Einstein, Relativity and Literary Modernism
Paul Sheehan
On the face of it, the juxtaposition of modernism and science constitutes a fundamental mismatch. Whether the criterion be method (empirical testability), ideology (the belief in progress) or framework (systematic organizational schemas), the modern scientific world view seems irreconcilable with the principles of aesthetic modernism. Such a critical distancing can be seen in Mrs Dalloway (1925), with Virginia Woolf’s satirical depiction of the medical establishment and its codes of conduct. When faced with a patient suffering from shell shock, that most modernist of nervous disorders, Woolf’s physicians propose sedation and ‘proportion’ as treatments – with disastrous results. This is, however, only one part of a wider picture; as we will see, a short time after Mrs Dalloway, Woolf embraced a different kind of modern scientific paradigm, one derived from the new physics.
In addition, there were other modernist writers who had no misgivings about drawing freely on scientific metaphors, allusions and analogies in their works. Perhaps the most famous of the latter is T. S. Eliot’s depiction of the poet’s mind as a ‘shred of platinum’ (Eliot, 1932, 18). He uses this image to draw a parallel between a catalytic substance able to transform oxygen and sulphur dioxide into sulphurous acid and the poet’s capacity to turn emotions and feelings into art. Along with Eliot’s later praise of James Joyce’s Ulysses (it has ‘the importance of a scientific discovery’) (Eliot, 1975, 177), it is apparent that modernism has a more complex and ambivalent relationship with the discourse of science than a superficial overview might suggest.
When it comes to the more specific question of modernism’s relationship to Einstein and relativity, however, the reverse would appear to be the case. Covert affinities between the science of relativity and the principles of literary modernism are not hard to find: both tend to embrace paradox, rather than progress; both abjure universal chronometry, in favour of more diverse, polytemporal perspectives; and both press at, and move beyond, the limits of realism, whether scientific or literary. Yet even with these accordances, which have been widely acknowledged, there are evident difficulties in securing more concrete and nuanced links between the two. These difficulties might be summarized as too advanced, too abstruse and too recent.
Perhaps the least surmountable stumbling block is the disciplinary one. The new physics of the early twentieth century was based on mathematical proofs beyond the grasp of most, if not all, practitioners of literary modernism. This has led some critics to conclude that the latter possesses only the most cursory, incidental relationship to relativity theory (Sleigh, 2011, 156). Moreover, theoretical physics is at the ‘hard’ end of the science spectrum, where cultural ramifications are less easy to identify – unlike those of the life sciences (i.e. Darwin), mind science (Freud) or the so-called ‘science of history’ (Marx and others), all of which have been successfully incorporated into modernist studies. And then there is the problem of influence. Histories of literary modernism invariably cite as extra-disciplinary progenitors not only Darwin, Freud and Marx but also Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Bergson – all thinkers who emerged out of nineteenth-century thought and who broke decisively with it. Einstein’s cultural renown, by contrast, does not begin until the 1920s, by which time modernism was well into its ‘high’ phase of production.
Recognition of these difficulties has taken both positive and negative forms. The latter is evident in surveys of modernism and science, which tend to pass fairly briskly from the concerns of Victorian science – thermodynamics, entropy, the discovery of radiation – to (advanced) quantum physics and/or information theory, bypassing Einstein altogether; or else referring to relativity theory only fleetingly, then moving quickly on.1 In a more positive vein, scholars have attempted to alleviate the difficulties outlined earlier by introducing a mediating factor of some kind. Metaphor is the prime candidate here, as the go-between linking scientific concepts with literary invention. Daniel Albright, for example, in Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and the Science of Modernism (1997), uses the language of waves and particles to find new ways of exploring the often contradictory tenets of modernist poetry. And in Einstein’s Wake: Relativity, Metaphor, and Modernist Literature (2001), Michael Whitworth examines metaphors of form in literary periodicals, as a means of connecting scientific theories with modernist writing. But as productive as this method has been, I want to propose a different kind of rapprochement between relativity theory and modernism: a shared theoretical orientation that engages closely with the nature of the real and questions what this confrontation can yield.
As it is generally understood, the modern epoch is defined by instability, upheaval, incongruity and paradox, by the declamation that the centre cannot hold and, concomitantly, that the constituents of reality are out of joint. Modernism’s response to the tumult of modernity is to seek upheavals in art – disturbances of form and remakings of tradition, necessitating radical forms of stylization. Allied to this is the uneasy awareness that the observable, empirically measureable world does not line up neatly with the new conceptual understandings of it; other movements and forces, below the threshold of the perceiving eye and the conscious mind, confound the disclosures of phenomenal reality. Or to put it another way: our experience of the modern is at sharp odds with the forms of representation available to embody it. If the science of relativity has much that seems to accord with the work of literary modernism, it is because of this mutual averment that the real has its own laws and dispositions, and that nature and art alike can only gain access to them obliquely.
