The Clock in the Forest

On the Calculation of Volume, Vol. IV

Many great works have slow patches, and the latest instalment of On the Calculation of Volume is a more boring book than the previous three volumes. To some readers, who found the first three volumes really quite dull, this will be vindication. Perhaps my expectations were too high. I loved the first two volumes, and had my expectations completely met by the third volume. I recorded a podcast about the philosophy of time in all three books with Rebecca Lowe. And I wrote about the philosophical mode of narration and the moral question of what we owe each other once we become different sorts of people.

This volume is the most discursive, both about the question of time and the moral quality of changed persons. Either this is all necessary to the overall structure, or Balle hit a slow patch. I’m going to discuss the issues of time and morality, which suggest this volume is still necessary, if perhaps less interestingly delivered than the others.

First, time, and whether time is independent of us and our actions. On one theory, time is an eternal clock that carries on regardless of what happens. On another theory, time is just something that relates all of our actions together. Rebecca explains the two theories like this:

There are two big standard philosophical theories in this debate. First, some people think that time is independent from change. On this view, time can be thought of as a container. That is, people who hold this view tell us that even if events stopped unfolding — if, instead, somehow everything in the world ‘froze’ — then time would nonetheless continue. The container wouldn’t go away!

…

Some other people think, however, that there cannot be time without change. On this second view, if the kind of ‘freeze’ took place that meant events stopped unfolding, then time would also be frozen.⁸ This view is called relationism, because on this view, time is reduced to relations between events, or between things and events.

You will see that both theories are present in the novel. Tara is in a container of time; Thomas and the others on a loop are in the sort of time that can be paused. Rebecca suggests the novels could be about “quantum theories of time that allow time to pass differently in different parts of the universe, and also allow for time to move beyond linearity.”

The importance of time is how it allows Balle to investigate the obligations we have to each other. As I wrote before: “The question Balle poses is whether Thomas is still a person in the same sense that Tara is a person. If time runs completely differently, how can they be the same sort of being?” In volume IV, these questions are openly discussed.

It’s difficult to know whether we’re still human. It was Sarah who had started having doubts. She laughed, but she meant it: She felt like something else. She didn’t know what exactly—just something else. Not a human being. Not an animal. Not a ghost or a monster or some mythical creature, and then people began suggesting all sorts of things we might be if we were not human: witches and trolls, fairies and nymphs, cherubs, gods and goddesses, devils and vile beasts, miscreations, freaks, homunculi. There was also talk of aliens, cyborgs, clones, androids, that sort of thing, but Sarah said those weren’t it either.

As I wrote before, the characters like Thomas who are stuck in a loop are akin to people with dementia or children—people for whom time is so different than it is for “normal” adult people that we have significantly different obligations towards them. If our experience of time becomes sufficiently distinct from other people’s, we become different types of person, and feel cut off from them. Some unified sense of time is essential to the idea of social bonds. A family shares a sense of time — a sense of the days passing with some unity of both the container they are in (these days together that will end) and of the relation they hold (our time passes as ours).

Think of As You Like It, where we are told both that “there is no clock in the forest” and “Time travels in divers paces with divers persons.” These two concepts of time drive the action of the play. As Rawdon Wilson explained in 1975, “There is more than one concept of time present in As You Like It.” In the court, things begin and end. In the forest, time is timeless (even if only as a pastoral ideal). Then there is the relativity of time, the specific time-sense of individuals.

It is the interior, private time of individuals which is, primarily, opposed to the objective time of the public world. This, however, is a multiple, not a single or absolute, opposition.

Wilson thinks the characters move from the time imposed upon them to living on their own time. We can see this same dynamic at play in volume IV.

We’re a cheerful bunch inside a container of time. If time is a container, that is. We gather around the breakfast table in the conservatory, we convene in the drawing room as evening falls. People come and go, and the days race by, faster and faster.

A happy bunch, could one say that? I don’t know. Can you be happy when you’re missing someone? I dice onions and vegetables. If Karna Jeri is tired, I chop wood. I sit at the table in the conservatory. Olga walks in. A little later, Henry D. does too. He is heading out for supplies, so I do get out after all, because I tag along, and of course you can. Be happy. Can you be happy in a house full of friends? Yes, you can. Of course you can.

Can I be happy while Thomas goes around his house? Of course I can. It’s not just me here. There are others to do the missing with. We wait. That’s what people have always done. There has always been someone to miss. Think of that. Think of all the people who miss someone, and who go on living anyway. Day by day is manageable. Think of that. Of course you can be happy in the meantime. I unwrap and pickle and set out plates in the kitchen. Everything is easier when I rinse vegetables in water. When I chop and slice and think of the past. It’s what people have always done when they missed someone.

You can immediately see the problem. This is interesting, but a whole book of this gets old quickly. Joanna Biggs said in the LRB, “On the Calculation of Volume is almost more fun to think with than to read – and for a novel of ideas, that’s no bad thing.” I don’t find that to be true of the first three volumes, but it was true of this one. However, Balle has to establish the timelessness—the lack of concern for public, objective time, as Wilson characterises Arden—of the commune Tara establishes, and of how that changes the way people live, the way they feel obliged to each other and themselves. She does that well enough, it just happens to be rather slow and, for her most interested readers, already established earlier on. Ideally, the end of this volume, which is really splendid, would have occurred about halfway in—but volume V is coming in November, and she has once again left us on a cliff-hanger (which I shall not spoil…) that is both narratively gripping and philosophically interesting.

If Tara is going to leave the forest and return to ordinary time, she will do so as a quester, an Everyman, for whom the old world can never be the same now that she has been to the place where the clock runs differently. Here is how Wilson describes that strange sensation of learning to see time differently, in As You like It.

There is, then, a way to Arden. It is not, surely, the kind of way which Smith had in mind, marked by dusty highroads, worn boots, and all the common perils of travel. But it is there nonetheless. It is the way of the mind’s journey; a mental voyage of discovery which leads to the recognition of self and the importance of feelings. It leads away from property and its appropriate concerns to a new experience of the value of feeling. In some respects it is a process of stripping value from externals, such as property, that might recall the foreshortened voyage of Everyman to the same conclusion.

Along the way to Arden, Time becomes not merely the measurement of motion and change, the necessary context of voyaging, but also the symbolic function of each stage of the journey. And, of course, all, save Jaques’ return to the world of the polity when occasion allows. No one, I trust, except perhaps a Jan Kott, would find this return from Arcadia ironic. One leaves the play certain that life in the polity will never again be the same—convinced that the lessons of Arden have been real.

This is a passage of criticism that I find quite stirring, tapping as it does into one of the fundamental aspects of literature, which Balle, too, has evoked in her novels. We are all questing out of the forest.