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The Planetary Clock : Antipodean Time
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Paul Giles
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The Planetary Clock

The Planetary Clock

Antipodean Time and Spherical
Postmodern Fictions
PAU L G I L E S
1
1
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
List of Illustrations xi
Introduction: Antipodean Time and the Anthropocenic Imaginary1
Four-Dimensional Postmodernism 1
Ironies of the Anthropocene 18
Genealogies of the Planetary 38
1. Répétition Planétaire: Upside-Down Postmodernism61
Augustinian Aesthetics 61
The End of Time: Messiaen’s Musical Apocalypse 66
Retro-Modernism: Rohmer’s Antithetical Cinema 79
2. Antipodean Alice: Cold War Fetishism and Frozen Time104
Parallel Dimensions: Blackman’s ‘cross-roads’ 104
‘Ghost-Images’: Genet, Roeg, Bergman 117
Ligeti’s Apocalyptic Buffoonery 125
Nabokov, Ananyms, and Ada133
3. Queer Poetic Time: Crosstemporal Parataxis and Disjunctions
of Scale146
Larkin and ‘the seabed of Time’ 146
Against ‘Chrononormativity’: Ashbery, Rich, Gunn, Glück 157
Waiting for the Past: Tranter and Murray 167
4. ‘Reverse-Thinking’: Metahistorical Arts and Fictions183
Crosstemporal, Cross-cultural, Cross-media 183
‘The re-prefix’: Barth and Rushdie 196
Unspoolings: Lynch, Haneke, and Embedded Trauma 208
Planetary Australian Fiction: Winton, Jones, Tsiolkas 218
5. Two-Way Time Travel: Recursive Science and
‘Backward-Flowing’ Fiction237
Obsession and Atonement: Murnane and McEwan 237
The American Systems Novel: Eugenides, Foer, Powers 252
6. Postmodern Slave Narratives: Anachronism and Disorientation276
The Arts of Rememory: Butler and Morrison 276
Obama, Tarantino, and Transnational Trauma 289
vi Contents
7. Reorchestrating the Past: Long Songs and Antipodean Relations316

Luhrmann and the Politics of Relationality 316
Indigenous Fiction and the Global South: Hulme and Wright 326
Musical Time Shifts: Sculthorpe, Birtwistle, Benjamin 344
Conclusion: The Long Postmodernism357
Works Cited 367

Index 413
Acknowledgements
I should like to thank my colleagues in the English department and the United
States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney for providing a constructive
intellectual environment in which to write this book. More specifically, I gratefully
acknowledge the conveners and audiences of conferences and seminars where
certain sections of this book were first discussed. Under the sponsorship of Yuan
Shu and Donald Pease, I presented ‘Comparative Temporality and (Trans)National
Formation: Adrienne Rich and Les Murray’ at the American Comparative
Literature Association, New York, in March 2014. ‘Obama, Tarantino, and
Transnational Trauma’ was a paper given at a seminar on ‘Obama and
Transnational American Studies’ at the University of Mainz, Germany, in October
2014 (thanks to Alfred Hornung), and then again at the University of New South
Wales, Canberra, the following month (thanks to Heather Neilson). Some of the
analysis of Charles Blackman was included in my keynote lecture, ‘Haunted by
the Future: Antipodean Gothic and Temporal Prolepsis’, at the Gothic Association
of New Zealand and Australia Conference held in Sydney in January 2015 (thanks
to Lorna Piatti-Farnell). The material on David Mitchell was first explored at a
symposium hosted by the International American Studies Association at the
University of Sapienza, Rome, in April 2016 on International American Studies
and the Question of World Literature (thanks to Giorgio Mariani). It was also on
this trip to Europe that I first encountered the replica of Lorenzo della Volpaia’s
Planetary Clock at the Museo Galileo in Florence. I gained much from conversa-
tions with participants in the seminar ‘Transnational and Crosstemporal: World
Literature across Space and Time’ that I taught at the Institute for World Literature
at Harvard in July 2016, where various observations on Tarantino’s Django
Unchained were particularly useful. (Thanks to David Damrosch for graciously
facilitating this event.) I discussed the paintings of Fiona Hall in a lecture, ‘Lost
Homelands: The Expropriation of American Studies in the Anthropocene Era’,
given in a seminar organized by Susana Araújo on ‘Homelands and the Borders of
“America” ’ at the University of Lisbon, Portugal, in September 2016. This turned
out to be the last time I saw Amy Kaplan, an old academic sparring partner who
also spoke at this seminar and is now much missed.
I received invaluable feedback on an early draft of the book’s first chapter when
it was presented at Brigham Young University in 2017, at the kind invitation of
Brian Russell Roberts. Natalya Lusty similarly subjected some of the material on
the visual arts to stringent but enlightening critique. I also benefited from discus-
sions with Liz DeLoughrey at the ‘Global Ecologies-Local Impacts’ conference
viii Acknowledgements
organized by Iain McCalman and David Schlosberg at the Sydney Environment

Institute in 2016, and with Ursula Heise at the ‘Literary Environments: Place,
Planet and Translation’ conference convened by Stuart Cooke and Peter Denney
at Brisbane in 2017. Research for the project in its early stages was funded in part
by a grant from the Australian Research Council (DP150101848).
A few fragments from these initial excursions were subsequently converted
into earlier versions of various sections that now appear in this book. ‘Obama,
Tarantino, and Transnational Trauma’ first appeared in Obama and Transnational
American Studies, edited by Alfred Hornung (Universitatsverlag Winter, Heidelberg,
2016). The Portugal lecture, ‘Lost Homelands’, was translated by Nuno Sousa Oliveira
and published as ‘Patrias Perdidas: A Expropriacao dos Estudos Americanos na
Era do Antropoceno’ in Anglo Saxonica 14.1 (2017). In addition, a much earlier
version of the first section of Chapter 7 had its first incarnation as ‘A Good Gatsby:
Baz Luhrmann Undomesticates Fitzgerald’, in Commonweal, 1 July 2013, at the
kind invitation of Paul Baumann. A shorter account of the Australian novelists
discussed in Chapter 4 also appeared as ‘Writing for the Planet: Contemporary
Australian Fiction’, in The Planetary Turn: Art, Relationality, and Geoaesthetics in
the 21st Century, edited by Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru (Northwestern
University Press, 2015).
I would like to express appreciation to the various artists and galleries listed on
the Illustrations page for permitting reproduction of the images in this book.
I should also particularly like to thank Giorgio Strano, Curator of the Museo
Galileo in Florence, for answering my questions about Lorenzo della Volpaia. I am
especially indebted to David Hockney, Christian Thompson, and Leah King-Smith
for allowing their work to be reproduced and discussed within what Julie Green,
Head of Reproductions at David Hockney, Inc., called an ‘unusual’ context.
I am very grateful to Jacqueline Norton at Oxford University Press for her
continued support of my work, for the incisive and detailed reports she commis-
sioned that helped to improve the final book, and to her assistant Aimee Wright
for advice about permissions issues. My own excellent research assistant, Blythe
Worthy, supported by a grant from the Faculty Research Support Scheme at the
University of Sydney, not only helped to secure copyright clearance for the
illustrations, but also made various perceptive suggestions about rephrasing in
particular instances.
Though each part of this sequence is intended to stand independently, this vol-
ume also represents a continuation of the project engaging with antipodean rep-
resentations of temporality that was inaugurated by Backgazing: Reverse Time in
Modernist Culture (OUP, 2019). The epigraph to The Planetary Clock is taken
from the second book on Recent Phenomena in the Celestial World published in
1588 by Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, who also planned a third volume in his
sequence but did not live to write it. I hope that is not a bad omen.
Acknowledgements ix
This book was completed before the coronavirus pandemic that became
widespread in the early months of 2020, an outbreak that testified clearly enough
to planetary interconnection in its uglier forms, though how this event relates to
the larger circumference of postmodernism will be for future historians to judge.
It is worth noting in passing, however, that Bill Gates and many other observers
have long warned of the vulnerability of a networked world to the global circula-
tion of an infectious virus, with Gates saying in 2015 that ‘microbes’ were far
more likely to kill large numbers than the ‘missiles’ that were the focus of atten-
tion from National Security experts during the Cold War years and afterwards.
Planetary systems are complicated mechanisms connected by more than simply
international finance or economic supply chains, and the planetary clock ticks
synchronistically across every latitude and hemisphere.
Sydney
September 2020
List of Illustrations
0.1 David Hockney, “The Four Seasons Woldgate Woods (Spring 2011,
Summer 2010, Autumn 2010, Winter 2010),” 2010–2011 25
0.2 The Earth, as photographed from Apollo 17 (1972) 28
0.3 Reproduction of The Planetary Clock, by Lorenzo della Volpaia (1510) 39
0.4 Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, Warlugulong (1977) 43
0.5 Robert Campbell Jnr, Abo History (Facts) (1988) 43
0.6 Christian Thompson, Invaded Dreams (2012) 44
0.7 Leah King-Smith, from Patterns of Connection (1991) 46
0.8 Linda Syddick Napaltjarri, ET and His Friends (1993) 47
0.9 Fiona Hall, Wrong Way Time (2014) 48
0.10 Fiona Hall, Detail from Kuka iritija (Animals from another time) (2014) 49
1.1 Roland Penrose, L’île invisible (Seeing is Believing) (1937) 69
1.2 Eric Rohmer, with actors Delphine Seyrig and Francois Perrier and
composer Olivier Messiaen at the French National Arts Prize,
December 1977 80
1.3 Jean-Louis (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Maud (Françoise Fabian) in
Ma Nuit chez Maud (1969), dir. Eric Rohmer 90
1.4 In front of the statue of Vercingetorix in Ma Nuit chez Maud (1969),
dir. Eric Rohmer 90
1.5 Maud’s apartment with the picture of a lunar eclipse, in Ma Nuit chez Maud
(1969), dir. Eric Rohmer 92
1.6 Mirabelle (Jessica Forde) and Reinette (Joëlle Miquel) with Reinette’s
painting ‘The Refusal’, in Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle (1987),
dir. Eric Rohmer 97
1.7 The Five Continents bookstore, in An Autumn Tale (1998), dir. Eric Rohmer 101
2.1 Charles Blackman, ‘Upside Down Alice’ (1956). 109
2.2 Charles Blackman, The Tea Ceremony (1981) 111
2.3 Charles Blackman, The Shoe (1956) 112
2.4 Charles Blackman, Celestial Bouquet (1985) 113
2.5 Charles Blackman, The Mysterious Forest (1985) 114
2.6 Charles Blackman, The Family (c.1955)115
2.7 Francis Bacon, Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953) 116
2.8 Incongruity and juxtaposition in Walkabout (1971), dir. Nicolas Roeg 119
xii List of Illustrations
2.9 An animal carcass in the desert in Walkabout (1971), dir. Nicolas Roeg 121
2.10 Sidney Nolan, Drought Skeleton (1953) 122
2.11 Clock without hands in Wild Strawberries (1957), dir. Ingmar Bergman 124
2.12 Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1500), outer panels 141
4.1 Fire truck and white picket fence, in Blue Velvet (1986), dir. David Lynch 209
4.2 Albrecht Dürer, Traumgesicht (Dream Face) (1525) 217
6.1 Django (Jamie Foxx) and Billy Crash (Walton Goggins) in Django Unchained
(2012), dir. Quentin Tarantino 290
6.2 Esteban Vihaio (Michael Parks) in Kill Bill Volume 2 (2003), dir. Quentin
Tarantino296
6.3 Close-up shot of the book Vihaio is reading in Kill Bill Volume 2 (2003),
dir. Quentin Tarantino 296
6.4 Transposing identities in the bar game in Inglourious Basterds (2009),
dir. Quentin Tarantino 302
7.1 World map of shipping routes in The Great Gatsby (2013), dir. Baz Luhrmann 325
7.2 Pieter Brueghel, The Triumph of Time (1562) 347
7.3 Image from Andreas Cellarius, The Celestial Atlas (1661), as reproduced
on the cover of the score to Thomas Adès, Concentric Paths (2005) 355
‘Suspiciendo despicio’
(When I raise my eyes to the sky, I see earthly things as well)
Tycho Brahe, De Mundi Aetherei Recentioribus Phaenomenis, Liber
Secundus (About Recent Phenomena in the Celestial World, Second
Book), 1588
Introduction
Antipodean Time and the Anthropocenic Imaginary
Four-Dimensional Postmodernism
The theme of this book is the way in which an engagement with antipodean
aspects of postmodernism inflects the representation of time across Western lit
erature and culture more generally. Although the word antipodean introduces
complex questions around positionality, as will be discussed later, the starting
point here, as in the Oxford English Dictionary’s first definition of the term, is
‘Australia and New Zealand (in relation to the northern hemisphere)’. By bringing
the localized cultures of Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand into dialogue with
more established postmodern narratives, so I argue, we expand the circumfer
ence of postmodernism as a cultural phenomenon, making it appear more exten
sive in both time and space, while also effectively foregrounding the aesthetics of
postmodernism, tracing ways in which an embrasure of planetary dimensions
has always been integral to its constitution. Stuart Hall suggested in 1986 that
postmodernism was ‘about how the world dreams itself to be “American” ’, but it
was always much more complicated than that, and to trace the long arc of post
modernism, from its embryonic formal experimentation in the 1960s to its envir
onmental concerns in the early twenty-first century, is to describe a richer and
more complex version of this cultural phenomenon, thereby relating it to a global
circumference rather than one centred merely upon the United States.1
Conversely, to trace ways in which American writers and artists, from John Cage
to Toni Morrison, represented time according to planetary rather than merely
nationalistic coordinates is to realign postmodernism within a much more expan
sive orbit, one in which the radical temporal disjunctions incumbent upon vari
ous forms of retrograde motion can be understood as integral to the aesthetic
dimensions of US postmodernism. By correlating postmodernism with the para
doxical figure of a planetary clock, through which unfathomable spatio-temporal
distances are framed within a specific chronometric measure, we come to recog
nize how such a projection of expansive scales can be understood as itself form
ing a crucial part of the postmodernist rubric. I therefore use fictions in a broad
1 Lawrence Grossberg, ‘On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall’
Journal of Communication Inquiry 10.2 (1986): 46.
The Planetary Clock: Antipodean Time and Spherical Postmodern Fictions. Paul Giles, Oxford University Press (2021).
© Paul Giles. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198857723.003.0001
2 The Planetary Clock
sense, to indicate not only works of prose fiction but also poetry, films, paintings,
and other cultural phenomena governed by an aesthetic framework. Indeed, one
of my contentions is that postmodernism itself is another form of fiction, a cat
egory of cultural history whose meaning necessarily fluctuates across time.
Periodization of any kind is always a fraught intellectual issue, of course, but
just as the definitional parameters of modernism have expanded in recent times
to encompass socially committed novels of the 1930s and 1940s as well as the
more widely recognized innovations of ‘high’ modernists such as T. S. Eliot and
Ezra Pound, so correspondingly it makes sense to think of postmodernism as a
relatively loose historical category encompassing avant-garde metafictions of the
1960s, a new focus on questions of race and gender in the 1970s and 1980s, issues
associated with computer technology from the 1990s onward, as well as anxieties
about the permeability of national borders and global warming that have charac
terized the first two decades of the twenty-first century. James Annesley has com
plained that postmodernism, ‘a framework developed initially in relation to the
analysis of literature and culture from the 1960s and 1970s,’ was later used to
explicate ‘texts from the end of the twentieth century’, to such an extent that the
explanatory term ‘lost its specificity’; but another way of looking at this might be
to say that postmodernism was never defined merely by formal concerns but was,
rather, interwoven at all levels with broader global issues.2 In this sense, it
becomes easier to see how the formation of literature and culture since the 1960s
has been shaped not only by what Timothy S. Murphy has called ‘the fundamen
tal postmodern principle of linguistic indeterminacy and slippage’, but also by a
geographical ‘slippage’ that crucially involved a decentring of Western canons.3 In
the case of postmodernism, such a shift enables us to see, for example, how envir
onmentalism—which was, as Frederick Buell observed in 2001, ‘a key part of the
globalization process’—became intertwined within the discursive matrix of
‘the global economy’, even if the emphasis during the 1990s on postmodernism as
a manifestation of multicultural cosmopolitanism and ‘the cultural logic of late
capitalism’ actually paid little attention to it.4 Environmentalism and transnation
alism, in other words, became key points of reference at the turn of the twenty-first
century even for those, like Donald Trump, who vehemently opposed their prem
ises. ‘Counter-globalization,’ as Murphy has shrewdly observed, ‘should be our
horizon of expectation for the culture of globalization as well.’5
2 James Annesley, Fictions of Globalization: Consumption, the Market and the Contemporary
American Novel (London: Continuum, 2006), 9.
3 Timothy S. Murphy, ‘To Have Done with Postmodernism: A Plea (or Provocation) for
Globalization Studies’, Symplokē 12.1/2 (2004): 24.
4 Frederick Buell, ‘Globalization without Environmental Crisis: The Divorce of Two Discourses in
U.S. Culture’, Symplokē 9.1/2 (2001): 48–9.
5 Murphy, ‘To Have Done with Postmodernism’, 29.
Introduction 3
The overall effect of this expansion in historical and geographic scope is to