How, then, do Einstein and modernism meet? Not mathematically, but conceptually – first by routing relativity through philosophy and then by (further) routing it through aesthetics. In terms of philosophical affiliations, modernism and relativity both explore, with some tenacity, different kinds of temporal anomaly. Indeed, many literary modernists saw time as a tyranny that needed to be overcome. Nineteenth-century temporal logic in particular had to be resisted, based as it was on the belief that time is linear, progressive and indomitable, the time of empire and industry, and of social conformity. Modernism responded to this unspoken authority by introducing discontinuity, heterogeneity and irregularity into the rhythms of nature (especially the circadian cycle) and technology (mechanical clock-time).2 With relativity, then, Einstein further weakened the regimen of temporal consistency. He showed that different observers can measure different times for the same event – if they are moving relative to each other. Although measurable, these differences are often minute. But for objects moving at high (i.e. relativistic) speeds, time dilation is significant, and it has far-reaching implications.
The above example highlights what is perhaps the most difficult aspect of Einstein’s theories: their radically ahuman quality. Insofar as human actants appear in these theories, they function simply as bodies – mere objects in the world of matter, representing vantage points or vessels falling through space, susceptible to particular forces and counter-forces exerted by fields of energy. Concomitantly, a significant part of modernism is more deliberately antihumanist. As Simon During notes, literary modernism’s turn away from philosophical anthropology, and its consequent abandonment of the ‘ideal of humanist progress’, left it ‘unable to affirm human substance’ (During, 2013, 151, 158). For D. H. Lawrence, this meant that the ‘old stable ego of the character’ was no longer tenable (Lawrence, 1981, 183). Modernist ‘subjects’, therefore, are hollowed out and disaffected, fictional avatars for the hypothetical human agents that Einstein uses to demonstrate how relativity works. As we will see, this notion of a ‘hollowed-out’ subject is further complicated by the vicissitudes of modernist interiority.
The aesthetic dimensions of relativity theory are less evident than its philosophical implications, but the former can nonetheless be seen in Einstein’s efforts to popularize his works – a move that greatly enhanced the worldwide fame he has enjoyed almost continuously since 1920. The first steps on this path, in the Anglophone world, were a short book entitled Relativity: The Special and the General Theory (1920), in which Einstein outlined his two seminal works for a general readership, and The Meaning of Relativity in 1922, a transcription of the high-profile lectures he gave the previous year at Princeton University. In addition to these self-penned works, a number of non-specialist elucidations appeared around the same time, from such luminaries as Arthur Eddington (Space, Time and Gravitation: An Outline of the General Relativity Theory [1920]) and Bertrand Russell (ABC of Relativity [1925]).
In his plain-language writings, Einstein famously exploited the gedanken or thought experiment, his favourite expository device. Consider, for example, one of the conclusions he draws in the original ‘special relativity’ paper of 1905:
So we can see that we cannot attach any absolute signification to the concept of simultaneity, but that two events which, viewed from a system of co-ordinates, are simultaneous, can no longer be looked upon as simultaneous events when envisaged from a system which is in motion relatively to that system. (Lorentz, 1923, 42–3)
In Relativity, Einstein illustrates this counter-intuitive notion of simultaneity via the now-famous scenario of the man on the bank and the man on the train (Einstein, 2006, 26–8). Since each occupies a different reference frame (i.e. ‘system of co-ordinates’), each will have a different sense of temporal order. The man on the bank sees two bolts of lightning strike the train, one at the back and the other at the front, simultaneously; the man on the train, however, who is in motion relative to the bank, will first see the bolt that strikes the front of the train (towards which he is moving) before he sees the bolt that strikes the back (away from which he is moving). According to Einstein, both views are correct. Like so much else in the observable world, simultaneity is dependent on the reference frame of the observer. Thus, Einstein did not just describe the ‘relativity of simultaneity’, in his popular account of it; he also, in a sense, ‘staged’ it for a mass audience, giving it the starkness and simplicity of a folk tale.
Einstein’s works also contain more formal aesthetic qualities. Writing in the early 1960s, Thomas Kuhn notes that hard evidence is not all that is required for a new scientific paradigm to take hold: ‘[S]ometimes it is only personal and inarticulate aesthetic considerations that can do that. […] Even today Einstein’s general theory attracts men principally on aesthetic grounds, an appeal that few people outside of mathematics have been able to feel’ (Kuhn, 1996, 158). Yet many people ‘outside of mathematics’ have responded to Einstein’s celebrated formula, E = mc2, in aesthetic ways. Its reputation as the world’s most famous scientific equation is based to a large extent on the elegant simplicity of its shape: just three terms, bound in a relationship that conjoins an absolute (the speed of light) with two variables (energy and mass). The mutual convertibility of the two variables offers resources for the imagination, suggesting that matter is protean and unpredictable, rather than fixed and inviolate. Literary experimentation, as with conceptual understanding, cannot prove the play of relativity here, only offer instantiations of it; yet those instantiations can provide radical new contexts for Einstein’s theories and augment the latter’s connate aesthetic qualities.
