Postmodern Time and Space in Fiction and Theory by Michael Kane

Author:Michael Kane
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030374495
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Surely that transformation was enough to make one lie in bed a little longer and miss the train for work!

“The time is now”

Technology, the Simultaneous Poetry of Everyday Life, and Ulysses

The ability to communicate instantaneously with someone far away by means of telegraph, wireless telegraph and then, for larger numbers of the general public, by telephone greatly contributed, according to Kern, to an awareness not just of events happening in faraway places, but of simultaneity. Kern begins his chapter on “The Present” on the night of April 14, 1912, the night when people on over a dozen ships became aware of the disaster befalling the Titanic within minutes of the distress call sent out by wireless telegraph. Unfortunately, of course, speed of movement had not kept up with the greatly accelerated speed of communication enabled by the invention of the telegraph, and the first ship, the Carpathia, having heard the message 58 miles away, did not arrive “until almost two hours after the Titanic went down with 1522 passengers”.24 The fact that lives were saved at all could be put down to the invention of wireless telegraphy. As the New York Times noted a few days after the disaster: “But for the almost magic use of the air the Titanic tragedy would have been shrouded in the secrecy that not so long ago was the power of the sea.”25 Kern reminds us that the “first distress signal by a ship at sea was sent in 1899” and the first wireless news service was established by the Marconi Company in 1904 (p. 68). News of the disaster of the night of April 14, 1912, had travelled around the world by the early morning. The well-known tragic story serves to illustrate a point about the effect of modern communication technology on the sense of time: “The ability to experience many distant events at the same time, made possible by the wireless and dramatized by the sinking of the Titanic, was part of a major change in the experience of the present” (p. 67f.). The major change was in the heightened awareness of simultaneity—the simultaneity of local events (possibly in the same city) and distant events (possibly across the Atlantic).

If the telegraph heightened the awareness of simultaneity, “the telephone had an even broader impact and made it possible, in a sense, to be in two places at the same time” (p. 69). That, of course, implies a “major change” in the experience of place as well as of time. The geographer David Harvey also refers to this “new sense of simultaneity” in his discussion of “Money, Time, Space and the City”: “The rise of mass-circulation newspapers, the advent of telegraph and telephone, of radio and television, all contributed to a new sense of simultaneity over space and total uniformity in coordinated and universally uniform time.”26 Harvey’s emphatic repetition of the idea of uniformity in that last phrase is in keeping with another phrase referring to the accelerating “tightening of the chronological net around

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