reposition what Jean-François Lyotard called ‘the postmodern condition’ not as
an intellectual programme per se but as a broad cultural phenomenon shaped, in
variable and often conflicting ways, by a wide range of ideological perspectives.6
Although postmodernism has often been understood in the popular press as a
synonym for cultural radicalism and relativism, there have actually been many
different instantiations of postmodern culture, some of them informed by trad
itionalist or religious perspectives rather than simply formal experimentation or
irony, and one aim of The Planetary Clock is to describe this phenomenon in both
its intellectual and geographical variety. John Carlos Rowe in 1992 charted ‘three
different kinds of postmodernism’: an initial period of literary experimentation,
mainly in fiction, from 1965 to 1975; an era invested more in the theoretical agen
das of poststructuralism and deconstruction, roughly from 1975 to 1985; and a
‘postindustrial society’ dominated by information technology, something that
gained pace quickly after the first IBM personal computer went on sale in 1981,
with this digital capacity leading Alan Liu to call postmodernism ‘the cultural
arm of postindustrialism’.7 Working along similar though somewhat narrower
lines, Amy J. Elias in 2007 suggested that ‘aesthetic postmodernism . . . is generally
understood as having two stages of development: a late-modernist, metafictional
phase predominating in the 1960s and 1970s, and an antimodernist phase of cul
tural critique predominating in the 1980s and 1990s centring on politics of race,
class, gender, and nationhood’.8 Wendy Steiner similarly criticized definitions of
postmodernism that equated artistic importance merely with formal innovation,
arguing in particular that during the years between 1960 and 1990 fiction by
women—confessional narratives, autobiographies, and so on—was equally as
significant as work by male metafictional writers, the latter being the stuff of
what Amy Hungerford dismissively categorized as ‘the old postmodernism’.9
Hungerford has even gone so far as to suggest the period after 1945 should rather
be designated ‘long modernism’, on the grounds that ‘the second half of the
twentieth century sees not a departure from modernism’s aesthetic but its triumph
in the institution of the university and in the literary culture more generally.’10 Such
6 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), trans. Geoff
Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
7 John Carlos Rowe, ‘Postmodernist Studies’, in Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn, eds.,
Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies (New York:
Modern Language Association of America, 1992), 180; Alan Liu, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work
and the Culture of Information (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 302.
8 Amy J. Elias, Sublime Desire: History and Post- 1960s Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2001), xxvi.
9 Wendy Steiner, ‘Postmodern Fictions, 1960–1990,’ in Sacvan Bercovitch, ed., The Cambridge
History of American Literature, VII: Prose Writing, 1940–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999), 499–500; Amy Hungerford, ‘On the Period Formerly Known as Contemporary’,
American Literary History 20.1/2 (Spring-Summer 2008): 414.
10 Hungerford, ‘On the Period Formerly Known as Contemporary’, 418.
scepticism about the particular valence of postmodernism would fit with Andreas
Huyssen’s 1986 observation that it is primarily an American term, and that when
French intellectuals such as Lyotard and Julia Kristeva ‘think about the postmod
ern at all . . . the question seems to have been prompted by American friends, and
the discussion almost immediately and invariably turns back to problems of the
modernist aesthetic’, la modernité.11
There is, of course, always blurring and overlap between different periods, but
one pragmatic use of such historical differentiations is the way it enables scholars
to avoid the misleading notion that one distinctive era involves merely the
degradation of an earlier set of intellectual assumptions. Theodor W. Adorno
regarded the postmodern as merely a dead and decadent phase of modernism,
one where cultural work had taken on the form of reified consciousness, but for
all of his barbed genius, Adorno was neither sympathetic to nor attuned towards
postmodern styles involving an aesthetic negotiation with mass culture. One dan
ger in entirely dissolving historical periods consequently lies in the risk of not
identifying clearly enough the disparate material conditions that inform the pro
duction of cultural narratives. If modernism itself was shaped by World War I,
which exploded comfortable Edwardian assumptions of all kinds, and then by the
aftermath of World War II, which (as Werner Sollors argued) produced a new
emphasis on ‘cultural pluralism’ involving ‘intellectual critiques of fascism’ that
made modernist narratives centred upon the integrity of race or nation no longer
tenable, then postmodernism might be understood as linked systematically to the
collapse after 1973 of what David Harvey has called ‘Fordist modernism’, organ
ized around the stability of capital and labor.12 The Bretton Woods agreement in
1973 ensured that the US dollar would no longer be tied to the gold standard, and
this, together with subsequent proliferations of computer technology, rendered
local industry far more susceptible to transnational volatility. By correlating the
‘condition of postmodernity’ with broader social and political developments,
Harvey highlighted ways in which nation states had become susceptible to global
realignments across an economic as well as cultural axis.
As Jean Baudrillard noted, the ‘almost automatic reversion’ of 9/11, which
involved the Western system of globalization turned back violently against itself,
made shockingly manifest the ways in which borders of the United States, like
those of other nations, had become vulnerable to the rapid transfer of people and
capital across national frontiers, while also emphasizing the power of mass media
to shape the electronic reproduction of spectacle across a global domain.13 John
11 Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), 214.
12 Werner Sollors, ‘Ethnic Modernism, 1910–1950’, American Literary History 15.1 (Spring 2003):
75; David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 156.
13 Jean Baudrillard, ‘L’Esprit du Terrorisme’. trans. Michel Valentin, South Atlantic Quarterly 101.2
(Spring 2002): 406.
Introduction 5
Gray similarly suggested that 9/11 merely forced into view the new ‘realities of
globalization’ that had been ‘overlooked or repressed’ during the neoliberal apo
gee of the 1990s, with its fantastic dream of ‘the end of history’, a market-driven
liberal utopia driven by the universalization of commodified Western values,
something epitomized by the foundation of the World Trade Organization in
1995.14 September 11, 2001, has been nominated by Maurizio Ascari as the offi
cial date of postmodernism’s demise, but it would be more accurate to suggest
that 9/11 was a belated product of postmodernism, a traumatic event that ren
dered the dark side of global postmodernism visible.15 More plausibly, Frank
Lentricchia and Jody McAuliffe argued that 9/11 represented an end to ‘the long
American holiday from history’, an event that made clear to the American people
how their country and its values have always embodied part of a fraught histor
ical and geographical world, rather than merely epitomizing the microcosm of a
neoliberal state whose conditions could incontestably be universalized.16
Back in 1991, Fredric Jameson offered his version of postmodernism as ‘an
attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think
historically in the first place’, with his justly celebrated book offering an account of
culture permeated in its every aspect by the globalizing tentacles of ‘late capital
ism’, thereby inducing an obliteration of regionalist difference and a critical tem
per of ‘multiple historical amnesias’.17 This view of postmodernism as inherently
oppositional to the lineaments of progressive temporal sequence was endorsed
around the same time by N. Katherine Hayles, who described how an analysis of
postmodern culture ‘amounts to writing the history of no history’.18 The notion
that postmodernism ever sought specifically to neglect ‘social and historical
responsibility’ is doubtful, however, and, in any case, as the chronological con
tours of postmodernism have begun more clearly to take shape, so the phenom
enon has become easier to identify in historical terms.19 Ursula K. Heise in 2011
described the term ‘postmodernism’ as ‘mildly dated’, suggesting that questions of
‘global ecological connectedness’ had only ‘played at best a marginal role’ in its
formation, although Jameson in 2015 maintained that globalization, through its
‘displacement of old- fashioned industrial production by finance capital’,
14 John Gray, False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, rev. ed. (London: Granta Books,
2002), xii; Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press-Simon and
Schuster, 1992).
15 Maurizio Ascari, Literature of the Global Age: A Critical Study of Transcultural Narratives
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 21.
16 Frank Lentricchia and Jody McAuliffe, Crimes of Art and Terror (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2003), 15.
17 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1991), ix, 170.
18 N. Katherine Hayles, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 281.
19 Randall Stevenson, Reading the Times: Temporality and History in Twentieth-Century Fiction
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 177.
c ontinues to form ‘the economic base of which, in the largest sense, postmodernity
was the structure’. Jameson went on to insist that postmodernity—a word he now
says that he should have used in the first place rather than postmodernism—
continues to exemplify ‘not a style but a historical period, one in which all kinds
of things, from economics to politics, from arts to technology, from daily life to
international relations, had changed for good’. But even if we accept Jameson’s
premise of an ‘indispensable’ theoretical relationship between globalization and
postmodernity, to extend the circumference of the latter by reinscribing its
occluded antipodean aspects is to elucidate ways in which postmodernism’s
planetary dimensions, as Heise observed, have become increasingly manifest.20
Neoliberalism and international market capitalism may have been important
adjuncts to postmodern culture, but they were by no means synonymous with it,
and to reconsider postmodernism from a non-Western perspective is to elucidate
a wide variety of ideological forces that have clashed within its compass.
In this sense, to adumbrate a spherical postmodern culture is to translate the
idea of a sphere from its primary incarnation within a ‘theology of the orb’, as
exemplified in both Plato’s philosophy and medieval theology, and to emphasize
instead its inherently dualistic nature. A sphere, in Peter Sloterdijk’s definition, is
‘an orb in two halves, polarized and differentiated from the start, yet nonetheless
intimately joined’.21 Though both Plato and the Church Fathers sought to inte
grate spherical designs within ideal forms, the production of globes after about
1500 was linked to questions of geographical and commercial expansion, and the
use of sphere as a compound in contemporary language—in words such as hemi
sphere, atmosphere, and so on—speaks to a planetary condition that exceeds
mere phenomenological projection. Heidegger’s assumption of the sphere as a
basis for human ‘living’ and ‘building’ thus finds itself displaced by a planetary
environment within which interior worlds are always doubling back upon them
selves. Sloterdijk described Heidegger as ‘the greatest thinker of old Europe’, with
the philosopher’s thought being ‘a metastasis of southwestern German Old
Catholicism circa 1900’.22 By contrast, however, spherical postmodern culture
speaks not to an ‘idea of all-encompassing unity’ but, rather, to the dispersal of
‘the psychocosmic immune system of old Europe’ within planetary space.23 The
20 Ursula K. Heise, ‘Martian Ecologies and the Future of Nature,’ Twentieth-Century Literature 57.3
& 57.4 (Fall/Winter 2011): 447–8; Fredric Jameson, ‘The Aesthetics of Singularity,’ New Left Review 92
(March–April 2015): 115, 103–4.
21 Peter Sloterdijk, Spheres, Volume 2: Globes Macrospherology (1999), trans. Wieland Hoban
(South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2014), 364, and Spheres, Volume 1: Bubbles Microspherology
(1998), trans. Wieland Hoban (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2011), 45.
22 Sloterdijk, Spheres, Volume 2, 28; Peter Sloterdijk, Spheres, Volume 3: Foams. Plural Spherology
(2004), trans. Wieland Hoban (South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2016), 481, and ‘The Plunge and
the Turn: Speech on Heidegger’s Thinking in Motion’, in Not Saved: Essays after Heidegger (2001),
trans. Ian Alexander Moore and Christopher Turner (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), 5.
23 Sloterdijk, Spheres, Volume 2, 133, 449.
Introduction 7
key geometrical characteristic of a sphere, as Angus Fletcher has noted, is that it