A potential objection to the present argument might be, Why invoke Einstein and relativity at all? What can they offer to literary modernist studies that other theories of non-linear temporality elide or overlook? If a single thinker could be said to have produced a philosophy of modernist time, it is Henri Bergson. His belief in a time of lived experience, which he calls durée, or duration, emphasizes the power of intuition to gainsay relief from the pressures of causality and make human freedom a real possibility. In Bergson’s view, the data given to consciousness are immediately and unavoidably temporal, and hence a riposte to the regimentation of clock-time (whose instruments of measurement, in any case, transpose the experience of durée into spatial representations). Einstein, too, challenges the absolute character of Newtonian time. However, he does not posit in its stead subjective time, as does Bergson, but perspectival time. Subjective time presupposes a more malleable, changeable and irregular alternative to objective or clock-time. If Einstein is, in the strictest sense, only really interested in clock-time, it is to show how that time is malleable, changeable and irregular. Rather than the observer’s consciousness determining these changes, then, it is reality itself that is relativized. But if Einstein’s theories are borne out by this practice of objective measurement, how does it accord with the principles of literary modernism?
At the heart of the modernist assault on the protocols of realism is an intensified subjectivity, conveyed through such technical devices as impressionism, interior monologue, stream of consciousness and the use of free indirect speech. But this so-called ‘subjective turn’ belies the fact that many literary modernists also seek to express new relationships with the objective world. A characteristic move is to moderate the radical subjectivity of a character’s interior life by rendering it from the inside out – on its own terms, as it were, rather than from the outside in, as literary realism would have it. The effect of this move is to depersonalize the inner life of such a character, by presenting it through an ‘objectivizing’ lens. Charles Altieri suggests that something like this takes place in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929), through the narration of the mute, mentally disabled Benjy. Altieri writes,
In Benjy’s world subjectivity and objectivity enter strange conjunctions. Of course the objectivity in Benjy’s rendering of the world is severely reductive because it renders only sensations without articulate judgments. But […] this absence of judgment becomes a strange and enticing freedom. There is no gulf between what Benjy registers and what is actually taking place. (Altieri, 2007, 76)
Faulkner picked up some of this technique from his reading of Joyce.3 In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), the developing consciousness of the novel’s protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, is presented in strikingly dispassionate ways. Language and form convey the phases of Stephen’s mental maturation, the ontogenetic principle that engenders it confounding any easy distinction between internal and external. Moreover, the ‘objective subjectivity’ that results is also evident in other modernist undertakings: in T. S. Eliot’s project to objectify emotion; in Wyndham Lewis’s rendering of human anatomy in terms of hard surfaces and inanimate objects; in Ezra Pound’s valourization of objectivity as the essence of imagist poetics; and in Ford Madox Ford’s insistence that impressionism is actually a more reliable way of rendering the true conditions of the real.4 These ‘strange conjunctions’ of subjective/objective attributes tally with the postulations of Einsteinian physics and its demonstration that measurements of time and material objects fluctuate under relativistic conditions. In the absence of a universal metric, relations between things – between observer and observed – assume new configurations for the literary-modernist outlook as much as for the science of relativity.
Reading Modernism Relativistically
The modernist novel, in its most exigent forms, is engaged in a constant struggle: to reshape the time-dependent nature of narrative, by finding new forms of periodicity. The modernist poem, by contrast, is not bound to this charter. Moreover, in being freed from having to resist the demands of temporal propriety, some of the resources it shares with the modernist novel can be seen more starkly. In particular, it reveals one of modernism’s elemental literary figures: the arrested instant. Impression, image, symbol, moment and epiphany all constitute modes of instantaneity, in which the pressures of causal inference that underpin the burgeoning of event are suspended. For this reason, these techniques constitute the most valuable assets that the novel has to dilate time indefinitely or to stop it clean in its tracks.
Yet even as these poetic figurations have been successfully exploited by novelists, it is evident that modernist poets themselves have responded to relativity by bringing to the fore a wider range of concerns, from cosmology to prosody. In the early 1920s, for example, W. B. Yeats briefly took an interest in the science of relativity. After reading a primer on the subject, he considered accommodating Einstein’s view of the cosmos into his occult system of gyres and spheres; a marginal reference to a ‘four dimensional [sic] sphere’ (Yeats, 1978, notes, 31) is all that survives of this plan. A number of American modernist poets, by contrast, zealously embraced and promoted what they took to be the essence of Einstein’s scientific revolution.
William Carlos Williams is arguably the strongest poetic advocate of relativity – and the earliest. When Einstein visited America and lectured at Princeton University, in April 1921, Williams celebrated the historic occasion with a poem, ‘St Francis Einstein of the Daffodils’. Somewhat eccentrically, Williams presents the already world-famous scientist as an embodiment of vitalist principles, attuned like St Francis to the natural environment and its seasonal variations:
Einstein, tall as a violet
in the lattice-arbor corner
is tall as
a blossomy peartree …
(Williams, 1951, 379)
The month of April is important (as it was for Eliot, in the same period, drafting what would become The Waste Land), with the coming of spring. Rebirth is thus presented as a kind of freedom, for the mind as much as for nature, heralded by the arrival of the scientific revolutionary in the new world.
