Time, Literature, and Cartography After the Spatial Turn: The Chronometric Imaginary by Adam Barrows (review)

• Published in: Modern Fiction Studies Vol. 65; no. 2; pp. 397 - 400
• Main Author: Prieto, Eric
• Format: Journal Article Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 01.07.2019
• Subjects: Cartography; Children; Childrens literature; Consciousness; Death & dying; Fiction; Heidegger, Martin (1889-1976); Kipling, Rudyard (1865-1936); Lefebvre, Henri (1901-1991); Literary characters; Literary devices; Literature; Logic; Melville, Herman (1819-1891); Modern literature; Novels; Rhythm; Rushdie, Salman; Time; Verne, Jules (1828-1905); War literature; Santa Barbara California; California; United Kingdom > UK; United States > US
• ISSN: 0026-7724; 1080-658X; 1080-658X
• DOI: 10.1353/mfs.2019.0023

[...]the fictions that Barrows studies are valued above all for their ability to resist our habitual tendency to mistake human-scaled perspectival priorities for absolute ontological privilege, and to suggest alternative ways of seeing that foreground the interactions between human and nonhuman rhythms. Chapter 4 builds on this argument by leveraging Nabokov's treatment in Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle of his somewhat ridiculous Bergsonian scholar Van to argue for the need to reject any understanding of time that attempts to abstract human consciousness from the material realities of the body and its environment. [...]when Van insists that the reality of human existence can only be understood in terms of a Heideggerian horizon of death, Ada rebuts him by gesturing towards her body and their surroundings. Here, though, the emphasis is on the powers of imaginative fiction not just to depict but also to resist the stultifying effects of a strictly rationalized, instrumentalist conception of time. [...]for Barrows, Rushdie's children's novel Luka and the Fire of Life shows that time "demands to be measured in the language of dreams … rather than in the language of chronologic morbidity" (129–30) and the "In the Sundarbans" chapter of Midnight's Children shows that "fantasy, in throwing off the human sense of proportion that would scale all reality to its own ends and insights, opens up human rhythms and spaces to disabling collisions with other temporal scales, other systems of measurement" (141).