has ‘no edges’ and ‘implies continuous rotating influences’, a world in constant
motion. In this sense, the figure of a sphere infracts against the notion of linear
parameters, necessarily introducing ‘blurred edges’ through which any given bor
der becomes permeable.24 The spherical might thus be said to map transnational
ism on a planetary plane, introducing a mode of global rotation that creatively
compromises the separatist integrity of territorial boundaries.
It is consequently more helpful to conceptualize postmodernism as a broad
category, both spatially and temporally, rather than defining it inductively, as a
phenomenon synonymous with what Jeffrey T. Nealon called ‘the new global
casino capitalism’. In his book Post-Postmodernism (2012), Nealon argued how
his preferred term ‘marks an intensification and mutation within postmodern
ism’, with one reviewer suggesting this title was ‘potentially misleading’ for imply
ing a periodizing break when the book’s main thesis turns on continuity. Nealon
was, of course, right to point out that social and political conditions have changed
significantly since Jameson published his first essays on postmodernism in 1984,
but this is no different from signalling how, say, Victorian culture altered between
1840 and 1870. The manifold discrepancies between early and mid-Victorian
times should not obscure the homologies that also connect such thirty-year inter
vals. Indeed, to expand the temporal arc of any given scholarly field is potentially
to understand its historical dimensions with greater clarity, just as Nealon’s argu
ment about ‘the world of post-postmodern capital’ (my italics) might have been
more persuasive if some of his assumptions—about how ‘classic rock is every
where’, for example, with ‘the Eagles in the grocery store’—had been played off
against a greater sense of geographical variability, with this template of commodi
fied rock music not necessarily being one that would be recognized outside North
America.25 Australian geographer Katherine Gibson, writing collaboratively with
American scholar Julie Graham as ‘J. K. Gibson-Graham’, has drawn on Australian
cultural landscapes, from Aboriginal land rights movements to the Labor Party
governments of the 1980s and 1990s, to highlight ways in which a supposedly
‘naturalized universal of the capitalist economy’ always encountered geographical
and ideological limits, so that even in what Gibson-Graham in 2006 called ‘these
postmodern times’, it was possible to adumbrate an alternative discursive world
that was not ‘capitalocentric’, after the familiar US model.26 Postmodernism,
I argue, has always been tied to a planetary clock rather than to a national narrative,
24 Angus Fletcher, The Topological Imagination: Spheres, Edges, and Islands (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2016), 83, 88, 192.
25 Jeffrey T. Nealon, Post-Postmodernism: or, The Cultural Logic of Just in Time Capitalism (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 29, ix, 41, 44–5; Andrew Shipley, ‘Review of Post-Postmodernism,
by Jeffrey T. Nealon’, Symplokē 22.1/2 (2014): 427.
26 J. K. Gibson-Graham, A Postcapitalist Poetics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2006), 166, 53, and The End of Capitalism (as we knew it): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy
(Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 6.
and the trajectory informing its antipodean dimensions renders this kind of
spherical spectrum more clearly visible.
Even though postmodernism itself can (and should) properly be historicized,
one of its effects paradoxically involves, as Sven Birkerts noted, ‘an aesthetic that
rebukes the idea of an historical time line’, as well as a ‘flattening of historical
perspective’.27 Describing the last quarter of the twentieth century in the United
States as ‘a great age of fracture’, Daniel T. Rodgers related this sense of ‘disaggre
gation’ specifically to a reconfiguration of time, in a world where ‘globalizing mar
kets had shortened time expectations’, and where the idea of continuous linear
history had consequently been rendered redundant.28 Rodgers accounted for this
notion of ‘compressed time’ across all parts of the political spectrum: ‘the new
managerial rhetoric of quick response and flexible production’ was mirrored in
‘the eagerness of postmodernist architects to pluck symbols and motifs out of the
past into a pastiche for the present’, while Ronald Reagan’s appropriation in his
1981 inaugural address of the spirit of John Winthrop showed ‘the exuberance of
a kind of transgressive time travel’, with Brian Massumi also commenting on how,
as an old Hollywood actor, Reagan ‘operationalized the virtual in postmodern
politics’.29 Similarly addressing the compressed time scales characteristic of ‘neo
liberal temporality’, Carolyn Hardin described ‘the future-in-present temporality
of contemporary financialization’, whose accumulations were predicated not on
the Keynesian (or Fordist) assumption of a stable continuity between past, pre
sent, and future, but rather on a short-term framework governed by the immedi
acy of telepresence, in a world where the future itself had come to appear highly
unpredictable, if not incomprehensible.30 Evidence of how such a ‘present-focused
time-sense’ has formed part of what Hardin called a ‘broader cultural shift’, one
not just confined to financial markets, can be seen in the assumption that regime
change in Iraq could be, as Rodgers noted, ‘premised on compressed and foldable
time, on the ability of universal human incentives to kick in surely and quickly’,
something the foreign relations historian John Lewis Gaddis described as
‘free-market thinking applied to geopolitics’.31
The point here is neither to defend nor indict postmodern temporality for
itself, but to suggest how its assumptions vary markedly from those of (say)
modernist, Victorian, or Enlightenment temporality, and how a cross-cultural
approach can most usefully illuminate the comparative characteristics of
27 Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (Boston, MA:
Faber, 1994), 123, 129.
28 Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 3, 5, 221.
29 Rodgers, Age of Fracture, 230, 254, 231; Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement,
Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 41.
30 Carolyn Hardin, ‘Neoliberal Temporality: Time-Sense and the Shift from Pensions to 401(k)s’,
American Quarterly 66.1 (March 2014): 95, 110.
31 Hardin, ‘Neoliberal Temporality’, 110; Rodgers, Age of Fracture, 267; John Lewis Gaddis, ‘Grand
Strategy in the Second Term’, Foreign Affairs 84.1 (Jan./Feb. 2005): 15.
Introduction 9
postmodernism across both time and space. Postmodernism, what comes ‘post’
or after modernism, is etymologically a comparative formation, and the term
itself only makes discursive sense within a nexus of comparison, both spatial and
temporal. While many of the figures considered in this book have been stereotyp
ically associated with particular national traditions—Philip Larkin with England,
for example, or Les Murray with Australia, or John Barth with the United States—
my argument will be that the planetary dimensions inherent within postmodern
ism serve to fold their art into spheres that are inherently hybridized and
transnational. In this way, the identification of national identity as an elusive phe
nomenon, something quite explicit in the work of Vladimir Nabokov or Thom
Gunn for example, can be seen to frame the articulation of postmodernism more
generally. Such a comparative perspective also effectively illuminates how post
modernist temporality embraced a range of socially progressive aspects, opening
up horizons that had been repressed by more conventional figures of linear his
tory. Besides its evocation of environmental questions, postmodernism’s resist
ance to traditional constructions of historical continuity was associated with a
feminist impulse towards ‘postmodern rhythmic temporality’, as Elizabeth Deeds
Ermath described it, a rejection of the coercive nature of the ‘commanding met
anarrative’ of historical realism, and the revelation instead that ‘temporality’ is
merely ‘a convention and a collective act of faith’.32 bell hooks similarly argued
that the emphasis in postmodernism on a ‘decentered subject’ allowed potential
discursive space for Black activist politics and for a ‘bonding’ of other groups that
had been marginalized by the heavy hand of traditional history, and this became
associated with the popular idea of postmodernism as associated above all with
what Marianne DeKoven called the ‘progressive, egalitarian, diverse’ cultural
politics of ‘the long sixties’.33 It is important to observe that the renewed attention
to questions of race and gender in the cultural politics of the 1980s and 1990s,
in particular, owed much to ways in which postmodern paradigms informed
both the critical trajectory of poststructuralism and the commitment of New
Historicism to excavate alternate versions of the past, narratives that had custom
arily been suppressed by the institutional constraints of the old history. But this
emphasis on aesthetic defamiliarization—or ‘de- doxification’, to use Linda
Hutcheon’s term—carried as its more sinister corollary the neoliberal paradigm
of the commodification and redistribution of time through a 24/7 market model
based around a world in which, as Jonathan Crary argued, human biology took
second place, where ‘sleeping’ was regarded as ‘for losers’, and where ‘the relent
less financialization and commodification of more and more regions of individual
32 Elizabeth Deeds Ermath, Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational
Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 33, 20, 30.
33 bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1990),
31; Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 3–4.
and social life’ created ‘a time extracted from any material or identifiable
demarcations’.34 The problematization of older models of continuity, in other
words, created distinct hazards as well as opportunities across a broad cultural
spectrum, and postmodernism was never synonymous with either emancipatory
politics or the coercions of late capitalism.
Such a radical compression of temporality also carried ramifications for the
production and consumption of art. Hayles asserted baldly in 2012 that ‘[t]he Age
of Print is passing’, while Jeremy Green in 2005 described how within what he
called ‘late postmodernism’, the whole conception of a ‘literary field’ was finding
itself under siege from ‘heterogeneous mediascapes’: television, DVD, Internet,
and so on.35 Although Green did argue that ‘imaginative engagement with this
fissured terrain has produced a significant body of contemporary writing’, he
nevertheless acknowledged how a publishing industry interlocked with mass
media and with the increasingly standardized tendencies of higher education,
whereby degrees came increasingly to be regarded as a form of accreditation for
the information economy, created a situation in which writing itself was regarded
as ‘a quixotic or absurd activity, an anachronistic enterprise’.36 Creative writing
still enjoyed considerable purchase as a university subject, as Mark McGurl has
described in The Program Era; but the Leavisite idea of literary criticism as being
at the heart of a liberal humanist education, with the long novel enshrined by the
Cambridge critic’s ‘great tradition’ both representing events unfolding over
sequential time and demanding a substantial expenditure of time on the part of
willing students, had generally been superseded.37 Helen Powell described ‘the
digital age’ as emerging from the 1980s, while Charlie Gere dated the new era
from 2000, arguing that the turn of the millennium witnessed the ‘almost total
transformation of the world by digital technology’.38 The latter claim is gross
hyperbole, of course, similar to Masao Miyoshi’s extravagant assertion in 1993
that ‘Cable TV and MTV dominate the world absolutely’; but it is nevertheless
true that new electronic technologies changed common perceptions of time
across a broad axis.39 For example, Jacques Derrida noted in Archive Fever (1995)
how the model of microcomputing as a ‘mystic pad’ introduced a different kind of
34 Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2002), 4;
Jonathan Crary, Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso, 2013), 14, 99, 29.
35 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2012), 2; Jeremy Green, Late Postmodernism: American Fiction at the
Millennium (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 1, 14.
36 Green, Late Postmodernism, 28, 13, 11.
37 Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James,
Joseph Conrad (London: Chatto and Windus, 1948).
38 Helen Powell, Stop the Clocks! Time and Narrative in Cinema (London: Tauris, 2012), 26; C. Gere,
Digital Culture, 2md ed. (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), 13.
39 Masao Miyoshi, ‘A Borderless World? From Colonialism to Transnationalism and the Decline of
the Nation-State’, Critical Inquiry 19.4 (Summer 1993): 747.
Introduction 11
memory, and how ‘psychoanalysis (among other things) would not have been
what it was if e-mail had existed’.40 Paul Booth, similarly, has written of how con
temporary television narratives have affected our general understanding of his
toricity, arguing how there have been complex convergences between digital
media structures and the evocation of history itself as a reconstruction of the
past, since both involve forms of ‘temporal displacement’ that signal ‘a shifting
notion of the cultural response to time and temporality in general’, through which
bygone scenarios are projected in simulated forms.41 The consequent institution
alization and naturalization of what Baudrillard described as an ‘age of simula
tion’ predicated upon ‘a liquidation of all referentials’ ensured that the ‘theology
of truth’, a powerful conception in the modernist understanding of meaning as a
latent and often secretive phenomenon, came to find itself supplanted by a hyper
real world in which the old division between realism and simulation had been
abolished. The challenge of Andy Warhol’s art, as Baudrillard observed, was not
to analyse the iconography of Jackie Onassis or other pictorial subjects in terms of
psychological depth, but to recognize the affective power of their ‘multiple repli
cas’ within the material world’s ‘vertigo of duplication’.42
The implicit correlation between finance and politics in relation to revised con
ceptions of postmodern temporality became mirrored also in affinities between
the fields of medicine and the security state. Eric Cazdyn has analysed how ‘there
is a shared logic in the way preemption was employed by the Bush administration
to justify its attacks on Iraq and the way preemption is now emphasized in eco
nomics, psychiatry, ecology, culture, and the medical sciences’. In particular,
genetic prediction of cancer and other diseases made possible by the emergence
of biotechnology has established the notion of ‘a new chronic mode’, one in which
the current condition of a person’s body merely foreshadows a future state, just
as the so-called ‘war on terror’ involves the security state forestalling events before
they happen.43 This creates, as Massumi observed, a curious ‘affect-driven logic
of the would-have/could-have’, grounded in a ‘metaphysics of feeling’, where threats
that do not actually materialize have ‘all the affective reality of a past future, truly
felt’. As Massumi noted, ‘[p]reemption is a time concept’, pivoting on a structure
of reversal whereby future time is transposed into present time.44 This marks a
significant change from the legal assumptions that appertained through most of
40 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1995), trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1996), 15.
41 Paul Booth, Time on TV: Temporal Displacement and Mashup Television (New York: Peter Lang,
2012), 209, 212.
42 Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman (New York:
Semiotext(e), 1983), 4, 12, 136.
43 Eric Cazdyn, The Already Dead: The New Time of Politics, Culture, and Illness (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2012), 130, 5.
44 Brian Massumi, Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2015), 191, 201, vii.
the twentieth century, when justice was apportioned in relation to actual deeds
rather than on the basis of mere intentions or fantasies. It also involves a distinct
shift away from the existentialist emphasis on freedom of the will as a morally
constitutive category. David Carr’s Time, Narrative, and History (1986), a book
published in a series entitled ‘Studies in Phenomenology and Existential
Philosophy’, drew upon the work of Martin Heidegger in order to postulate an
ethical stance towards both past and future, one that emphasizes the moral need
to ‘strike a balance between two extremes: over-stressing our inheritance in the
present by treating it as an isolating from past and future, and over-stressing our
openness to past and future by treating it as a supra-temporal perspective’.45 Yet
while such an emphasis on freedom as a condition of ‘balance’ may have seemed
important in the middle years of the twentieth century, particularly after the
trauma of World War II, it carries less obvious resonance at the beginning of the
twenty-first century, when issues of genetic coding, and information technology
in general, have dramatically altered our understanding of what the concept of
‘inheritance,’ and therefore of existential freedom, might mean. As we will see in
Chapter 5, the scientific intertwining of biogenetics with family ancestry in a
novel such as Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex (2002) is very different in kind from
the principled representation of temporality as ethical and political progression
in Jean-Paul Sartre’s ‘Roads to Freedom’ trilogy of novels, published between 1945
and 1949. This is not to claim that Eugenides is a better novelist than Sartre,
merely to indicate that their conceptions of time and history function very differ
ently, and that such cultural differences need to be acknowledged in any critical
understanding of their work.
Postmodern time, then, characteristically involves a scrambling of linear
sequence, whereby the present is haunted by both the proleptic future and what
Huyssen has called ‘present pasts’. Huyssen described how ‘modern means of
transportation and communication’ have weakened ‘temporal boundaries’ to
such an extent that history itself has been superseded by various forms of memo
rialization, some linked to the ‘museal sensibility’ that becomes part of a popular
collective imaginary, others associated with changes in digital technology through
which computer memory creates an archived past that far exceeds the capacity for
recollection of any given individual.46 Huyssen commented on how this ‘shift
from history to memory’ involved a ‘welcome critique of compromised teleo
logical notions of history,’ with the incorporation of ‘[m]emory as re-presentation,
as making present’ providing a valuable corrective to established histories based
45 David Carr, Time, Narrative, and History (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), 42.
46 Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2003), 1, and Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia
(New York: Routledge, 1995), 14. On how ‘automated electronic systems of memory’ have impacted
upon relations between present and past, see also Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Our Broad Present: Time
and Contemporary Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), xiii.
Introduction 13
on highly selective versions of the past that amounted in many cases to forms of
institutional ‘amnesia’.47 All of the public apologies to both the living and the dead
that have characterized the postmodern era—for the Holocaust, for child abuse,
to the ‘Stolen Generations’ of Indigenous Australians who were removed from
their families—presuppose a world in which the past is considered malleable,
with the genre of apology predicated on an assumption that history might have
gone in another direction if different ethical choices had been made. Jameson, by
contrast, subordinates ethics to politics, and for him history is ‘what hurts’, involv
ing a series of complex social and economic determinants that ensures the past
‘had to happen the way it did’.48 Within the postmodern culture of apology, how
ever, blame is characteristically associated instead with the actions of individuals;
indeed, there is a curious paradox—verging on a structural contradiction—asso
ciated with the notion of moral responsibility within postmodernism, whereby
the swerve away from existential autonomy as a functional category does not
exonerate the individual guilt of those caught up in earlier scenes of exploitation.
There do seem to be implicit statutes of limitations in such exercises—nobody, for
example, has so far apologized for the treatment of child chimney-sweeps in
nineteenth-century London, lamentable though that undoubtedly was by today’s
standards—but the general principle of the apology involves an appropriation of
the past for corrective purposes and the supposed amelioration of injustice by a
dissemination of sentimental affect. There have been some examples of this
re-appropriation of the past that have generally been considered successful, such
as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up in South Africa after the
abolition of apartheid in 1994, which sought cathartically to expurgate the past by
granting amnesty to those prepared to bear witness to their previous actions.
But again, this Commission was invested more in transforming narratives of
the future by the way it sought to reconfigure the terms and power equations of the
past. Whatever the philosophical status of this kind of temporal shift, it has clearly
influenced the representation of time in postmodern art and culture. As we shall
see in Chapter 4, Michael Rothberg’s analysis of ‘multidirectional memory’, link
ing adult to child and evoking a ‘transversal’ form of memory that transmits itself
across generations, is relevant to the cinema of Michael Haneke, whose film
Hidden (2005) evokes the latent violence that links contemporary Paris to the
French-Algerian war, just as Haneke’s film The White Ribbon (2009) obliquely
47 Huyssen, Twilight Memories, 6, and Present Pasts, 10, 21.