Williams’s early interest in Einstein deepens across the decades, culminating in a 1948 essay on ‘The Poem as a Field of Action’. Brushing aside almost half a century of modernist experimentation, Williams avers that poetic structure – by which he means measure and foot, the ‘accepted prosody’ of the poem – has remained unchanged. He writes,
How can we accept Einstein’s theory of relativity, affecting our very conception of the heavens about us of which poets write so much, without incorporating its essential fact – the relativity of measurements – into our own category of activity: the poem. […] Relativity applies to everything, like love, if it applies to anything in the world. (Williams, 1969, 283)
What Williams calls the ‘relativity of measurements’ must lead, he says, to a reinscription of ‘prosodic values’ (Williams, 1969, 286). The primary task of the post-war American poet is thus to develop new rhythmic structures capable of reflecting those values. Williams considered his own contribution to poetic relativity to be the ‘variable foot’, a method of using unconventional line-breaks that was, he believed, indubitably American.5
Williams’s advocacy is paralleled by Louis Zukofsky’s, who sought to establish a broader colloquy between poetry and science. His early interest in the physicist’s life spurred him to undertake the English translation of Anton Reiser’s Albert Einstein: A Biographical Portrait (1930). Among the many borrowings for Zukofsky’s epic poem-sequence A, which he began around the same time, are details and anecdotes from Reiser’s biography.6 In terms of formal applications, concrete (if oblique) examples can be seen at the end of ‘A’-8ʹ and throughout ‘A’-9ʹ. Zukofsky composed these sections according to a mathematical formula that determined internal rhymes and (in ‘A’-9ʹ) rearranged a handful of terms across the stanzas (‘values’, ‘labor’, ‘things’, ‘use’). Exchange-value, that quintessentially Marxian concept, is shown still to be operating in a newly relativized universe: ‘But see our centers do not show the changes/Of human labor our value estranges’ (Zukofsky, 1978, 106).
A third instance of poetic relativity is expounded by Charles Olson, an American modernist inheritor. In his notion of open or projective verse – formulated after reading Einstein’s 1934 collection of Essays in Science – Olson deems poetic energy to be both transformative and transferrable: ‘A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it […] by way of the poem itself to […] the reader’. There is, he says, an energy ‘peculiar to verse alone’, that is different from (but equivalent to) the energy that ‘the reader, because he is a third term, will take away’ (Olson, 1960, 387). In attempting to map Einsteinian physics onto the poetic imagination, Olson makes poetic creativity part of a dynamic process that does not stop at the printed page, with the word. Moreover, two years before developing these ideas Olson envisaged poetic time and space as unfixed, inconstant and radically inseparable (‘Nor I nor Einstein would want to disentangle [time and space]’) (Olson, 1974, 2). Projective verse thus facilitates poetic spacetime, binding ear, breath, syllable and line with the field of objects, including man and his relationship to the forces of nature.
As Olson’s Einstein-inspired musings indicate, bringing modernism and relativity into productive alignment is a matter of reading practices as well as writing strategies. This means attending to those fictional/poetic moments when physical processes no longer conform to one’s intuitions or expectations, when the distribution of matter creates ripples in the phenomenal world. If Newtonian mechanics regarded space as a rigid, homogeneous medium, susceptible neither to change nor to any conditional agencies, Einstein saw it as heterogeneous, as implicated in temporal irregularities and possessing ‘a power to take part in physical events’ (Hey and Walters, 1997, 188). Reading modernism relativistically is, therefore, not just a question of metaphorical appropriations or conceptual parallels but also of textual anomalies.
The American poets mentioned above stand out for the approbation and support they lend to Einsteinian relativity, affirming its applicability to modernist literary poetics. But if many English and Irish literary modernists reacted more coolly to the new physics, that did not preclude them from absorbing, on some level, its cardinal precepts. The remainder of this chapter focuses on two such pairs of writers, who present complementary attitudes to Einstein and relativity: one engaging with these subjects directly and explicitly, in light of the debates they have provoked; and the other proffering fictional examples of relativity that signify covert affiliations rather than mindful projections or applications. In the late 1910s and early 1920s, D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce form such a pair; and at the other end of the 1920s, a similar coupling can be seen with Wyndham Lewis and Virginia Woolf. Einstein’s relationship to literary modernism can thus be gauged through these four exemplars, in the first decade of his ascendancy as a cultural figurehead.
