World Literature, Non-Synchronism, and the Politics of Time by Filippo Menozzi

Author:Filippo Menozzi
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030416980
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

1 Reading Contretemps

In a telling passage of Moyez Vassanji’s 1989 novel The Gunny Sack, the narrator suspends the chronicle of the events in order to meditate on the particular sense of time that informs the story. Salim, The Gunny Sack’s first-person storyteller, compares “wisps of memory” to cotton balls “gliding from the gunny sack, each a window to a world … Asynchronous images projected on multiple cinema screens … Time here is not the continuous coordinates … but a collection of blots like Uncle Jim drew in the Sunday Herald for the children” (Vassanji 1989, 138). But “Uncle Jim numbered the blots for you so you traced the picture of a dog or a horse when you followed them with a pencil … here you number your own blots and there is no end to them, and each lies in wait for you like a black hole from which you could never return” (ibid.). As this passage reveals, The Gunny Sack formulates a remarkable sense of time through the deus ex machina which gives the novel its title: a gunny sack, given to Salim by defunct Ji Bai, Salim’s great-uncle’s wife, out of which come objects and memories that help the narrator, Salim, assemble the story of his family across four generations. The way in which the gunny sack enables the narration to unify, however, entails a concept of time vividly captured by the image, first, of “asynchronous images projected on multiple cinema screens” and then of “blots” on a newspaper page, with no pre-given image to be finally revealed. Time is not a succession of events or the simple sequential continuum from before to after. In the novel, time is rather imagined as a set of images or blots that coexist, at the same time, inside the gunny sack, lying in wait for the narrator to extract them and recover them, at the risk of becoming “black holes” from which there is no return. As Salim explains in the conclusion of the novel, “I can put it all back and shake it and churn it and sift it and start again, re-order memory, draw a new set of lines through those blots, except that each of them is like a black hole, a doorway to a universe” (326).

The novel stages a non-chronological multiverse that can be reassembled and re-ordered, as revealed by Vassanji’s own reflections about the novel. In an interview with Shane Rhodes, Vassanji observes: “If a person were to construct a history at two different times in his life, he would end up with two totally different books … History is a play between … the created and the creating, the real and the imagined” (Rhodes 108). The novel displays this tension between “the created and the creating” through the device of the gunny sack, which constantly points the reader’s attention to the fictional narrative frame, the act of creating the story. Objects from the sack are envisioned as windows to multiple worlds, images not in line

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