48 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1981), 102, and ‘Periodizing the 60s’, in The Ideologies of Theory (London:
Verso, 2008), 483. In a barb at Emmanuel Levinas, Jameson notes: ‘I have so often been taken to task
for my arguments against ethics (in politics as well as aesthetics) that it seems worth observing in
passing that Otherness is a very dangerous category, one we are well off without’ (Postmodernism, 290).
conjures up the traumatic memory of Nazi Germany.49 Trauma, in other words,

has become the stuff that postmodern temporality thrives upon.
My concern here, then, is not so much with a philosophy of time but with an
aesthetics of time, the ways in which postmodern temporality represents the
world in different fashions from the temporal styles of previous eras. One aspect
of this aestheticization of postmodernist time involves a recognition of ways in
which it evokes conceptions of a spectral presence that, as Dipesh Chakrabarty
noted, was generally not available to ‘the secular code of historical and humanist
time—that is, a time bereft of gods and spirits’.50 The haunting aspects of trauma
also transgress against more traditional aspects of progressive humanist time,
while the idea of a spectral past looming over the empirical present is also a theme
that has been extensively explored within Indigenous culture. It is, of course, easy
enough to understand academic suspicion of scholars who insist upon the real
presence of ancestral spirits; one may be put in mind of the Welshman Glendower,
in Shakespeare’s King Henry IV Part One, who claims he ‘can call spirits from the
vasty deep’, to which the more down-to-earth Hotspur responds: ‘Why, so can I,
or so can any man;/But will they come when you do call for them?’51 But as
Chakrabarty, drawing on the work of Slavoj Žižek, observed: ‘gods are as real as
ideology is, that is to say. . . they are embedded in practices’.52 Žižek’s notion of
how the ‘fundamental level of ideology. . . is not of an illusion masking the real
state of things but that of an (unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality
itself ’ carries particular resonance within a framework of postmodernism, where
apparently secular formations find themselves countervailed by many residual
loyalties (involving ethnic inheritance as well as religion), and where the dividing
line between belief and scepticism is often blurred or inchoate.53 The notion of a
four-dimensional postmodernism thus refers not only to an understanding com
mon in the world of theoretical physics of time itself as the fourth dimension of
space, but also to the prospect of antipodean postmodernism opening up a lim
inal zone in between sacred and secular, one in which a transposition of perspec
tives elucidates different angles of vision, both geographic and ontological. My
purpose is not to claim any kind of categorical primacy for antipodean postmod
ernism but, rather, to suggest ways in which it works productively to disorient
more familiar accounts of the subject, thereby rendering them permeable to alter
native spatio-temporal dimensions.
49 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of

Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 18.
50 Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Time of History and the Times of Gods’, in Lisa Lowe and David
Lloyd, eds., The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1997), 39.
51 William Shakespeare, King Henry the Fourth, Part One, Act Three, Scene I, lines 52–8, in The
Complete Works, ed. Peter Alexander (London: Collins, 1951), 496–7.
52 Chakrabarty, ‘The Time of History’, 41.
53 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 33.
Introduction 15
In this sense, the version of historicism committed to what Chakrabarty called

a ‘metanarrative of progress’ might be seen in itself as endemic to an ‘elitism’ that
would dismiss religious affect as beneath intellectual consideration by the ‘disen
chanted language of sociology’.54 By bringing Western time into the orbit of
antipodean time, and by considering ways in which traditional understandings
of linear progress turn back upon themselves, my purpose is not to validate
Indigenous culture as a metaphysical entity but, rather, to analyse ways in which
postmodern time across a global axis often involves a destabilization of conven
tional boundaries between the secular and the supernatural. Writing in 1979, as
the ‘computerization of society’ was beginning to reconstruct Western society
according to an ‘operativity criterion’ of technological efficiency within which
‘metaphysical philosophy’ appeared to be redundant, Lyotard defined the ‘post
modern condition’ as involving an ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’; but such
an attempt to universalize the codes of Western secularism glossed over many
emotional affiliations that could not fit so clearly within a sceptical accord.55 Jean
Genet in a 1977 interview said he thought there was ‘nothing happier or more
joyful’ than Monteverdi’s mass of the Beata Vergine, and he also remarked on a
Japanese Noh play ‘which really moved me’ in its evocation of the transition from
Buddhist into Shinto religion, even though the French writer firmly dismissed
any notion of granting such aesthetic fabrications the status of any kind of literal
truth: ‘Do you think I’m Buddhist or Shinto?’ The real scandal of Genet was not
so much sexual or political transgression, but an investment in the gravitas of art
itself as a phenomenon that could outweigh worldly constraints; he remarked that
after reading in bed a page of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, he ‘then
had to think for two hours before starting again’.56 For Genet, the potentially rad
ical, disruptive power of art could never be subordinated to the interests of any
kind of orthodoxy, communist, Catholic, or otherwise.
In Australia, the academic tradition of Cultural Studies that developed during
the latter part of the twentieth century has tended to marginalize, if not altogether
proscribe, this realm of aesthetics as tending towards a dangerously deviant
cathexis, a distortion of the consolidation of normative social values in the inter
ests of promoting a merely self-indulgent or socially elitist style. Australian critic
Simon During compared the cultural prestige associated with traditional forms
of the humanities to older and now largely superannuated models of learning
that propped up vested or aristocratic interests, ‘the world of Scholasticism and
the trivium; the worlds of old Anglican rural, parochial, and liturgical life, and so
on’. Tony Bennett likewise related conceptions of ‘art’s autonomy’ not only to
54 Chakrabarty, ‘The Time of History’, 50–1, 49.

55 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 67, xxiv–xxv.
56 ‘Jean Genet talks to Hubert Fichte’, trans. Patrick McCarthy, New Review No. 37 (April
1977): 10–11.
formulations of professional expertise linked to the consolidation of social power,

but also to a romanticized notion of freedom that can be traced back to Kant and
‘bears the continuing impress of a secular and historicized version of Christian
metaphysics’.57 Yet Genet’s investment was in neither freedom nor Christianity
but, rather, an imaginative rearrangement and traducement of social structures,
which he sought to spin on their head so they could be apprehended from an
alternative perspective. In this way, there are significant homologies between the
antipodean and the aesthetic, in that both involve not transcendence but system
atic repositioning, a recalibration of the normative codes of Western culture.
Rather than relegating antipodean aesthetics to a footnote, I argue that to bring
the art of Australasia into dialogue with Western culture more generally is to
expand postmodernism’s geographical orbit so as to gain a more nuanced view of
its temporal scales, the planetary clock that chronicles the manifold variations of
time on Earth. Ato Quayson used the term ‘calibrations’ to describe ‘a reading
practice’ that brought together ‘close reading of literature with what lies beyond it
as a way of understanding structures of transformation, process, and contradic
tion that inform both literature and society’, and The Planetary Clock seeks simi
larly to calibrate literature, art, and film in the light of broader ‘interdisciplinary
modulations’ across differential geospatial equations.58 Hayles, who prefers the
term ‘digitalism’ to postmodernism, has suggested that antiquated models of lit
erary scholarship should be reclassified under the label ‘Comparative Media
Studies’, and such a reformulation would speak to the sense of literature as an
exhausted enterprise that During, Bennett, and others have talked about.59 The
contention of this book, however, is that the formulation of aesthetic value across
a broad spectrum of art forms—music, film, and the visual arts, as well as litera
ture—offers an apparatus of aesthetics that exceeds the boundaries of the quotid
ian, provoking forms of alterity that open up different kinds of ways to understand
the world.
The defamiliarization of time was a common theme in visual art of the 1960s,
ranging from the subversion of conventional narrative constraints in Warhol’s
eight-hour film Empire (1964), which features one shot of the Empire State build
ing from mid-evening until 3 a.m. the next day, to the fluctuating time schemes in
the films of Michelangelo Antonioni. The brilliance of Empire, as Pamela L. Lee
wrote, lies in its ‘seemingly literal relationship to time’, the ways in which it
57 Simon During, ‘Stop Defending the Humanities’, Public Books, 1 March 2014, online: http://
www.publicbooks.org/stop- defending-the-humanities/, accessed 24 Jan. 2017; Tony Bennett,
‘Sociology, Aesthetics, Expertise’, New Literary History 41.2 (Spring 2010): 267–8. Both During and
Bennett were born outside Australia—During in New Zealand, Bennett in the UK—but they cur
rently work at the University of Queensland and Western Sydney University respectively and have
become academically associated with the shift from literary to cultural studies.
58 Ato Quayson, Calibrations: Reading for the Social (Minnesota: University of Minneapolis Press,
2003), xi.
59 Hayles, How We Think, 7.
Introduction 17
orchestrates its shots so as to disrupt the selective temporal conventions around

which regular art is organized, while Antonioni’s work similarly problematizes
traditional assumptions of linear sequence.60 In the latter’s L’Avventura (The
Adventure, 1960), there is a specific allusion to Australia, since the film follows a
group of wealthy friends from Rome who search the coastal islands off Sicily for
Anna (Lea Massari), who has suddenly disappeared without trace from their
boating holiday. With a storm looming on the island, they take refuge in a hut
and encounter its occupant, a fisherman who tells them the hut’s owners are in
Australia, from where he himself has returned after thirty years, pointing to
photographs of his antipodean relatives pinned to the walls of his abode to prove
it. In a flat-footed reading of this scene, Lindsay Barrett complained of how ‘these
narcissists have no interest in [the fisherman’s] story: they ask him no questions
about himself, or Australia, or the years he spent there; all they care about is the
adventure of their search’. However, the enigmatic and disorienting nature of this
Aeolian landscape, whose islands (as one of the characters remarks) were once
volcanoes, reflects the larger dislocations of space and time that are crucial to the
tenor of this film, evoking as it does scenes of classical and religious ruin where
the reality of time itself appears to become evanescent, to implode upon itself or
go into reverse.61 As we shall see throughout this book, the anomalous temporal
ity associated with ‘indigenous and aboriginal peoples’ consistently interrupts
Eurocentric assumptions, invoking dimensions of the uncanny or alterity that
introduce what Iain Chambers has called ‘a critical uncertainty’ into ‘institutional’
Western chronotopes.62 But such alterity is not merely the product of n on-Western
cultures. As I discuss in Chapter 1, both French composer Olivier Messiaen
and film-maker Eric Rohmer use religious imagery to reconstruct postmodern
narratives in a way that allows space for the uncanny, and to expand postmod
ernism’s orbit to include antipodean variations is again to elucidate alternative
angles on Western as well as Australasian cultures. Chakrabarty, when c omparing
‘secular’ and ‘humanist time’ to its ‘subaltern’ corollaries, focused on the invoca
tion of ‘Gods, spirits, and other “supernatural” forces’ in South Asia, with an
acknowledgment as well of how various communal stories in ‘Africa, or Latin
America’ disrupt the global penetration of ‘capitalism’; but the spherical strain of
an antipodean imaginary, extrapolating from the specific geographical circum
stances of the Southern continent larger dimensions of a lterity, also carries a
particular charge within this context.63
60 Pamela L. Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2004), 279.
61 Lindsay Barrett, ‘The Beginner’s Guide to Being an Australian: John O’Grady’s They’re a Weird
Mob’, in Peter Kirkpatrick and Robert Dixon, eds., Republics of Letters: Literary Communities in
Australia (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2012), 244.
62 Iain Chambers, ‘Citizenship, Language, and Modernity’, PMLA 117.1 (Jan. 2002): 30, 28.
63 Chakrabarty, ‘The Time of History’, 39, 36, 57.
Reinscribing postmodernism within a planetary framework in this way does

not involve merely invoking Indigenous culture as a corrective to Western deca
dence. Johannes Fabian, in his poststructuralist account of anthropology Time and
the Other (1983), cautioned specifically against relegating the study of any social
organization to a mythical time of origins, and the burden of Fabian’s argument
was that anthropology itself is always tied up with the ironies of language and with
the ‘dialectical contradiction’ inextricably entangled in all questions of representa
tion. What Fabian called the anachronism and ‘allochronism of anthropology’ is
thus not a categorical mistake, but an aspect integral to its intellectual condition of
being.64 To bring Western postmodernism into juxtaposition with its antipodean
counterpart is consequently not merely to replenish the former with a lost world of
spirit, nor simply to deconstruct the latter through exposing it to neoliberal forms
of commodification. Instead, it elicits a reciprocally illuminating circuit between
these differential potentialities, suggesting how they are bound up in complex
ways each with the other. Such a projection of temporality along multiple scales
simultaneously is itself characteristic of postmodernism recalibrated across a
spherical domain, with English composer Harrison Birtwistle (to be discussed in
Chapter 7) organizing his musical piece for electronic tape Chronometer (1971)
around an idea of time unfolding in different registers. Chronometer juxtaposes a
loud stopwatch, the bells of fourteenth-century Wells Cathedral and the chiming
of Big Ben, with this iconic London clock being slowed down on tape to a distant
rhythmic echo resembling a heartbeat, as if to counterpoint clockwork time with a
slower, organic process of time’s gradual unfolding. Such métissage represents both
an aestheticization of time and its alignment along different ontological scales, and
it is a similar sense of radical variability that illuminates the art of postmodernism
within a planetary framework. One limitation of US versions of postmodernism,
in their intellectual association with New Historicism and its emancipatory narra
tives of race and gender, was the way they tended simply to take over what Brook
Thomas called the ‘progressive temporal continuity’ associated with a ‘pragmatic
sense of temporality,’ so that there were ‘unacknowledged continuities’ between the
teleology of old history and New Historicism.65 By contrast, to invoke a long post
modernism, extensive both in its temporal scope and its spatial extent, is to recon
struct this sense of time according to more heterogeneous markers.
Ironies of the Anthropocene
The apparent antithesis between postmodernism on the one hand and environ
mental politics on the other can be traced back as far as William Cronon’s classic
64 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 164, 32.
65 Brook Thomas, The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1991), 79, 22.
Introduction 19
1992 essay, ‘A Place for Stories’, which complained of how there was ‘something
profoundly unsatisfying and ultimately self-deluding about an endless postmod
ernist deconstruction of texts that fails to ground itself in history, in community,
in politics, and finally in the moral problem of living on earth’.66 Bruno Latour
similarly chastised postmodernism for ‘its rejoicing in virtual reality’, along with
‘its overemphasis on reflexivity, its maddening efforts to write texts that do not
carry any risk of presence’, and he accused ‘Postmoderns of the past and of the
present’ of attempting ‘to break the connection between the discovery of natural
laws of the cosmos and the problems of making the Body Politic safe for its
citizens’.67 One structural irony here, however, is that predictions of climate change
have themselves been amplified by a postmodernist intellectual context, with cli
matology heavily reliant on computer-generated models that allow scientists to
study the complex interactions among oceans, land, atmosphere, flora, fauna,
clouds, and human industry.68 It is true, as climate scientist Paul N. Edwards
observed, that all meteorological knowledge has always been indebted to abstract
scientific systems of one kind or another, since climate ‘is essentially the history of
weather, averaged over time’, and is thus necessarily dependent on a ‘model-data
symbiosis’.69 To say climate change is a virtual conception is not to suggest it is
merely phantasmagoric or fanciful, but to suspend the ontological divide between
empirical reality and the postmodern simulacrum in a manner that follows pre
cisely Baudrillard’s projection of ‘perpetual simulation, in a perpetual present of
signs’.70 Virtual reality is as real as any other.
This is not, then, to take issue with the general science of climate change, based
upon measures of rising oceans, thawing polar icecaps, and an increasing preva
lence of extreme weather; as Michael E. Mann and Tom Toles summarize this
case, ‘[t]he basic facts are now clear and essentially beyond dispute’.71 It is, how
ever, to acknowledge that there are many different discursive contexts within
which such science might be conceptualized, and that the ‘careful hedging’
practised by professional scientists cognizant of the limitations of all theories
pertaining to climate prediction often gets lost amidst the loud pressure from
mass media and politicians for simple ‘data’ that can be extrapolated to make a
popular case. This has led, as Mike Hulme has argued, to a situation in which
66 William Cronon, ‘A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative’, Journal of American History
78.3 (March 1992): 1374.
67 Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1999), 21–2, 217.
68 Adam Trexler, Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 2015), 38.
69 Paul N. Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global
Warming (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 287, 352.
70 Jean Baudrillard, America (1986), trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1988), 76.
71 Michael E. Mann and Tom Toles, The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial is
Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2016), 9.
the science of climatology has become framed within a wide spectrum of