D. H. Lawrence: The Politics of Relativity
Although in many ways the chief Anglo-modernist exemplar of relativity theory, D. H. Lawrence did not treat the subject with unbridled reverence. ‘Einstein isn’t so metaphysically marvellous’, he tells a correspondent in 1921, after reading Einstein’s popular account of his theories (Lawrence, 1987, 37). Despite this apparent dismissal, Lawrence declared his interest in relativity soon afterwards in Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922) – his philosophical treatise on social and individual identity – and in the semi-autobiographical novel Kangaroo (1923), an exposé of civil and political unrest in Australia. But Lawrence’s clearest statement of approval is conveyed much later, in the poem ‘Relativity’ (1929):
I like relativity and quantum theories
because I don’t understand them
and they make me feel as if space shifted about like a swan that can’t settle,
refusing to sit still and be measured;
(Lawrence, 1972, 210)
Even this apparently straightforward paean to relativity (and quantum physics) has political nuances. Lawrence presents the unsettled motion of the swan as a ‘refusal’, a rebuff to those scales of measurement on which modern science is so reliant. Unlike quantum theory, relativity science does not, of course, posit any such resistance, because objects, distances and temporal changes can still be measured; the results, however, will vary across reference frames. But in making this claim, Lawrence’s speaker is depicting both relativity and quantum theories as anti-scientific – or, at least, as putting the scientific method in question.
In the earlier Fantasia of the Unconscious, Lawrence more openly brushes relativity theory against the grain. ‘The universe isn’t a spinning wheel’, he writes, ‘It is a cloud of bees’ (Lawrence, 2004, 72). In other words, the ‘clockwork universe’ model bequeathed by Newton ignores the complexity and unpredictability of the cosmos. Lawrence then homes in on his subject: human beings resemble that cloud of bees, he writes, in that ‘[w]e have no one law that governs us’; and because of this encompassing truth, it follows that ‘we are in sad need of a theory of human relativity’. But establishing that theory will not be easy, because for each human individual to enjoy a fullness of being means entering into a ‘living dynamic relation’ with his or her fellow creatures. The relation that Lawrence proposes will not be founded on love, brotherhood or equality. To the contrary, he writes,
The next relation has got to be a relationship of men towards men in a spirit of unfathomable trust and responsibility, service and leadership, obedience and pure authority. Men have got to choose their leaders, and obey them to the death. And it must be a system of culminating aristocracy, society tapering like a pyramid to the supreme leader. (Lawrence, 2004, 191)
The principle of relativity, strictly adhered to, does not eradicate the need for authority. The swan that refuses ‘to sit still and be measured’ may be an avatar of freedom, but once relativity enters the domain of human relations, there must be social hierarchies. This hard-nosed realization is the stimulus for the novel that Lawrence begins soon afterwards, in June 1922, not long after his arrival in Australia.
The main purpose of that novel, Kangaroo, is to render more fully Lawrence’s notion of a theory of human relativity. Scientific disputation is not the issue here; relativity, for Lawrence, is but a tool or instrument for prising open existential dilemmas about the self, democracy, power, violence and leadership. These are pressing issues for any writer attempting to diagnose the post-war malaise, as Lawrence does in Kangaroo; indeed, the long shadow of the Great War hangs over the novel’s action as well as its debate. The latter is initiated by Benjamin ‘Kangaroo’ Cooley, a lawyer, ex-soldier and would-be social reformer, who represents (one version of) Lawrence’s ‘supreme leader’ archetype.
In chapter 6, Cooley outlines to Richard Somers, the author’s erstwhile alter-ego, his conception of the ideal polity. It would be, he says, a kind of benign tyranny: ‘I want to keep order. I want to remove physical misery as far as possible. […] And that you can only do by exerting strong, just power from above’ (Lawrence, 1994, 111). Cooley sees this in terms of a proto-Nietzschean ‘reverence for life’ that eclipses petty human requisitions. ‘The secret of all life’, he declares, ‘is in obedience: obedience to the urge that arises in the soul, the urge that is life itself […] It is a subtle and conflicting urge away from the thing we already are’ (112). But obedience is not merely an internal, self-liberating matter, says Cooley, because man ‘needs to be relieved from this terrible responsibility of governing himself when he doesn’t know what he wants, and has no aim towards which to govern himself’ (113).
Somers clarifies and completes these thoughts in chapter 14 (‘Bits’), which leads him to a partial repudiation of relativity. What Somers calls the ‘history of relativity in man’ is governed by a series of dialectical shifts. A man’s naked being-in-the-world confers on him a kind of freedom, like the swan’s; but that freedom can be suffocating, as he must submit his individuality to the clutches of a ‘sympathetic humanity’. Somers, like Cooley, vehemently rejects the latter, because ‘[t]he bulk of mankind haven’t got any central selves […] They’re all bits’ (280). Later, he concludes a soul-searching monologue about ‘relativity in dynamic living’ with a reflection that might have come directly from ‘Kangaroo’ Cooley, showing the two men to be ideologically attuned: ‘When the flow is power, might, majesty, glory, then it is a culminating flow towards one individual. […] It is the grand obeisance before a master’ (303). A crypto-fascist reordering of social relations, trading liberty for leadership: this is Lawrence’s antidote to the calamity of the Great War and to the industrialized democracy that supposedly caused it. Somewhat adventitiously, Lawrence hews a kind of absolute from his politics of relativity, turning Einstein on his head and stretching his theory to breaking point.
