and in how such formations function critically and politically in the present. Available online at http://repositories.cdlib.org/ucpress. Series Editors: Ali Behdad (Comparative Literature and English, UCLA); Judith Butler (Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley), Founding Editor; Edward Dimendberg (Film & Media Studies, UC Irvine), Coordinator; Catherine Gallagher (English, UC Berkeley), Founding Editor; Jody Greene (Literature, UC Santa Cruz); Susan Gillman (Literature, UC Santa Cruz); Richard Terdiman (Literature, UC Santa Cruz) 1. On Pain of Speech: Fantasies of the First Order and the Literary Rant, by Dina Al-Kassim 2. Moses and Multiculturalism, by Barbara Johnson, with a foreword by Barbara Rietveld 3. The Cosmic Time of Empire: Modern Britain and World Literature, by Adam Barrows 4. Poetry in Pieces: César Vallejo and Lyric Modernity, by Michelle Clayton The Cosmic Time of Empire Modern Britain and World Literature Adam Barrows university of california press Berkeley • Los Angeles • London University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2011 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Barrows, Adam. The cosmic time of empire : modern Britain and world literature / Adam Barrows. p. cm. — (Flash points ; 3) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-520-26099-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. English fi ction—19th century—History and criticism. 2. English fi ction—20th century—History and criticism. 3. Time in literature. 4. Modernism (Literature)—English-speaking countries. 5. Time—Political aspects. 6. Time—Systems and standards. I. Title. PR830.T5B37 2011 823′.80933—dc22 2010019955 Manufactured in the United States of America 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on Cascades Enviro 100, a 100% post consumer waste, recycled, de-inked fi ber. FSC recycled certifi ed and processed chlorine free. It is acid free, Ecologo certifi ed, and manufactured by BioGas energy. For Tim Brennan This page intentionally left blank Contents List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction: Modernism and the Politics of Time 1 1. Standard Time, Greenwich, and the Cosmopolitan Clock 22 2. “Turning From the Shadows That Follow Us”: Modernist Time and the Politics of Place 53 3. At the Limits of Imperial Time; or, Dracula Must Die! 75 4. “The Shortcomings of Timetables”: Greenwich, Modernism, and the Limits of Modernity 100 5. “A Few Hours Wrong”: Standard Time and Indian Literature in English 129 Conclusion: A Postmodern Politics of Time? Negri’s “Global Phenomenological Fabric” and Amis’s Backward Arrow 154 Notes 171 Bibliography 193 Index 205 This page intentionally left blank Illustrations figures 1. A graphic illustration of the diversity of world time before 1884 / 32 2. Fleming’s model of the globe as the perfect timepiece / 33 3, 4, 5. Illustrations of three radical clock-dial reforms / 120 table 1. The voting on Resolutions II and V at the International Prime Meridian Conference / 44 ix This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments This book began as an idea in a seminar at the University of Minne- sota on nineteenth-century masculinities. The course was taught by Lois Cucullu, and the rigorous interweaving of popular and canonical texts with cultural theory that she modeled in that class set the groundwork for much of the intellectual work that I would do in the following years. I have dedicated the book to Tim Brennan, not only because he was my dissertation director on the project, but because he has served as a pro- fessional mentor and role model for me over the years. As an intellectual whose teaching and writing exemplify his honesty and political commit- ment, Tim has shaped my understanding of what it is possible to achieve in this profession. I was fortunate to benefi t from the keen insights of Brian Goldberg and John Mowitt, who read the book as a dissertation and helped to shape its evolution. Also at the University of Minnesota I greatly benefi ted from frank and open professional interchanges with my graduate student cohort through a productive dissertation writing group. I am grateful to the members of that group, particularly Marie- Therese Sulit, Melanie Brown, and Diana Ostrander, each of whom read rough drafts of most of the chapters, often multiple times. Much of the early writing and research for this project was greatly assisted with the support of a William W. Stout fellowship and two consecutive Ruth Drake fellowships at the University of Minnesota. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to present early versions of these arguments at professional conferences. In particular I was for- xi xii | Acknowledgments tunate to participate in a seminar on simultaneity with Stephen Kern and others at the seventh annual Modernist Studies Association conven- tion in Chicago, and I thank Edward Aiken for organizing that event. At the 123rd annual Modern Language Association convention, also in Chicago, I participated in a lively panel presentation on “Modern- ist Mean Time” organized by Jessica Burstein. My thanks to her and also to John Paul Riquelme, John G. Peters, and Carrie Preston, who offered encouragement and insight following that event. An abbreviated version of chapter 4 appeared in the journal Modern Fiction Studies. I am grateful to the Johns Hopkins University Press for their permission to reprint that material here. The archival research on which the argu- ments in chapter 1 are based was conducted during two trips to Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa, the fi rst of which was funded by a Samuel Holt Monk/Moses Marston research award from the University of Minnesota. I am grateful to the staff, reference librarians, archivists, and freelance researchers at LAC for their assistance with this project. As a fi rst-time author I was fortunate to bring this book to comple- tion under the guidance of the editorial board of the Flashpoints series. Thanks especially to Ed Dimendberg, who guided me gracefully through the process, to Hannah Love at the University of California Press, and to the external reviewers of the manuscript, whose attentive, fair, and rigorous responses to my work have helped to make this book what it is. Substantial revision of the manuscript was carried out at Salisbury University, and I thank my colleagues there for their support, as well as my new colleagues at Carleton University, who have enthusiastically welcomed me into their department. Thanks to my parents, Tom and Susan, for their unconditional love and support, to Bob and Amy, Henry and the late Dorothy Hill, to Denis and Cindy, Bob and Marlys, Beau and Nisha, Nick and Stefanie, and all those who have supported me over the years. Finally, to my wife, Darla, and son, Elliot, who know better than anyone what the costs of this project have been, I offer this book with my love. Introduction Modernism and the Politics of Time A concern with time is intrinsic to the internal logic of modernity. “More than anything else,” Zygmunt Bauman writes, modernity is the “history of time: the time when time has history” (“Time and Space Reunited,” 172). Radically breaking with the authority and legitimacy of the past, modernity offers a totalizing vision of progress toward an illimitable future.1 Its universal narrative of irrepressible global develop- ment presupposes a uniform scale of spatial and temporal measurement. In this context the legislative creation of world standard time at the International Prime Meridian Conference of 1884 stands as a signal moment in the history of modernity, providing a global grid whereby the minutest spatial unit and the most infi nitesimal duration of time could be measured in relation to Greenwich, England. Convened in Washington, D.C., at the behest of a group of American metrologists and engineers with the Canadian industrialist Sandford Fleming as their spokesman, the goal of the Prime Meridian Conference was to establish the meridian of longitude passing through Greenwich as the spatial and temporal zero point for global cartography and civil time measure- ment. The issue at the conference was a particularly modern one: Did individual nations possess sovereignty over the regulation of civil life, down to the very intimate rhythms of temporal activity? Or was time, as Fleming insisted, transnational, universal, or, in his own terminology, “cosmopolitan”? Despite what one dissenting astronomer termed the “ancient and necessary barriers” of nations, time was conceivably the 1 2 | Introduction metaphysical principle that transcended all cultural and political divi- sion.2 The Prime Meridian Conference would ultimately render Green- wich not only an international symbol of the British Empire, but also the cosmopolitan standard for measuring the very limits of modernity.