competing philosophical beliefs.72 Jeffrey T. Kiehl, for example, hoped to counteract
‘our habitual patterns of negativity’ in relation to climate change matters by
drawing on Jungian psychology and Buddhism as a path towards ‘compassionate
action’, a quasi-religious directive of ‘transformation’ owing more to a cathexis of
emotional affect than to rational analysis: ‘If we open our hearts and feel our con
nection to the world,’ he writes, ‘our actions will be true.’73 Such a call to feel the
urgency of climate change rather than merely to analyse the problem rationally
brings to mind what Patricia T. Clough in 2007 called ‘the Affective Turn’, a move
ment charged with an emphasis different from the linguistic turn, focussing as it
does not so much on language as on the kind of sensory responses generated by a
‘biomediated body’—touch, taste, smell, and so on—all of which have been influ
enced by recent research in the cognitive neurosciences.74 It is, though, not diffi
cult to see how, in its openness to ‘visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally
other than conscious knowing’, such theories of affect participate in the same kind
of quarrel with more abstract forms of rationalism that galvanized postmodern
ism in its earlier days, when it sought radically to scrutinize modernism’s grand
(and grandiose) narratives under the sign of manifold cultural difference.75
To reformulate ‘the climate change problem’ within a postmodern mode is thus
not at all to reduce it to a merely ludic category, even though for instrumental
purposes, as Eric A. Posner and David Wesibach have suggested, there may be
good political reasons for disconnecting it from a more idealistic ‘corrective just
ice model’. Posner and Wesibach recognized how ‘justice-related arguments’ have
the capacity to undermine prospects for an international climate change agree
ment and thus to create increased risks for the general state of human well-being,
especially in poor nations, and so they chose to argue pragmatically for a ‘broadly
welfarist’ approach to this issue.76 The larger point, though, is that a more cap
acious definition of postmodernist culture would encompass both rhetorical
irony and ethical commitment, with the mise-en-abîme of linguistic deconstruc
tion not necessarily positioning itself in opposition to environmental concerns
for the planet. Such a symbiotic interface between the kind of epistemological
slippage characteristic of poststructuralist theory and scenarios of moral
72 Mike Hulme, Why We Disagree About Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and
Opportunity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 233, 218.
73 Jeffrey T. Kiehl, Facing Climate Change: An Integrated Path to the Future (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2016), xi–xii, 143.
74 Patricia T. Clough, ‘The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia, and Bodies’ (2007), in
Melissa Gregg and Gregory T. Seigworth, eds., The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2010), 207; Gregory T. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’, in
Gregg and Seigworth, eds., The Affect Theory Reader, 7–8.
75 Seigworth and Gregg, ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’, 1.
76 Eric A. Posner and David Weisbach, Climate Change Justice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2010), 190, 192, 9.
Introduction 21
engagement is familiar enough from the work of celebrated postmodernist writers

such as David Foster Wallace, and one of the larger benefits of antipodean
postmodernism is the way it turns the planet conceptually on its axis, allowing
such an interplay between irony and the Anthropocene to form a constituent part
of global postmodernism’s definition. By deconstructing ossified oppositions—
North versus South, as well as irony versus ethics—an antipodean postmodern
ism effectively expands what might seem like a narrow periodizing concept into a
more variegated, flexible phenomenon. It is also noteworthy that the profile of
global warming as a scientific issue was significantly advanced in the 1970s by the
development of spectral mathematics as a new way to calculate the Earth’s tem
peratures, moving away from the linear grids of latitude and longitude that had
until then dominated atmospheric research through the devising of a mathemat
ical system more fully responsive to variations caused by the Earth’s spherical
shape. Spectral mathematics brought polar geography into greater prominence
by, as Edwards observed, addressing ‘one of the most difficult problems in Earth
system modelling: representing wave motion on a sphere’.77 One of the pioneers
in this method was William Bourke, who was based at Australia’s Commonwealth
Meteorology Research Centre, and this indicates how the expansion of environ
mental science to recognize the shape of the planet can be understood as analo
gous to a move to redefine postmodernism according to a spherical model.78
Part of the problem with academic environmentalism in general is that it has
been too quick to take sides, to follow the example of Cronon in adducing a
‘moral center’ to environmental history, one that would position it antithetically
to postmodernism.79 Such an invocation of what Sabine Wilke called ‘global
environmental justice’ has involved linking environmental politics to systems of
colonial oppression that raise questions around identity and community, a stra
tegic shift that led Rob Nixon to indict what he called ‘the age of neoliberal glo
balization’ for suppressing the interests of too many people.80 This is not to
criticize the political position of Wilke or Nixon in itself, and the latter’s citation
of Arundhati Roy’s argument that globalization is ‘like a light which shines
brighter and brighter on a few people and the rest are in darkness’ carries particu
lar purchase in the era of Trump and Brexit, when there has been a sharp popular
reaction against the social and economic loading of the dice by those who, during
the heyday of neoliberalism, were able to manipulate global markets to their own
advantage. But to align this inequitable politics with a ‘slow violence’ that brings
77 Edwards, A Vast Machine, 165.

78 On the ‘magnitude of the “pole problem” ’, see Michael Naughton, Philippe Courtier, and William
Bourke, ‘Representation Errors in Various Grid and Spectral Truncations for a Symmetric Feature on
the Sphere’, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 122, No. 529 (Jan. 1996): 254.
79 Cronon, ‘A Place for Stories’, 1370.
80 Sabine Wilke, ‘Anthropocentric Fictions: Ethics and Aesthetics in a New Geological Age’, Rachel
Carson Center Perspectives, No. 3 (2013): 67; Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of
the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 46.
about environmental depredation is to conflate issues that are working themselves

out within radically different trajectories, one on the level of worldly affairs, the
other within the realm of planetary simulation. Nixon’s assertion of the ‘over
whelming, virtually unanimous, consensus among climate scientists that climate
change is happening, is human-induced, is accelerating, and will have cata
strophic consequences for human and much nonhuman life on earth’ may be
plausible enough, and Edwards concurs that while ‘[p]robabilities are all we
have . . . the probability that the skeptics’ claims are true is vanishingly small’, since
the ‘facts of global warming are unequivocally supported by the climate know
ledge infrastructure.’81 But the ways in which climate issues are represented, and
the complicated political options arising out of them, are another matter entirely.
Nicole Seymour has aptly claimed that in its insistence on the ‘transparency of
truth’, ecocriticism has too often avoided ‘self-reflexivity, and metacritique’, of the
kind integral to postmodern fictions. To fold environmentalism into postmod
ernism, then, is both to introduce an ecological dimension into postmodernism
and also to recognize how enviromentalism’s ‘reputation for sanctimony and
self-
righteousness’ might productively be crossed by more ironic aspects of
‘queerness’ and ‘affect’. Nature, suggested Seymour, is no less of a performative
category than gender.82
One paradox here involves the way in which the Anthropocene is itself a
non-anthropocenic concept, something that attempts specifically to counter the
‘narcissistic reflex’ of human exceptionalism by a contrary emphasis on the integ
rity of non-human objects, what Jane Bennett called ‘the vitality of matter’. Such
vitality involves, in Bennett’s view, ‘the capacity of things—edibles, commodities,
storms, metals—not only to impede or block the will and design of humans but
also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies
of their own’.83 From this angle, there might appear to be an anomalously
anthropomorphic aspect to the Anthropocene, an appropriation of human tools
of measurement to calibrate processes that are non-human in their operation.
Such a double-bind serves ironically to draw attention to the limits of human agency,
even as the term itself invokes the malignant repercussions of human industrial
civilization. Another structural irony is the fact that it will only be possible to
date the Anthropocene in retrospect, from a hypothetical point way beyond the
temporal horizons of contemporary historians. As Jeremy Davies has observed,
there are innumerable disagreements about when the Anthropocene era, involving
the warming of the planet due to human activity, might properly be said to have
81 Nixon, Slow Violence, 172, 39; Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living (New York: Modern Library,
1999), 123; Edwards, A Vast Machine, 429.
82 Nicole Seymour, Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 26, 16, 19, 119.
83 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2010), xvi, ix, vii.
Introduction 23
begun. Some opt for the era of the Cold War, pointing to the Manhattan Project’s
first nuclear test in 1945; others point to James Watt’s patents on steam engine
design in 1784, or to the emergence of European capitalist regimes of globalizing
commodity chains in the fifteenth or sixteenth century, or to Columbus’s first
transatlantic voyage in 1492; still others suggest that climate change is not a phe
nomenon specific to the last few centuries, but can be traced back to agriculture
and settlement that began some five thousand years ago.84
While it may not be within the competence of any cultural critic to adjudicate
among these conflicting claims, it is entirely appropriate to highlight the
degrees of epistemological uncertainty associated with such projections and
the rhetorical ironies embedded within the conception of the Anthropocene
itself. Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey has written of how ‘the Anthropocene must be
provincialized’, since it is a ‘masculinist and ethnocentric’ concept weighted too
much towards the ‘global north’ and correspondingly light on marine issues of
oceanography and islands, with the additional irony that the emergence of the
Anthropocene was imbricated during the Cold War with nuclear science, since it
was the military tracking of radioactive fallout after World War II that led to the
development of radiocarbon dating and more accurate models of the planet’s
deep time. On a more systemic level, however, it is also true that the Anthropocene
is necessarily an allegorical formation, one involving what DeLoughrey described
as ‘an aporia or discontinuity’ at its core.85 Pursuing this complex relation between
the planetary environment and its discursive configuration, Srinivas Aravamudan
described climate change through the trope of ‘catachronism’, an ‘inversion of
anachronism’ that ‘re-characterizes the past and the present in terms of a future
proclaimed as determinate, but that is of course not yet fully realized’.86 The editor
of the special issue of diacritics where Aravamudan’s essay appeared noted how
our consciousness of the Anthropocene has ‘ushered in strange and chaotic tem
poralities’, ones associated with extraordinary expansions of temporal scale.87
Aravamudan chronicled how the last major extinction event was an asteroid col
lision with the Earth some 65 million years ago, and how there have been ‘eleven
major climate change events’ involving glaciation and interglacial interludes over
the past million years. All of this renders ‘the quasi-Nazi propositions of deep
ecology’ highly problematic in terms of contemporary politics, since these diver
gences of scale between social time and ecological time are so great.88
Aravamudan’s notion that the ‘Anthropocene is never simply what you predict it
84 Jeremy Davies, The Birth of the Anthropocene (Oakland: University of California Press,
2016), 89–104.
85 Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, Allegories of the Anthropocene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2019), 20, 12, 69, 10. DeLoughrey’s model of ‘provincializing’ the Anthropocene is indebted to Dipesh
Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe, and her use of ‘aporia’ to the work of Paul de Man.
86 Srinivas Aravamudan, ‘The Catachronism of Climate Change’, diacritics 41.3 (2013): 8.
87 Karen Pinkus, ‘From the Editor: Climate Change Criticism’, diacritics 41.3 (2013): 3.
88 Aravamudan, ‘Catachronism’, 13, 23.
will be; otherwise the future would be just an extension of the present’ can be
linked conceptually to what Nassim Nicholas Taleb called the ‘black swan’ idea of
history, which is based upon ‘the structure of randomness in empirical reality’.
Taleb specifically expressed scepticism about ‘the models used to forecast climate
change’, suggesting that technological developments or other unexpected events
might prevent the simple extrapolation of a future state from current conditions.89
Indeed, Paul Smethurst has linked the apocalyptic trope of ‘global warming’ to a
modernist style of grand narrative, one that seeks to extrapolate predictions from
the past, despite the fact that the models of chaos theory and unpredictability
associated with postmodern chronotopes signal ‘not the end of history, but the
end of history as a map’.90 One of the structural ironies associated with the
Anthropocene (as opposed to the science of climate change) involves the way this
concept is framed by a postmodern condition but circumscribed discursively by
older styles of rhetoric.
The issue here involves not only philosophical randomness, but also the prob
lematic correlation between radically different time scales. British painter David
Hockney in 2008 dismissed climate change activists as ‘hair-shirt’ people, adding:
I blame computers. They can make predictive models of anything, and tell us
we’re all heading towards doom. But in our grandparents’ day, what do you think
people were worrying about? Hellfire and eternal damnation caused by our bad
conduct. Global warming has just replaced God. Something to feel guilty about.
The new religion.91
It is true that the idea of apocalyptic catastrophe can be ‘oddly comforting’, as