James Joyce: Relativistic Mechanics
Where Lawrence treats relativity theory as pliable and suggestive, using it to lend scientific weight to his ideas about social reform, Joyce incorporates it into his web of puns and parodies. To that end, Finnegans Wake (1939) contains numerous allusions to Einstein and to 1920s debates on space and time. In a children’s geometry lesson, for example, the scientist is referred to as ‘Eyeinsteye’, and oblique mention is made of ‘his Noblett’s surprize’ (Joyce, 2012, 305–6); and Ein/stein is transfigured into the opposition elm/stone (an allusion to the physicist’s birthplace of Ulm).7 Earlier, however, Joyce had shown himself to be alert to the counter-realist possibilities of relativity physics, most notably in the ‘Wandering Rocks’ chapter of Ulysses (1922). First published in serial form in 1919, the chapter shows Joyce experimenting with synchroneity, as he fits the novel’s entire cast of characters into nineteen vignettes of varying lengths.8
In section one, a near-anonymous ‘onelegged sailor’ is first glimpsed, ‘swinging himself onward by lazy jerks of his crutches’ (Joyce, 2000, 280). By section three he has made it around MacConnell’s corner and is heading up Eccles Street, towards the Blooms’ residence. And finally, thirteen sections later, the sailor arrives at 14 Nelson St. The geographical gap between Eccles St and Nelson St is less than 100 metres, yet Joyce has deviously inserted thirteen other sections into that gap. There is, then, no attempt to make time and space map onto each other, as realism would demand; instead, Joyce meticulously crafts a polylinear reality, a multi-form event-structure that implicitly exploits the potentialities of non-Euclidean space.
Molly Bloom’s involvement in this episode reveals similar modifications of narrative logic, as she awaits a visit from her lover, ‘Blazes’ Boylan. Signalling her availability to Boylan, Molly puts a sign in the window that reads ‘unfurnished apartments’. In section two, her ‘generous white arm’ (Joyce, 2000, 288) throws a coin down to the onelegged sailor. In the next section, the ‘unfurnished apartments’ card slips off the window sash; and the arm, or now the hand, throws the same coin to the same onelegged sailor. And finally, six vignettes later, the card is put back on the window sash – even though only a few seconds has elapsed since it fell from the sash. It is only at this point that we know it is number 7 Eccles St, the home of Molly and Leopold Bloom.
Reading Joyce realistically, ‘Wandering Rocks’ is a kind of mosaic, an accretion of diverse ‘snapshots’ of Dublin life that, taken together, signify a panoramic whole. The chapter has traditionally been read in such terms as the ‘novel in miniature’, a composite portrait of Joyce’s Dublin in nineteen interlocking parts. Reading Joyce relativistically, by contrast, means suspending the desire for completeness, for a full and comprehensive picture. On the one hand, Joyce is demonstrating the ‘relativity of simultaneity’ that Einstein described in his special theory, by showing different time-flows across reference frames9; but on the other, he is also adducing the curvature of spacetime, the anti-Newtonian anomalies predicted by Einstein’s general theory. In (re)presenting the same or adjacent moments, and applying different narrative rhythms to them – by changing a word, re-weighing an emphasis or adding/subtracting a detail – Joyce modulates the spatio-temporal pressures exerted on them. The role of matter then becomes fundamental, as spacetime gets pushed and pulled, stretched and warped, consonant with the wayward lives of Dublin’s capricious citizens.
Wyndham Lewis: Einstein in the Flux
Although Einstein’s theories break with Newtonian conceptions of (Euclidean) space and (absolute) time, they still possess some continuity with nineteenth-century science. The question of energy, in particular, was paramount from the mid-century on, with the discovery of electromagnetic waves and formulation of the second law of thermodynamics.10 Energy is also crucial for Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, who made it central to the Vorticist manifestoes they devised for the first issue of Blast in June 1914. Indeed, as regards Einstein’s notion of mass-energy conversion, Daniel Albright sees Vorticism itself ‘to some extent, [as] the application of this conversion-principle to poetry’ (Albright, 1997, 168). But if energy was the Einsteinian concept that Lewis could embrace, time (or, more precisely, spacetime) was the one the most abhorred. A monumental polemic, Time and Western Man (1927), catalogues in some detail Lewis’s objections to the ‘time-cult’ that, he was convinced, had crippled modern fiction, philosophy and science. Lewis’s aim, then, was to rescue the self from the flux of becoming to which Bergson and his ostensive acolytes – Joyce, Proust, Gertrude Stein – had consigned it.
