Pages: 51

This chapter outlines the dominant temporal logic in the new millennium – surveillance capitalist “network time” that has led to the crisis of time – and its connection with acceleration, dyschronia, and deceleration. Then the dominant tendencies in Anglo-American literature are described to provide a context for fiction about time. Exploring the current milieu of digital and network temporalities, literature becomes the terrain of the entanglements between the human and technological, which entails the redefinition of human identity and the self. What follows, therefore, is an overview of various approaches to the nature of cognitive processes: the paradigms of cognitivism, connectionism, and embodiment, and their links to posthumanism and transhumanism. This chapter proceeds to focus on fiction’s response to the new consciousness of time. Literature mirrors the shifting attitudes to time and forges new conceptualizations, providing productive alternatives to the dominant capitalist ecology of time, inscribed in non-linear modes of time, outlined in the next section. The last part of the Introduction constitutes an overview of this book’s chapters, whose main aim is to analyze such alternative temporal experiences and configurations and demonstrate that literature remains a valid medium for theorizing and representing time.

Pages: 32

Chapter 1 addresses a new mode of temporality marked by an anticipation of the ultimate end, and trauma and anxiety, instigated by the turn of the millennium and 9/11 terrorist attacks. In Don DeLillo’s novels Point Omega and Zero K, this anticipation is paired with the decelerated flow of time. The two novels fashion suspended time and encode it in the image of the desert that opens up onto distinct rhythms of geologic time. In Point Omega, the protagonist retreats to the desert to cleanse from the culture of acceleration linked to the city and experience slowness represented by geologic time. Although he declares a wish for the “omega point” described by Teilhard de Chardin as a culmination of the evolution of historical consciousness, in fact, the protagonist desires the ultimate end and human extinction. Zero K features preparations for eternal life through cryonics. However, the exploration of the relationships between time, language, consciousness, and identity reveals that cryonics entails a process of deconstructing one’s identity that cannot be reversed. With the image of suspended time, DeLillo juxtaposes deep presence or resonance that represents a reclamation of time for one’s own conscious use away from capitalist productivity.

Pages: 35

Western culture tends to separate the notion of phenomenological time (subjective time experienced in individual consciousness) from cosmological time (objective time, accessible through the clock), arguing that they take place on different levels and have no connection. This classic opposition is challenged in three time-travel novels, John Wray’s The Lost Time Accidents, Charles Yu’s How to Live in a Science Fictional Universe, and Adam Roberts’s The Thing Itself. Untypically of time travel plots, the two texts explore the relationship between human consciousness and time so as to dismantle and transgress it. While Wray’s and Yu’s novels propose that there is external time, yet even if we could perceive it, the picture would be tainted by our consciousness, The Thing Itself goes further and proffers – consistently with Immanuel Kant’s ideas, which it enacts – that there is no space or time in the external world; they are instead parts of human consciousness, used to order reality. The novels thus revise the simplistic opposition between phenomenological and cosmological time, advancing the two temporal experiences as two aspects of consciousness of time that complement each other.

Pages: 29

Chapter 3 addresses fictions that feature a memory of the future that has not been lived yet, which is rationalized by science (Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” and Robert J. Sawyer’s FlashForward), clairvoyance (Philip K. Dick’s The Minority Report), or the mixture of the two (Natasha Pulley’s The Watchmaker of Filigree Street and The Lost Future of Pepperharrow). The fictions explore the consequences for an individual of previewing the future, the possibilities of rewriting the anticipated events, and the questions of free will and determinism in the universe that constitutes a permanent record of events that happen timelessly. In the framework of reversed causality, the present is determined by the future, rather than the past, and what is emphasized is the agency of the present with its potential to impact the future. Future memory disrupts the causal linear paradigm of identity formation and leads to the subject’s loss of continuity, becoming part of their archive of personal history, even if it is not fully experienced. While preview of the future in the deterministic framework crushes human agency and destroys the present, within the frame of compatibilism or contingency, it appears politically productive, helping an individual to make an informed choice.

Pages: 41

Vauhini Vara’s novel The Immortal King Rao and Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House extrapolate from the present role of the Internet in memory archivization to envision uploading the totality of personal memories to the network. The novels portray a web of human memories as a neural network, anticipating a new type of memory that fuses humanist conceptions of collective and cultural memory with the biotechnological notion of the global brain, whereby the self turns into a node in the system of networked memory. In this model, the boundaries of the self become unstable and porous, which results in anxiety about renouncing one’s autonomy and private interiority and disrupting the continuity of the self. Vara’s novel depicts this loss of self through the contamination of the protagonist’s consciousness by the upload of her father’s memories. In Egan’s book, identity is unsettled by the altered temporal relations of the new memory and its non-narrative quality, equating memories with a database. Both novels thereby trace a paradigm shift in the nature of memory under the influence of the digital, and, by inference, the nature of human identity, revealing the process that leads to a gradual separation of memory from personal identity.

Pages: 4

This conclusion sums up the argument of this book. Responding to the crisis of time and creating multiple alternative timeframes that resist the capitalist time regime, literature employs non-linear models to explore the changing designations of human entanglement with the surrounding temporalities. As many literary works repeatedly demonstrate, inhabiting atemporal timeframes, particularly in the network society that has disturbed our former anchoring in space and time, endangers the integrity of human identity to the point of erasure. In this situation, the salient role of narrative – and literature – reveals itself in the digital era to ensure the integrity of time, consciousness, identity, and meaning. This chapter gestures at future explorations of representations of temporality in literature after the recent caesura of the pandemic, which, similar to 9/11, recalibrated time acceleration and brought about the end of the 9/11 era.