Aravamudan noted, and also that the notion of the Anthropocene as ‘a negative
theology of messianicity’ has attracted the intellectual support of many Christian
proselytizers.92 Links between theology and ecology have an extensive cultural
history, going back to William Paley in the eighteenth century: ‘Long before ecol
ogy emerged as a scientific discipline,’ observed Alan Bewell, ‘it was an important
aspect of natural theology, which celebrated the intricate ecological relationships
existing among plants and animals as an expression of the wisdom and design of
Creation.’93 Given this intellectual genealogy, it is not difficult to understand how
89 Aravamudan, ‘Catachronism’, 24; Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the
Highly Improbable, 2nd ed. (New York: Random House, 2010), xxxii, 315.
90 Paul Smethurst, The Postmodern Chronotope: Reading Space and Time in Contemporary Fiction
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 83–4.
91 Andy McSmith, ‘Painter Sees Red: Is David Hockney the Grumpiest Man in Britain?’
Independent (UK), 5 June 2008, online: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/painter-
sees-red-is-david-hockney-the-grumpiest-man-in-britain-840532.html, accessed 24 Jan. 2017.
92 Aravamudan, ‘Catachronism’, 10, 24.
93 Alan Bewell, Natures in Translation: Romanticism and Colonial Natural History (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), 297–8.
Introduction 25
Thom van Dooren’s utopian commitment to ‘ecologies of hope’ owes as much to

his academic background in religious studies as to his environmental activism.94
Some of the more foolish clerical commentators who have sought to extrapolate
divine teachings from contemporary events effectively corroborate Hockney’s point
about the guilt-ridden aetiology of climate change with, for example, the Bishop of
Carlisle in 2007 claiming that severe flooding in England was a ‘strong and definite
judgment from God’ and a sign of the community’s ‘moral degeneration’.95
Hockney himself, who specifically rejected the Nonconformist religion of his
native Yorkshire, created in 2011 The Four Seasons: Woldgate Woods (Figure 0.1),
a brilliant sequence of digital videos synchronized around the changing seasons
throughout the year in a rural area close to his family home in Bridlington, with
Figure 0.1 David Hockney, ‘The Four Seasons Woldgate Woods (Spring 2011,
Summer 2010, Autumn 2010, Winter 2010),’ (2010–2011). 36 digital videos
synchronized and presented on 36 monitors to comprise a single artwork. Edition of
10 with 2 A.P.s; Duration 4:21.
© David Hockney
94 Thom van Dooren, ‘Provisioning Crows: Ecologies of Hope in the Mariana Islands’, Association
for the Study of Literature, Environment and Culture, Australia and New Zealand, University of
Sydney, 25 Nov. 2016. See also van Dooren’s Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). Though now a professor in the Department of Gender and
Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, van Dooren completed his BA at the Australian National
University in 2003 majoring in philosophy and religious studies. In an essay on vultures in India, he
characteristically attributed their ‘differential treatment’ to ‘significant cultural and religious dimensions
of Hinduism and life in India’. Thom van Dooren, ‘Vultures and their People in India: Equity and
Entanglement in a Time of Extinctions’, Australian Humanities Review No. 50 (May 2011), online: http://
www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-May-2011/vandooren.html, accessed 24 Jan. 2017.
95 Hulme, Why We Disagree About Climate Change, 161.
the cameras passing through the landscape to create a four- minute video
synchronized as a single artwork on multiple screens. The larger connotations of
this work involve projecting a broader sense of regular temporality and represent
ing time itself as a continuous passage, rather than seeking merely to document
particular moments in time. But this seasonal aesthetic frame also implies how
the cycles of nature continue on their way unobstructed by any idiosyncratic
human designs. Despite his enthusiastic appropriation of avant-garde technolo
gies in the interests of art, Hockney’s representation of time here is conservative
and organicist, more akin to that in James Thomson’s poem The Seasons (1740), a
form that involves not the linear teleology characteristic of Christian hope or
conflagration, but a neoclassical patterning of natural repetitions.96
As Heise has observed, the Anthropocene has mostly been associated in liter
ary terms with science fiction, the genre that deals most explicitly with the fate of
the planet as a whole, although it is obvious enough that ‘cli fi’ (as it is now called)
from previous eras is not notable for its historical accuracy or prophetic insight.97
J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962) describes a scenario of global warming
caused by solar storms and a consequent colonization of the Arctic Circle,
which has turned into ‘a sub-tropical zone with an annual mean temperature
of eight-five degrees’.98 The novel cites surrealist artists such as Salvador Dalí and
Max Ernst, and it evokes surrealist-like images of clock faces without hands, with
one of the characters here contemplating reversing a clock’s direction and run
ning it backwards. This speaks to Ballard’s interest in his dramatis personae being
‘plunged back into the archaeopsychic past, uncovering the ancient taboos and
devices that have been dormant for epochs’, and such retrogression is juxtaposed
against radically different temporal scales, with Kerans, the novel’s central pro
tagonist, feeling ‘like a man marooned in a time sea, hemmed in by the shifting
planes of dissonant realities millions of years apart’.99 Brilliant though this is as a
surrealist jeu d’esprit, it hardly accords with the argument of ecocritic Adam
Trexler that ‘climate change is upon us’ and that all contemporary fiction must
necessarily engage, in one way or another, with climate change as ‘part of every
day life’.100 Ballard himself was a great admirer of Baudrillard, and his own fic
tional narratives position themselves not so much in the future but in what the
author called a ‘visionary present’ where parallel worlds intersect, thereby making
historical reality co-terminous with virtual reality.101 Trexler’s activist assumptions
96 On ‘the classical closed circle of cyclic time’ and its opposition to Christian models of ‘apoca
lypse’ and ‘deliverance’, see Stanley Hauerwas, ‘Theological/Worldly’, in Joel Burges and Amy J. Elias,
eds., Time: A Vocabulary of the Present (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 290.
97 Ursula K. Heise, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2016), 203. On ‘cli fi’, see Deborah Jordan, Climate Change Narratives in
Australian Fiction (Saarbrücken: LAP Lambert Academic Publishing, 2014), 29.
98 J. G. Ballard, The Drowned World (1962; rpt. London: Millennium-Gollancz, 1999), 21.
99 Ballard, The Drowned World, 63, 29, 44, 129. 100 Trexler, Anthropocene Fictions, 5, 233.
101 J. G. Ballard, ‘Introduction’, in The Complete Short Stories (London: HarperCollins, 2001), ix.
Introduction 27
risk overlooking the fact that Anthropocene novels are indeed works of
‘imaginative fiction’, not philosophical or scientific treatises.102 Ironically, however,
the fabricated nature of these fictional narratives works reciprocally to draw
attention to the postmodernist context of climate change itself, an issue that
gained traction when forms of prolepsis and simulacrum were becoming natural
ized within the wider culture.
This is not of course to advocate a position of climate scepticism, nor to deny
the pertinence of scientific evidence about global warming in the twenty-first
century. It is, though, to come at this issue intellectually from a different perspec
tive, one that would allow us to understand climate change as part of a larger
postmodernist constellation, with all of the aporias such a framework necessarily
involves. Again, my concern here is not so much with the politics of the
Anthropocene as with its aesthetics, with the confluence of forces that has pro
pelled the fate of the planet into full view and consequently informed the con
tours of postmodernist art. As Elizabeth A. Povinelli has written, the concept of
the Anthropocene is not just a meteorological or geological event but something
that can be traced back to political disturbances that emerged in the 1960s,
involving Indigenous opposition to mining activity and a projection of ‘Gaia’ as
‘the whole earth’. This planetary understanding was given added impetus by the
startling photographs of Earth sent back from the Apollo 8 spacecraft on
Christmas Eve 1968, and by photographs of the planet suspended in outer space
from Apollo 17 in 1972 (Figure 0.2)103 Though this Apollo project itself was inex
tricably tied to U.S. ‘militarism in the Cold War’, as DeLoughrey has argued, the
clear visibility in these iconic ‘Blue Marble’ images of the oceans and Antarctica,
along with their vast spatial dimensions by comparison with continental land
masses, effectively resituated narrow nationalistic agendas within a wider orbit.104
Cultural conflict between corporate mining interests and an Indigenous cul
ture immersed in the natural world is dramatized in German director Werner
Herzog’s film Where the Green Ants Dream (1984), which is set in Australia. In his
commentary on the film, however, Herzog specifically disavowed any affiliation
with ‘ “New Age” people’ or ‘the Green Party’. Instead, his narrative seeks in a more
circuitous manner to address ways in which all Indigenous culture is framed by
102 Timothy Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (London:
Bloomsbury, 2015), 189.
103 Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2016), 13, 10. For the official NASA historian’s observation of how it was ‘no accident
that the first Earth Day was held in 1970 in the midst of the Apollo flights to the moon,’ see
Steven J. Dick, Astrobiology, Discovery and Societal Impact (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2018), 234. Because of the Earth’s rotational position when Apollo 11’s astronauts first set foot on the
moon in 1969, the first television pictures of the lunar surface were transmitted through NASA track
ing stations in Australia.
104 Elizabeth DeLoughrey, ‘Satellite Planetarity and the Ends of the Earth,’ Public Culture 26.2
(Spring 2014): 262.
Figure 0.2 The Earth, as photographed from Apollo 17 (1972).

Courtesy of NASA
distortion and displacement—translation, in the largest sense of that word—so

that the film’s premise turns not on authenticity but, again, on a style of simulac
rum. Herzog commented on how ‘the Green Ants mythology’ that structures his
narrative ‘does have similarities to Aboriginal mythology, but it has been partly
invented by me,’ and his film is designed neither for documentary accuracy nor
for polemic purposes, but to address tensions between Indigeneity and modern
ity more generally.105 ‘Commitment,’ as Jacques Rancière has written, ‘is not a
category of art . . . An artist can be committed, but what does it mean to say that
his art is committed?’ As Rancière went on to acknowledge, this ‘does not mean
that art is apolitical’, but ‘that aesthetics has its own politics, or its own
meta-politics.’106 Aesthetic significations, in other words, tend to be complex and
multifaceted rather than proselytizing or unidirectional. Stephen Muecke,
pledged from an Australian critical perspective to an activist deployment of
Humanities expertise ‘in the public fora’, saw the task of ‘the contemporary
105 Werner Herzog, audio commentary, DVD extras, Where the Green Ants Dream, dir. Werner
Herzog (London: Infinity Arthouse, 2006).
106 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (2000), trans. Gabriel
Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), 50.
Introduction 29
humanities’ as ‘changing the planetary mind’; but such a subordination of art to

instrumental purposes does not necessarily speak properly to the radically differ
ent kinds of knowledge that postmodern aesthetics can engender.107
The emphasis on an ontology of things that marks ecological criticism has
frequently positioned postmodernism as its target, with Timothy Morton for
example critiquing ‘the aestheticized, slightly plastic irony of the postmodern age’,
which he characterized as ‘a weird transit lounge outside of history’.108 But the
‘posthuman’ perspective promoted by ecocriticism’s emphasis on non-human
matter can itself be understood as a postmodern phenomenon. Its manifestation
functions as a mirror image of the paradoxical scenario whereby the Anthropocene
adduces non-anthropocenic concepts, since the diminution of human agency in
the light of what Mark McGurl calls a ‘new cultural geology’ is tied systematically
to a postmodern discursive matrix. McGurl’s formulation of a ‘post-post-modern
or exomodern’ condition involves moving beyond the ‘residually humanist and
even “romantic” ’ spectres that he understood to be inherent in ‘leading formula
tions of the postmodern’.109 It is certainly true that the invocation of ‘geologic
time’ gives another spin to ‘the posthuman comedy’, one in which ‘scientific
knowledge of the spatiotemporal vastness and numerousness of the nonhuman
world becomes visible as a formal, representational, and finally existential prob
lem’, and where the ‘utter indifference’ of geological nature to human politics or
culture serves to elicit a sense of ‘ludicrousness’ at the ‘apparent lowliness’ of
‘human designs’. But such a comedy of debasement, deriving from the capacity of
‘natural processes’ to ‘enclose, infiltrate, and humiliate human designs’, has always
been part of antipodean postmodernism, and one reason these ‘posthuman’ land
scapes seem so unfamiliar to Western eyes is because the antipodean aspects that
have always been implicit within planetary postmodernism have tended to be
overlooked or suppressed.110 Latour’s analysis of how in the Anthropocene
‘[t]here is no distant place anymore’ carries particular resonance in the context of
Australia, whose extensive prehistory and vast spatial planes can be seen as no
longer merely marginal to the destiny of Western civilization, but as symbiotically
intertwined with it.111 Geoffrey Blainey famously associated Australian history
with ‘the tyranny of distance’, arguing that it had been marked in special ways by
107 Stephen Muecke, ‘An Ecology of Institutions: Recomposing the Humanities’, New Literary
History 47.2/3 (Spring/Summer 2016): 242–3.
108 Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 4.
109 Mark McGurl, ‘The New Cultural Geology,’ Twentieth-Century Literature 57.3 & 57.4 (Fall/
Winter 2011): 383, 380.
110 McGurl, ‘The New Cultural Geology,’ 380, and ‘The Posthuman Comedy,’ Critical Inquiry 38.3
(Spring 2012): 537, 541, 539, 550.
111 Bruno Latour, ‘Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene’, New Literary History 45.1 (Winter
2014): 2.
such a sense of distance from Western centres, but such a model of displacement
and distantiation has now become endemic to planetary time more generally.112
If Clark is correct to say that ecocriticism throws ‘into sharp relief the
anthropocentric limits of dominant forms of postcolonial criticism and politics’,
then to shift from the tired understanding of Australian culture as a subaltern
entity to a more capacious understanding of how its vast spatiotemporal contours
speak to a wider planetary condition serves to enrich our broader understanding
of the postmodern condition. This is especially the case since, as Clark noted,
‘Australia stands out as a particularly stark exemplar of the challenges of the
Anthropocene.’113 Several cultural critics have taken note of ‘the Clock of the Long
Now’, a project concocted by Danny Hills, Brian Eno, and other San Francisco
artists featuring a clock funded by Jeff Bezos, chairman of Amazon, to be built
inside a mountain in West Texas, a timepiece that is designed to tick once a year
and strike once a century, with a cuckoo emerging once a millennium. Within the
world of radical conceptual art, as Michelle Bastian has observed, this might be
seen as an attempt to steer attention away from contemporary compressions of
space and time and to foster instead a sense of ‘continuity and longevity’.114 But in
an Australian context where it was once possible to walk directly from Tasmania
in the south to New Guinea in the north and where ‘the last great rising of the
seas’—an event that occurred about 18,000 years ago, long after the arrival of
Aboriginal peoples—can itself be counted as part of human history, processes of
geological reformation and climate change have long been assimilated in a much
less forced manner into everyday life on planet Earth.115 Mike Smith’s recent
work on the archaeology of Australia’s deserts has determined that human occu
pation of the continent goes back 60,000 years, much further than previously
thought. Such a vast expansion of the scale of human history indicates how the
Holocene, beginning some 11,700 years ago, can be seen from this perspective as
a relatively recent event, how Indigenous peoples survived the Ice Age (extend
ing from 30,000 to 19,000 years ago), and how climate change itself can thus be
understood as part of a larger cyclic phenomenon.116 Whereas the conventional
Western historical scale of just a few thousand years necessarily produces a highly
constricted view of the relation between man and his environment, Smith’s
112 Geoffrey Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia’s History (1966),
3rd ed. (Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 2001).
113 Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge, 23, 116.
114 Michelle Bastian, ‘Fatally Confused: Telling the Time in the Midst of Geological Crises’,
Environmental Philosophy 9.1 (2012): 40; Mark McGurl, ‘Everything and Less: Fiction in the Age of
Amazon’, MLQ 77.3 (Sept. 2016): 468.
115 Geoffrey Blainey, The Story of Australia’s People: The Rise and Fall of Ancient Australia
(Melbourne: Penguin Australia, 2015), ix.
116 Mike Smith, The Archaeology of Australia’s Deserts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2013), 341–3.
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shapeless rubble and smouldering ruin on all sides bore witness to
Hun methods of frightfulness.
We at length came in sight of Arsiero and had to leave the car as
the road, which had been getting more and more choked with débris,
now became impassible. Moreover, big shells were coming over with
persistent frequency, and we could not afford to take any risk of our
transport being injured. We had no desire to walk back.
One must have seen the Front here for oneself in order to form
any conception of what the Austrian thrust meant, and how near it
was to succeeding.
Arsiero is situated in the valley of Astico; behind it is the semi-
circle of mountains which form the boundary of the tableland of the
Altopiano, so close as to dominate it completely, foremost amongst
these mountains being M. Cenzio and M. Cimone, standing up like
colossal barriers above the valley.
From the point of view of an artist it would be difficult to conceive a
more delightful panorama than one had before one’s eyes: it was a
glorious picture waiting to be painted in peace time, but you felt that
there was nothing attractive about it from the military point of view. If
an enemy were in possession of all these superb heights, then the
positions in the valley below would be very undesirable, to say the
least of it; and without any knowledge of military matters you realised
that the valley and all that it contained—towns, villages, vineyards
and what not—was completely at the mercy of the men who manned
the guns up above, and also that under cover of these guns
immense masses of troops could be safely brought down the side of
the mountains on to the plains, and established there pending further
movements.
Following up your thoughts as an amateur strategist, you could not
fail to come to the conclusion that the valley was as good as lost if
such a contingency came to pass, unless the defenders could
achieve what looked like a sheer impossibility, and drive the invaders
from their positions on the plain and back again up the mountain
side.
The idea of such a possibility was too fantastic to waste a thought
on it. Yet this is actually what happened during that fateful week
when Italy was on the brink of disaster.
On the road leading to the town there were signs everywhere of
the Austrians, and of the desperate fighting that had taken place
here only a few days previously. I had thought that there might be a
certain amount of panicky exaggeration in the reports of the extent of
the Austrian advance towards the place, but there were
incontestable proofs in the shape of trenches, barbed wire and so
forth pushed forward well in front of Arsiero.
Every yard of the enemy’s advance had been methodically
consolidated, but nothing had stopped the rush of the Italians—their
blood was up for vengeance—they were fighting on Italian soil and
on their way here had passed through the devastated villages and
ruined countryside, and had heard tales of outrage and infamy.
It was a case of God help the Austrians if they caught up with
them, for along the whole Front there had been considerable
evidence of the enemy’s barbaric methods; in one place, for
instance, near Magnaboschi, hundreds of naked corpses of Italian
soldiers were found in the mire.
With the knowledge of what they might expect if the Italians got to
grips with them, the Austrians, once they got on the run, never
stopped till they were safely back in their old positions, and here they
were putting up a stubborn fight when I was in Arsiero.
They were not beaten by any means, although driven from Italian
soil. That General Cadorna was evidently aware that any relaxation
of pressure would have brought them on again was substantiated by
the number of troops he was keeping in this sector.
Arsiero had suffered considerably, and although not entirely in
ruins, as has been stated, was more damaged by fire and shell than
any place in Italy I had yet seen.
On the outskirts of the town the gairish nouvel art villa of the
famous Italian writer, Antonio Fogazzaro, which must have cost him
a little fortune to build was now but an unsightly ultra-modern ruin
standing in the midst of a wilderness of park-like grounds. One of the
most advanced of the Austrian communication trenches leading into
the valley started from here.
A little distance further down the road were the immense paper-
mills of Rossi and Co., said to have been the largest in Europe, and
which employed hundreds of workpeople.
The buildings were absolutely wiped out. They had been
deliberately set fire to by the Austrians before they evacuated the
town. Nothing remained now but acres of crumbling walls,
smouldering timber, and twisted débris of machinery, over which
hung a pall, as it were, of smoke, a pitiful spectacle of wanton,
insensate destruction.
The town itself, a picturesque, rambling, up-hill and down-dale sort
of place was only destroyed in patches, but with the shells still
coming over there was yet a possibility of its utter destruction.
As the gun-fire seemed to have lulled a bit, we had a stroll up to
the battlefield on the hill beyond the houses. There a barrage of
shell-fire had evidently been attempted, judging from the fragments
of shell-cases of all calibres lying about. In places the ground was
littered with the detritus of war, and looked like an old-iron and rag-
refuse heap. Here and there were interesting curios and many
unexploded projectiles in perfect condition. It occurred to me that I
would take one of these away with me as a souvenir for my studio,
and was stooping down to pick up one when a soldier, who was
passing, rushed towards me yelling out at the top of his voice, “Non
toccate! non toccate! Signore.”
I did not understand much Italian, but I knew enough to
comprehend that I was not to touch it, and thought it strange that
with all this rubbish lying about I could not take something if I fancied
it.
My companion came up at that moment and explained to me that
it was most dangerous to handle these unexploded live shells—even
walking too close to them has been known to cause them to explode.
I did not want any further telling, and contented myself with taking an
empty .77 as a souvenir.
But nothing had stopped the rush of the Italians (see page 158)
To face page 160
CHAPTER XIII
The fighting on the Asiago plateau—Brilliant counter-offensive of