In performing this operation, Lewis argues that Einsteinian ‘timelessness’, that is, the loosening up of all fixed temporal coordinates, is of a piece with the ‘time-obsessed’ philosophizing of his arch-nemesis Bergson. Thus, Lewis finds it ‘unlikely’ that Einstein would not have read the work of Bergson; credits Einstein with inadvertently rehabilitating Bergsonian philosophy; and treats Duration and Relativity as a single conceptual entity (Lewis, 1928, 143, 86). As for the distinction made earlier in this chapter, between Bergson’s subjective or intuitive theory of time and Einstein’s objective, perspectival approach, Lewis will have none of it. For although Einsteinian theory, he writes, ‘sets out to banish the mental factor altogether and to arrive at a purely physical truth, it nevertheless cannot prevent itself turning into a psychological or spiritual account of things, like Bergson’s’ (111). As if realizing that he is on shaky ground here, Lewis redirects his critical scorn at Einstein’s biographer, Alexander Moszkowski, where he does score some hits.
As Lawrence did five years earlier, Lewis immediately followed up these animadversions on relativity with a narrative exposition of his views. The fruit of this attempt, The Childermass (1928), also resembles Kangaroo in that it is haunted by the devastation of the First World War. Two dead soldiers, Pullman and Satterthwaite, form a pseudo-couple and negotiate, as best they can, a camp known as the ‘Time-Flats’ – part of a limbo-like afterlife or ‘afterworld’, an uncanny dystopia that appears to be as tenuous and provisional as a film set. In this vaguely hostile environment, the ‘timeless’ and the ‘time-obsessed’ – or ‘Duration and Relativity’ – are made to seem compatible, thus legitimating the thesis that backfired in Time and Western Man. A metamorphic energy permeates both characters and locale, so that nothing is solid or stable, just as (Lewis says) Bergson’s theory predicts. Moreover, although space and time are deliberately separated (the two men, or shades, ‘get along splendidly with regard to space, but time is another matter’), the very notion of ‘Time-Flats’ belies this separation, providing a geo-temporal union that cannot but evoke four-dimensional spacetime (Lewis, 1965, 41). Objects, too, change size in accordance with their motion – a slowed-down, hallucinatory variation on the relativity-effect. And as Paul Edwards notes, a ‘relativity of perspective’ organizes certain scenes, indicating a deeper absorption of Einsteinian theory than Lewis himself would allow (Edwards, 2000, 327).
Virginia Woolf: The Velocities of Everyday Experience
Einstein is a marginal but insistent presence in Woolf’s writings of the 1920s. Thus, he appears in Mrs Dalloway (1925) as no more than a thought, streamed through the consciousness of a bystander who watches the mysterious aeroplane depart (it is, he thinks, a symbol ‘of man’s soul […] Einstein, speculation, mathematics, the Mendelian theory’) (Woolf, 1992a, 30). In the same period, Woolf notes in her diary that if non-linear, Einsteinian time is true, then ‘we shall be able to foretell our own lives’ (Woolf, 1980, 68) – an idea she may have obtained from her Bloomsbury associate Bertrand Russell. And several years later, in A Room of One’s Own (1929), Woolf reflects on ‘sitting at our ease’ and discussing certain topics of conversation: ‘physics, the nature of the atom […] [or] relativity’ (Woolf, 2000, 23). But as keenly aware as she is of Einstein’s wider cultural import, Woolf does not appear at this time to have had first-hand contact with any of his (or his explicators’) work.11
Despite this limitation, even a cursory glance at Woolf’s high-modernist novels, with their attempts to catch the ebb and flow of experience using alternate temporalities, suggests concordances with the new physics. The Waves (1931) is arguably the most intensively relativistic of these works. It stands as a book-length diagnosis of the problem that Lewis identifies in Time and Western Man: the fate of the self in a turbid, accelerating modernity. But from Woolf’s perspective, relativity is the solution, not an exacerbation of the problem. Like Lawrence, she brings relativity into the realm of social being, applying Einsteinian tenets to the velocities of everyday experience.
Wave-forms disclose the relativity of human encounter for the six ‘speakers’ (to call them ‘characters’ would be imprudent) who narrate the novel. Woolf’s waves function as patterns or oscillations that carry energy from one place to another, and also as forms of disturbance, as deformations of matter: ‘“When Miss Lambert passes,” said Rhoda, “[…] everything changes and becomes luminous”’; ‘“There is Jinny,” said Susan. “She seems to centre everything […] all the rays ripple and flow and waver over us, bringing in new tides of sensation”’ (Woolf, 1992b, 34, 99). About to meet with the group, Bernard feels internally dislocated: ‘They have come together already. In a moment, when I have joined them, another arrangement will form, another pattern. […] Already at fifty yards distance I feel the order of my being changed.’ Louis puts it most succinctly: ‘Meeting and parting, we assemble different forms, make different patterns.’ (Woolf, 1992b, 175, 140–1) Life itself, for Woolf’s speakers, unfolds as a kind of wave-pattern, a periodic figuration that can regulate, rearrange or discombobulate (244).
Trains and platforms, which appear intermittently throughout the novel, provide more specifically Einsteinian reference points. Woolf’s speakers board and leave stationary trains, observe guards on platforms and view the world through train windows. As if narrativizing Einstein’s man on the bank/man on the train thought experiment, Woolf makes Bernard relativity-conscious: ‘Meanwhile as I stand looking from the train window, I feel strangely, persuasively, that […] I am become part of this speed, this missile hurled at the city.’ And as he later notes, ‘[W]hen I am leaving you and the train is going, you feel that it is not the train that is going, but I, Bernard’ (Woolf, 1992b, 91, 109). Like The Waves as a whole, these reflections undercut Lewis’s (earlier) claim, in Time and Western Man, that there is ‘so far no outstanding exponent in literature or art of einsteinian physics’ (Lewis, 1928, 87). Where Lewis and Joyce are reluctant relativists, in their attempts to both incarnate and disavow Einstein’s theories, Woolf is that ‘outstanding exponent’ and a flag-bearer for a modernist aesthetics of relativity more broadly.
In the new century, a multi-purpose term has sprung up that rekindles a way of thinking prior to Einstein’s scientific revolution. That neo-Newtonian term is ‘real time’, and it figures in medical imaging technologies, in stock-market reports and in both broadcast and social media. There is real-time computing, real-time tracking systems and real-time polling of public opinion. The term has come to be used as a shorthand definition of modern-day instantaneity. Real time means no time, no delay between an event and its legibility across space; hence, it annuls the need for competing or conflicting reference frames. As for the term’s ubiquity, that can be ascribed to its entwinement with the ideology of globalization. Indeed, the dream of a globalized world is predicated on real time, on the annihilation of distance through technology. Real time is, then, a kind of wish-fulfillment fantasy, a collective delusion on the part of the post-industrial West.
The poetics of relativity formulated by Williams, Zukofsky and Olsen, and advanced by Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf and even Lewis – the awareness of irreducible temporal and spatial differentials – is an implicit riposte to the real-time credo and a reminder of just how fanciful and tendentious that dream is. It is through Einstein’s contestation of Newtonian absolute time and homogeneous space that this poetics can be properly grasped. And by reading modernism relativistically, as we have seen, it is possible to discern how the paradoxes of the real can be mapped and probed by the exigencies of the word.
1 Gillian Beer’s influential Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Beer, 1996), for example, has a chapter on the ‘Rise of Literary Modernism’, but it focuses on wave theory rather than relativity. Broader surveys of literature and science that neglect modernism and relativity include One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature (Levine and Rauch, 1987); Beyond the Two Cultures: Essays on Science, Technology, and Literature (Slade and Yaross Lee, 1990); The Third Culture: Literature and Science (Schaffer, 1998); Science and Literature: Bridging the Two Cultures (Wilson and Bowen, 2001); and Literature and Science (Sleigh, 2011). Conversely, there are good, albeit brief, accounts of relativity and modernism to be found in Peter Childs’s Modernism (2000, 65–8); and T. Hugh Crawford’s essay ‘Modernism’ in Bruce Clarke and Manuela Rossini (eds), The Routledge Companion to Literature and Science (2011, 510–11); and Stephen Kern, in The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1919 (2003), addresses these subjects in a wider historical framework.
2 For recent studies of modernism’s polytemporal fixations, see Ronald Schleifer, Modernism and Time: The Logic of Abundance in Literature, Science, and Culture 1880–1930 (2000); and Bryony Randall, Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life (2007).
3 See, for example, John D. Sykes, Jr., ‘What Faulkner (Might Have) Learned from Joyce’ (2005).
4 See Eliot (1932); Lewis (1967, 307); Pound (1951, 45), and Ford (1964, 39).
5 There is still some uncertainty as to what Williams’s method actually was, in terms of the ‘variable foot’. The clearest examples of the latter can be found in Book II, Section 3, of Paterson (1992 [1948]) and throughout The Desert Music, and Other Poems (1954).
6 See Alan J. Friedman and Carol C. Donley, Einstein as Myth and Muse (1985, 75–7).
7 See Duszenko, ‘The Relativity Theory in Finnegans Wake’ (1994, 63).
8 Jeff Drouin describes ‘Wandering Rocks’ as ‘a narrative experiment in relativistic mechanics’, suggesting that Joyce’s reading of The Little Review and The Egoist in 1918–19 gave him insights into the new physics. See Drouin, ‘Early Sources for Joyce and the New Physics: The “Wandering Rocks” Manuscript, Dora Marsden, and Magazine Culture’ (2009).
9 See Booker, ‘Joyce, Planck, Einstein, and Heisenberg: A Relativistic Quantum Mechanical Discussion of Ulysses’ (1990, 582).
10 See Armstrong 2005, 115–16.
11 This changed in 1937, when Woolf read The Mysterious Universe (1930), a popular account of the new physics by the British astrophysicist James Jeans. See Virginia Woolf (Whitworth, 2005, 184).
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