General Cadorna—I go to Asiago—Wonderful organization of Italian
Army—Making new roads—Thousands of labourers—The military
causeway—Supply columns in full operation—Wonderful scenes—
Approaching the scene of action—The forest of Gallio—The big
bivouac—Whole brigades lying hidden—The forest screen—
Picturesque encampments—The “bell” tent as compared with the
tente d’abri—Our car stopped by the Carabinieri—“Nostri Canoni”—
We leave the car—The plain of Asiago—The little town of Asiago in
distance—The Austrian and Italian batteries and Italian trenches—
Hurrying across—The daily toll of the guns—Asiago in ruins—Street
fighting—Importance attaching to this point—An ominous lull—
Regiment waiting to proceed to trenches—Sad spectacle—The
quarters of the divisional commandant—His “office”—Staff clerks at
work—Telephone bells ringing—The commandant’s regret at our
coming—Big artillery attack to commence—A quarter of an hour to
spare—A peep at the Austrian trenches—A little ruined home—All
movements of troops to trenches by night—Artillery action about to
commence—Not allowed to go to trenches—Adventure on way back
—Attempt cross no man’s land at the double—My little “souvenir” of
Asiago—Bursting shells—Ordered to take cover—The wounded
soldiers and the kitten—Anything but a pleasant spot—The two
Carabinieri—Cool courage—In the “funk-hole”—An inferno—My own
impressions—Effect on soldiers and our chauffeur—The wounded
sergeant—We prepare to make a start back—Irritating delay—A
shrapnel—My companion is wounded—Transformation along road—
Curious incident.
CHAPTER XIII
The Austrian thrust was not confined to the Arsiero sector, although it
was undoubtedly there that they made their greatest effort in men
and guns. The Asiago plateau in the district of the Sette Communi
was the scene of desperate fighting simultaneously with that around
Arsiero.
The counter-offensive of General Cadorna in this direction was, if
anything, more brilliantly conceived and carried out than in the Astico
valley, and that is saying a great deal. But here again, although
driven back, the enemy was by no means beaten, and continued to
fight sullenly for every yard he was forced to yield. Although the
Italians were pressing closely on the enemy’s heels, it was a tough
job to keep him on the move, as I was able to judge for myself.
I went up to Asiago on my return from Arsiero, and must admit I
was astounded at all I saw; it was inconceivable that so much could
have been accomplished in so short a time.
I have so often insisted on the wonderful organization of every
branch of the Italian Army that I hardly like to revert to it again, but I
had just returned, after having been away for several months, and I
found that my impressions were precisely the same as in the
beginning of the war; preparedness is still the mot d’ordre. An
instance of this will serve to convey my meaning.
It is uphill most of the way to the tableland where Asiago is
situated, and before the Austrian onslaught the roads to the plateau
were of so rough and primitive a description as to be quite
inadequate to meet the requirements of the immense transport
service of the army being sent up.
In order to cope with the exigencies of the situation drastic
measures had to be adopted, which were evidently foreseen and
arranged for in the event of certain contingencies such as the
present one arising.
Thousands of labourers, young and old, of the military classes not
yet called up, but who undoubtedly had been warned for this duty,
were brought from all over the country, provided with picks and
shovels and sent here by express trains. Without the delay of an
hour practically, they were set to work to cut down obstructing trees
and widen, build up and level the existing roads.
Of course they were well paid: five lires a day and their food
provided, but it was not a mere question of pay—of that you cannot
fail to be convinced—only men working with their hearts in their job
could have accomplished what these gangs of men did in the time. It
is truly an object lesson in the value of organized labour.
The fine broad highway, complete in every necessary detail, such
as stone parapets at the curves, and walling-up where there is risk of
landslides, came into being as though by the touch of a magician’s
wand, and proved of incalculable value in the counter-attack which
was meanwhile preparing. The transport of the masses of troops
synchronizing with the completion of the roads.
Certain it is that without such organization it would have required
many weeks to have carried out what was done in a few days, and in
the meantime the invaders, it is to be assumed, would not have been
idle on their side.
When I motored up to Asiago, had I not been told how long this
roadway had been in existence I should have said it was years old,
instead of days.
Along this military causeway was as busy and animated a scene
as could be imagined. The Italians had already recaptured all the
positions in the Sette Communi, and were pushing steadily on
towards the Altopiano beyond Asiago.
The supply columns were, therefore, now in full operation, and one
passed what was practically an endless convoy of munition trains,
motor lorries, picturesque carts from every corner apparently of the
peninsula, and long strings of pack horses and mules. In and out of
this imposing column and up the steepest parts of the road dispatch
riders on motor bicycles dashed along with reckless speed and
marvellous dexterity.
It was a wonderfully inspiriting scene, and this was accentuated as
one gradually began to hear the booming of the Italian guns in the
distance. We were rapidly approaching the scene of action, and the
Austrians were being given no respite.
The effect of all this, together with the glorious air of the mountain,
was as exhilarating as champagne—one felt years younger. The car
seemed to go too slowly, so eager were you to get on, and be in the
thick of it all.
The mountain side was bare and bleak, with scarcely a vestige of
tree or shrub—but on the tableland beyond the crest it gradually
changed, and we entered a belt of pine forest, dark and gloomy.
This was the forest of Gallio. The road wound in and out of the
dense trees, and only a short distance ahead could be seen. We had
now passed the head of the transport convoys, and came up with
reinforcements hurrying forward.
A remarkable scene now presented itself. The forest on either side
of the road was a big bivouac. The gloom under the trees was alive
with troops as far back as one could see. Every yard of ground
appeared to be occupied, whole brigades were lying hidden here
waiting the order to advance. No more effective screen could have
been wished for than this belt of forest, and it must have been a
continual source of anxiety to the Austrian generals to know what it
concealed.
It was probably for this reason that the forest of Gallio was the
hottest section of this Front, as it was continually being shelled, and
the casualties were always correspondingly heavy.
There was something singularly reminiscent of mining scenes in
the Far West in all I saw around me as many of the men had erected
their picturesque little tentes d’abri and formed little encampments in
all sorts of out-of-the-way corners. The soldiers were apparently
allowed considerable latitude in this respect, possibly because these
tents are so easily handled, and by reason of their small dimensions
are easily disguised with foliage.
The big and cumbersome “bell” tent so fondly adhered to by the
British Army Authorities under all circumstances would have looked
very out of date here, where initiative not dogma reigned supreme!
After passing through what gave the impression of miles and miles
of encampment, we approached the confines of the trees, and were
suddenly hailed by two Carabinieri standing under the trees just off
the road, and informed that the car was not allowed to proceed any
further.[A]
[A] The Carabinieri have a special status in Italy, and only men of
the very highest character are accepted for the corps. In peace
time they are country constabulary, and patrol the rural districts; in
war they automatically become military police and are exclusively
employed in the immediate rear of the fighting line, watching for
deserters, looking after prisoners, carrying despatches, and so
forth. They only take orders from their own officers, and never do
any military service. On but one occasion have they become
combatants, and that was at the battle of Palestro in 1859, when
they saved the life of King Humbert by forming a square to protect
him. Their war footing is 50,000, of whom 8,000 are mounted.
Of course our chauffeur pulled up without hesitating: he knew that
Carabinieri have to be obeyed without parley. My companion got out,
and I was following him when, scarcely had I got my foot off the step,
than there was a deafening report like a thunderclap a few yards
away. For a moment I thought my head had been blown off.
“Sonoi Nostri Canoni,” remarked my companion, who had been
there before, and who knew of an Italian big gun hidden in the trees
within a few yards of us; one of many along the outskirts of the
forest, I was told later, and which were giving the Austrians much
trouble. We left the car here to await our return and walked on. A
hundred yards or so and we were clear of the forest, which ended
abruptly on the edge of a slight acclivity.
A little below us was a wide expanse of grass-covered plain, and
in the centre of it, about a mile away, were the white houses of the
little town of Asiago, of which one had read so much during the past
few weeks.
Just beyond the town a line of low-lying hills stood out against the
horizon. On the crest of one of these hills—Monte Interrotto—about
two and a half miles distant were the Austrian batteries, and on the
slopes below were the Austrian and Italian trenches. In the far
distance to the North, Monte Zebio stood out amongst some rugged
peaks.
For the moment the scene was fairly peaceful, that is to say the
guns on either side were only firing in a desultory way; but, of
course, one could not tell how long this would last and what might
“come over” at any moment; however, as we had come here with the
intention of going right into Asiago, this had to be chanced. My
companion advised hurrying across as quickly as possible as there
was no cover anywhere, and the road was quite exposed to the view
of the Austrian gunners.
It was a typical summer morning, with the birds singing merrily on
all sides, so it was somewhat difficult to realize that there was
danger in strolling along leisurely, but before we had gone far we met
stretcher-bearers coming towards us with their sad burdens, and
quite a number of soldiers carrying wounded men on their backs.
No big engagement was in progress we learned, but the guns and
rifles were taking their steady and relentless daily toll all the time.
This constant stream of wounded ended by getting on one’s
nerves, and made you wonder what the fates had in store for you.
The town, from a distance, appeared to be quite undamaged, but
on getting near to it one found it was in a sad state of ruins. Very few
of the houses had escaped the ravages of fire or bombardment.
The position of Asiago, midway between the opposing batteries,
had, of course, in a great measure brought this about, and was
responsible for its gradual destruction.
There was a great deal of street fighting before the invaders were
driven out and back to the hills, and in several places were hastily
erected barricades formed with broken furniture and other
miscellaneous articles. Barbed wire entanglements of a novel
construction were also placed in some of the streets in case the
Italian cavalry attempted to force a way through.
So Asiago was very closely connected with the stirring events that
were taking place, and from being an unheard of little frontier town,
had become one of the most spoken of places in Italy.
The fact that the communiqués referred to it almost daily is proof
of the importance attaching to this point, and it required ceaseless
vigilance on the part of the Italians to retain their foothold in its ruined
streets. But no attempt has been made to fortify the place, its
defences are the trenches on the hills beyond, and which, at the time
I was there, were gradually being pushed forward.
Any troops in the town itself were only there de passage for a few
hours. It would have been risking unnecessary sacrifice of life to
have kept them there for any length of time.
We were in about as exposed a position as could probably have
been found on any front, but for the moment there was an ominous
lull which portended no good, and so it turned out. The respite was
not to last long; the Asiago plateau is far too important a sector of the
front to be left long in quietude.
The little town must have been a delightful place before the war,
and even now, destroyed though it mostly is, there are a few
picturesque corners which the bombardment has spared. There
were comparatively very few soldiers about, and the deserted, ruined
streets looked unutterably sad; but right in the centre, on an open
piece of waste ground, sheltered by some tall houses and a roughly
made “screen” of odd pieces of corrugated iron, a regiment was
waiting for nightfall to proceed to the trenches outside the town.
I had a good look through an aperture in the screen: the men were
noticeably subdued in their demeanour, as well they might be,
considering that at any moment they might be under a hail of
projectiles and with no means of escaping it.
They had evidently been on the road for some time, as they all
looked grimy with dust and dirt and tired out, judging from the way
most of them were lying about sleeping. It was an extremely sad
spectacle, and I had no inclination to make a sketch of it, novel
though it was.
We enquired our way to the quarters of the Divisional
Commandant, as my companion had a letter to deliver to him, and
an officer we met sent some one with us to show us the house, as
outwardly there was no indication of its being occupied. The number
of deep dug-outs protected with sand-bags one saw everywhere was
sufficient proof of the awful time the men stationed here went
through. As we went along we were constantly meeting stretcher-
bearers bringing along wounded men. At the corners of streets men
were sheltering close up to the walls as though expecting at any
moment something to happen.
The Commandant’s “office” was in a house that had suffered
badly: there were gaping cracks in the walls, and it looked as if any
explosion near it would bring it down with a run.
There were quite a number of staff clerks at work in the ground-
floor rooms, and the telephone bells were ringing incessantly.
We were received by the Commandant with much cordiality, and
the position of affairs in the immediate vicinity explained to us very
lucidly by means of a big military chart fastened to a table in one of
the rooms, but he expressed regret at our having come just on that
particular day as a big attack by the artillery was timed to commence
at eleven o’clock (it was then 10.45), and he feared we should not be
able to get back so soon as we wished.
As though in defiant response to his statement, there was at that
moment a loud report from an Austrian battery, and a big shell
screeched by overhead.
There was still a quarter of an hour to spare before the Italian guns
were to start off, so the Commandant suggested our going upstairs
to the third floor to have a peep at the Italian and Austrian trenches
through a shell-hole in the roof. The house was quite new and built in
flats, which had evidently been occupied by fairly well-to-do people.
The room we went into had evidently been a sort of bedroom and
nursery combined: it was in a complete state of ruin, furniture
smashed, women’s clothes jumbled up all over the floor, with tiles
and bricks and mortar, here and there among the débris a child’s toy,
a broken doll, and what not, letters and papers strewn everywhere,
and all sodden with rain. There was something inexpressibly pathetic
in this little ruined home.
The Italian and Austrian trenches were but a few hundred yards
away, and only quite a short distance separated them. There was,
however, very little to see even through our powerful binoculars. The
whole hillside was very bare, and the trenches looked like mere
furrows in it, and yet one knew that these furrows were full of men
waiting the opportunity to get out and kill each other.
There was not a sign of life anywhere, as it meant certain death to
show yourself if only for an instant, the Commandant told me; even
where we were in this third floor room we ran the risk of being
spotted by some vigilant sniper, for the dilapidated roof offered very
little shelter.
All movements of troops up to the trenches were made by night,
and once the men were in position they were completely isolated, it
only being possible to take them their food once during the day, after
dark.
On the crest of Monte Interrotto opposite us, about fifteen hundred
yards distant, was a curious little squat-looking building which had, I
was told, been originally erected as a fort, but now it was merely a
landmark probably, and abandoned, or it would have certainly been
obliterated by the Italian artillery.
It was just upon eleven o’clock when we came down, and the
telephone bells were ringing furiously—the artillery action was
evidently about to commence.
My companion, who, by the way, had a camera with him,
suggested our going out to the trenches, but when he mentioned it to
the Commandant he was told that he, as an officer, could of course
go if he wished; there was nothing to stop him, but I could not be
allowed to accompany him under any circumstances.
The reason for this interdiction was not explained as far as I could
gather. There was, however, no arguing the matter, so rather than
leave me he decided that since that was the case, and there was
nothing more to see here it would be better if we chanced it and
made a dash back to the car whilst there was yet perhaps time.
Whilst we were talking, the Italian batteries were already opening
fire all along the line, though apparently only in a tentative range-
finding sort of way to start with, and the Austrians were beginning to
reply by dropping shells round Asiago, several big projectiles
bursting in the outskirts of the town.
It looked, therefore, as though we were going to have an exciting
time getting back, and so it turned out. The Commandant grimly
wished us luck, and off we went.
We had not got far when our adventures commenced. A big
shrapnel bursting right over us. Fortunately we had heard it coming,
so had time to get behind a wall. The fragments of the shell beat
down on the ground like Brobdingnagian hailstones.
After that the firing from both sides seemed to become general,
and it was evident that the attack was developing seriously.
Out in the open, as I have said, there was no cover whatever, so
there was nothing for it but to attempt to get across the mile of “No
man’s land” at the double.
Some soldiers, who were going across also, set the pace to start
with. I must regretfully confess, however, that I am long past
athletics, and even in my best days was never much of a pedestrian,
so I very soon had to give in and take it easily.
And came up with reinforcements hurrying forward (see page 165)
To face page 172
My companion, who was quite a young man, could without a doubt

have run the whole distance, but he good-naturedly slowed down to
remain with me.
Apart from my lack of stamina, I was somewhat severely
handicapped for sprinting, as, at the Commandant’s quarters I had
been given the butt-end of a big shell as “a little souvenir” of my visit
to Asiago.
It certainly was an interesting trophy, though a trifle weighty, as
may be imagined, and I did not want to leave it behind if I could help
it, as I have a mania for collecting war “curios” for my studio; but it
was a terrible temptation to drop it now and chance getting another
later on. However, I stuck to it like grim death and, I may add,
eventually brought it to London.
The idea of a man of my years and experience attempting to run a
mile in a blazing hot sun and under fire with a piece of iron weighing
some 12lbs. under his arm was doubtless ridiculous, and probably
my companion thought so, though he said nothing.
We had just got out in the open when we heard a terrific explosion
and, looking back, we saw that a shell of the biggest calibre had
burst in the town.
An immense column of white smoke and dust rose high in the air,
and in it you saw fragments of timber and other débris suspended by
the force of the explosion in the still atmosphere for what seemed a
few seconds—so long, in fact, that my companion actually had time
to get his camera out of its case and take a snapshot.
The artillery duel was now spreading ominously, and we could see
that shells were bursting unpleasantly near the spot where we had
left the car, the objective of the Austrians being, of course, the Italian
batteries along the edge of the forest.
About half way across was what looked like a railway embankment
or something of that sort, the road passing under it by a low archway.
There was a cottage close by, and when we got up to it we found
that it was a sort of infantry post in charge of a non-commissioned
officer, and that the soldiers who had preceded us had been ordered
to take cover here for a time—and we had to do the same—the
object of this evidently being to prevent too much movement being
seen on the road.
The cottage was little better than a shanty, and afforded no
protection whatever. In the one room were several badly-wounded
men lying on stretchers on the ground.
The thunder of the guns and the bursting shells outside did not
appear to affect them at all; in fact, two of the most heavily bandaged
were actually playing with a pretty little tabby kitten that, strangely
enough, was there. It was a curiously homely note, and singularly
out of keeping with its surroundings.
The sergeant detained us some little time, and then only allowed
us to go on singly and with intervals between. He evidently was
using his own judgment in the matter.
When we reached the forest the shells from the Austrian batteries
appeared to be passing overhead in a continuous flight, their wailing
screech sounding like a high wind in the tree-tops.
It was as if a gale were raging, accompanied by incessant crashes
of thunder. Branches of trees were being brought down by the shells
in every direction, and altogether it was anything but a pleasant spot
to find oneself in.
Yet close by, standing as calmly as though waiting for the storm to
pass, were the two Carabinieri we had previously seen, and who
were evidently on guard here.
In all my war experiences I have never witnessed anything to
surpass the sangfroid displayed by these two men. Neither the
bursting shells nor the falling trees appeared to perturb them in the
least. They were as unruffled as a London policeman on point duty. It
was a display of cool courage I shall long remember. Their horses,
standing just behind, shared their master’s composure; they showed
no signs of nervousness, and were not even fastened up.
I shall have occasion later to again refer to the remarkable
fearlessness of the Carabinieri—it was one of the things that
impressed me most on the Italian Front.
The car was not where we had left it, and the Carabinieri told us
that the chauffeur had thought it advisable to move it to a less
exposed place further up the road so as not to risk its being
smashed to pieces.
We hurried on and soon found the car, but no chauffeur. After
calling out for some minutes and with difficulty making ourselves
heard above the din going on; we saw him coming up from what
looked like a cellar under the trees.
This was a “dug-out” or what our English Tommies have
humourously designated as a “funk-hole,” and was constructed of
heavy timber covered with turf and several layers of sandbags. It
was entered by a short flight of steps, so we went down to have a
look at it. One might have been in a settler’s hut out in the wilds
somewhere, though for the matter of that all log shanties convey that
impression.
It was a very rough and gloomy place, but I was told that the King
had taken “cover” here only the day before, and had been forced to
stay in it for several hours.
Some soldiers were there, so we sat down with them and had a
chat, and it was well we did, for the firing increased in intensity every
moment, and heavy projectiles began to burst on the roof of the
“dug-out” with such terrific force that one expected at any moment
the whole place would be blown to atoms.
The very ground trembled under the shock of the explosions. I
never thought that human ears or nerves could stand such an
inferno as we were in for during the next hour.
The effect on me personally was at first a sort of atrophy of my
senses—a feeling came over me that if this was to be my end, well
let it be a quick and complete finish, no blinding or maiming or other
drawn out agony. Next a sensation of extreme hunger, which at the
time I felt inclined to pat myself on the back for, as indicating heroic
indifference to my surroundings, but which later I learned, to my
disappointment, is a well-known manifestation of “funk,” a form of
nervous dyspepsia—“fringale,” the French call it. But gradually these
impressions wore off, and I looked around with curiosity to see how
the young soldiers around me bore themselves.
Several were in a state of absolute terror at each explosion, and
were wringing their hands and ejaculating under their breath “Oh,
Dio—Oh, mamma!” whilst others sat stock still and gazed in front of
them in moody silence.
Our chauffeur was very much upset and made no attempt to
disguise it; so much so, in fact, that I wondered how on earth he
would be able to drive us back; his nerve seemed to be quite gone,
and his face was ghastly white.
Suddenly a soldier rushed down the steps calling out frantically
that the sergeant was mortally wounded and asking if anyone had
any brandy. No one had any, and I made a mental note never again
to be without a flask of it in my pocket. The poor fellow was lying just
outside the dug-out with his leg badly smashed up by a big fragment
of shell.
He was losing consciousness and kept sobbing and crying out for
his mother. Fortunately some stretcher-bearers were near by, so in a
very few minutes he was bound up with an improvised tourniquet to
stop the hemorrhage and hurried off to the nearest ambulance
station, though I doubt whether he ever reached it alive.
We returned to the dug-out as the firing shewed no signs of
abatement; but my companion began to get fidgetty, and at last said
we might have to stay there for hours if we waited till all was quiet,
and suggested our risking it and making a start.
Of course I could only agree; but the chauffeur was not so
anxious. He was, if anything, still more upset by what had just
happened; however, a few kind but forcible words brought him to his
senses, and with an effort he managed to pull himself together.
So we all went out somewhat anxiously to see if the car was still in
existence, and found that, fortunately, it had passed through its
ordeal of fire unscathed and had not been touched.
There was no time to lose, as may be imagined, with shells
bursting all round us, but as might have been expected, because we
were in a hurry to get away there was an irritating delay, and this
delay was directly the cause of an incident that now occurred, and
which might very easily have had a fatal result.
The car had to be turned round, not a quick operation at the best
of times, and especially in a narrow road, but under fire, a decidedly
nerve-testing job.
We were standing in the roadway watching with impatience the
apparently awkward manœuvres of the chauffeur when there was a
flash like lightning, a loud report and a shrapnel burst right over our
heads not more than twenty feet up.
Instinctively I raised my arm to shield my eyes, as I always do;
almost at the same moment I heard my friend, who was just by, call
out that he had been hit in the shoulder.
Looking round I saw him stoop down and gingerly pick up a long,
jagged fragment of shell lying at his feet. This was the piece that had
struck him—it was almost too hot to touch.
He said he did not think he was much hurt, and that it was no use
waiting there to do anything for it. So we lost no time in getting off
before something more serious happened; we were only asking for
trouble every moment we delayed.
As a matter of fact, although he made light of it, he had a nasty
flesh wound; it turned out that the strap of his camera case, together
with his thick overcoat and tunic, had undoubtedly saved his arm.
We had only gone a few yards when a remarkable state of affairs
revealed itself: the road had disappeared, so completely was it
hidden by trees and branches brought down by the shells.
It was positively startling to see such a transformation in the
comparatively short time that had elapsed since we had come along
it.
Here was a pretty fix, but luck favoured us in the shape of a
soldier, who saw our predicament and indicated a way of getting
round the obstacles and regaining the road further on.
I will candidly confess that I was not altogether sorry when we at
length got out of range of the Austrian guns.
We had been under fire for more than four hours, and I had had
about enough of it for one day.
There was a big stir amongst the troops bivouacked in the forest,
and we passed several regiments on the road, which led one to infer
that the artillery duel was to be followed up by an infantry attack on a
large scale at nightfall, and so it turned out, as I afterwards learned.
But these operations on the Asiago plateau were then, and are
still, of almost daily occurrence, and, serious though they may
appear when seen at close range as on this particular occasion, are
evidently but a side issue in General Cadorna’s main plan of
campaign.

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The Planetary Clock : Antipodean Time

and Spherical Postmodern Fictions

The Planetary Clock

The Planetary Clock

7. Reorchestrating the Past: Long Songs and Antipodean Relations316

Works Cited 367

organized by Iain McCalman and David Schlosberg at the Sydney Environment

xii List of Illustrations

2 The Planetary Clock

The overall effect of this expansion in historical and geographic scope is to

4 The Planetary Clock

6 The Planetary Clock

key geometrical characteristic of a sphere, as Angus Fletcher has noted, is that it

8 The Planetary Clock

10 The Planetary Clock

12 The Planetary Clock

47 Huyssen, Twilight Memories, 6, and Present Pasts, 10, 21.

14 The Planetary Clock

conjures up the traumatic memory of Nazi Germany.49 Trauma, in other words,

49 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of

In this sense, the version of historicism committed to what Chakrabarty called

54 Chakrabarty, ‘The Time of History’, 50–1, 49.

16 The Planetary Clock

formulations of professional expertise linked to the consolidation of social power,

orchestrates its shots so as to disrupt the selective temporal conventions around

18 The Planetary Clock

Reinscribing postmodernism within a planetary framework in this way does

Ironies of the Anthropocene

20 The Planetary Clock

the science of climatology has become framed within a wide spectrum of

engagement is familiar enough from the work of celebrated postmodernist ­writers

77 Edwards, A Vast Machine, 165.

22 The Planetary Clock

about environmental depredation is to conflate issues that are working themselves

24 The Planetary Clock

It is true that the idea of apocalyptic catastrophe can be ‘oddly comforting’, as

Thom van Dooren’s utopian commitment to ‘ecologies of hope’ owes as much to

26 The Planetary Clock

28 The Planetary Clock

Figure 0.2 The Earth, as photographed from Apollo 17 (1972).

distortion and displacement—translation, in the largest sense of that word—so

humanities’ as ‘changing the planetary mind’; but such a subordination of art to

30 The Planetary Clock

The fighting on the Asiago plateau—Brilliant counter-offensive of

My companion, who was quite a young man, could without a doubt

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7. Reorchestrating the Past: Long Songs and Antipodean Relations316

Works Cited 367

engagement is familiar enough from the work of celebrated postmodernist writers