CHAPTER TWO

TEMPORALITY IN BRITISH QUANTUMFICTION: AN OVERVIEW

SONIA FRONT

The notions and conceptualizations of time inwestern culture have undergone many shifts sincethe nineteenth century – they have been influencedby the Industrial Revolution, the scientificrevolution connected with the new physics, therise of a worldwide capitalist economy, and themedia. In realist literature time figured as thebackground to the presented events to beproblematized and achieve theoretical and thematiccentrality only in the twentieth century. Achronological presentation of events in a realistnovel gives way to disruptive temporalities inmodernism although there are some texts of thattype that precede modernity. The examples can beGeoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales with twoparallel temporalities: that of “calibratedchronometrical time” and that of nature, orLawrence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy(1759) with two temporal levels: of the story andof narrative discourse, with the discoursedisrupting the story almost beyond the point of

Chapter Two

reconstructability.1 This chapter constitutes anoverview of the modern conceptualizations of timeand the specific literary strategies to addressthem focusing on the literary responses to the newphysics.

The Second Industrial Revolution in the latterhalf of the nineteenth century, with theintroduction of the assembly line and steam power,the inventions of the radio, telephone andtelegraph as well as the railway led to thestandardization of time in the form of time zonesset from Greenwich zero time.2 The writers of theperiod often confronted the regime of mechanicaltime and its tension with private time, e.g.Aldous Huxley in Brave New World (1932) or VirginiaWoolf in Mrs. Dalloway (1925). While Huxley depictsFordist time management, in Woolf’s novel Big Benas well as St Margaret and Clarissa’s home clocks,whose striking is interspersed in the action,symbolize the masculinist time and the masculinistsystem of values, such as the will to power andauthoritarianism.3 Although Woolf presents the

1 See Russell West-Pavlov, Temporalities (New York:Routledge, 2013), 13-14, 90-91.2 See Gerald James Whitrow, Time in History. Views of Time fromPrehistory to the Present Day (Oxford, N.Y.: Oxford UniversityPress, 1989), 152-169 and Chapter 5 “Times,” in JohnUrry, Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century(New York: Routledge, 2000), 105-130.3 Jo Alyson Parker, Narrative Form and Chaos Theory in Sterne,Proust, Woolf and Faulkner (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007),100. See also Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 2,trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (London,Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985), 106-110.

24

Temporality in British Quantum Fiction: AnOverview

events of one day, she only seemingly constructs achronological plot – in fact, she employs a back-and-forth technique: the plot “moves forward inthe present day, it continually jumps back toearlier times, covering a segment of the pasthere, a segment of the past there, but neverfilling in all the gaps,” and thus erases theboundary between the past and the present.4 Withthe masculinist mechanical time of Big Ben, Woolfjuxtaposes the feminine way of experiencing theworld. One of the objectives of structuringnarratives in an antilinear way is thus thefeminist critique of the patriarchal authoritativeversion of history and the depiction of ‘herstory’and gendered time.

Modernist and postmodernist notions of timewere also influenced by the scientific revolutionwhich depended on relativity theory and quantummechanics. It resulted in the “paradigm shift”5

from Newtonian physics to the Einsteinianrelativistic worldview at macroscopic scales, andfrom classical mechanics to quantum mechanics atmicroscopic scales. It was accompanied by a shiftin perspective also in mathematics, linguistics,philosophy, art, cinema and literature. The impactof the new physics upon metaphysics and aestheticswas unavoidable as it altered our notions of theuniverse, space and time. Victorian realism andrationalism were substituted by reality whichbecame ‘unrealistic,’ that is non-commonsensical:4 Parker, Narrative Form and Chaos Theory in Sterne, Proust, Woolfand Faulkner, 101.5 See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

25

Chapter Two

relative, irregular, subjective, uncertain andfragmentary. Yet, it cannot be said that it wasscientific discoveries alone that contributed tothe “paradigm shift.” The process is not causal –it is rather a result of a broader culturalZeitgeist, a change of worldview taking place invarious fields simultaneously. N. Katherine Haylesdescribes this as a “climate, rather than directborrowing or transmission, that is the underlyingforce guiding intellectual enquiry. … theinteractions are always mutual: the culturalmatrix guides individual enquiry at the same timethat the enquiry helps to form, or transform, thematrix.”6 It can, therefore, be stated thatliterary fiction has paralleled, foreshadowed orresponded to the conceptual revolution, attemptingto create metaphors and tropes to reflect a newnotion of reality, including a new conception oftime.

Relativity theory in fictionEarly modernist novels depict mainly

psychological time and to do that, they oftenresort to relativity theory as their formal and/orthematic framework. Relativity is most oftenappropriated in novels as relativism. The literaryinterpretations of relativity take the form ofnovels employing a few narrative points of view toretell the same situation(s), which illustrates,in Wyndham Lewis’s words, the “highly-complexdisintegrated world of private ‘times’ and specific6 N. Katherine Hayles, The Cosmic Web. Scientific Field Models andLiterary Strategies in the Twentieth Century (Ithaca and London:Cornell University Press, 1984), 22-23.

26

Temporality in British Quantum Fiction: AnOverview

amputated ‘spaces.’”7 The omniscient narration isrejected as it is considered as so biased andunreliable as the characters. This distrust of theauthorial omniscience contributed to a mass shiftin the contemporary novel from the third personnarration to the first person one. The literaryinterpretations of relativity theory include suchmodernist novels as, for example, LawrenceDurrell’s Alexandria Quartet (1957-60), or JamesJoyce’s Ulysses (1922) where in the part entitled“Wandering Rocks” the same set of events isdepicted from a variety of perspectives.8 Apartfrom that, Joyce satirizes relativity and pointsout its inability to depict human experience. Whatis significant in a novel of this kind is thatnone of the points of view can be treated as thedominating one; all of them are equally ‘true.’Also, a temporal sequence emerges from thejuxtaposition of simultaneous voices, and thedifferent points of view complement each other andcontribute to a fairly consistent story9 which canbe put together from the various pieces of thejigsaw puzzle.7 Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man (Boston: BeaconPress, 1957), 417.8 Stephen Kern, however, attributes the narrativetechnique in Ulysses to the influence of cinema and itsmontage, and the objective of surmounting thechronological time of literature. See his The Culture ofTime and Space, 1880-1918: With a New Preface (Cambridge,Massachusetts, London, England: Harvard UniversityPress, 2003), 77, 149.9 Ursula K. Heise, Chronoschisms. Time, Narrative andPostmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1997), 50-51.

27

Chapter Two

Mikhail Bakhtin has borrowed Einstein’s term“space-time” to construct his notion of a literarychronotope where he underlines the mutualinteraction between time and space: “In theliterary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporalindicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens,takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible;likewise, space becomes charged and responsive tothe movements of time, plot and history. Theintersection of axes and fusion of indicatorscharacterizes the artistic chronotope.”10 Whilefor Einstein space-time constitutes a singlecontinuum, Bakhtin maintains that multiplechronotopes, that is space-time continuums, canclash in a novel. Both Einstein and Bakhtinrecognize time as flexible, subjective and fusedwith space.

While Einstein himself did not suggest theconnection between time and consciousness,sometimes it is mistakenly attributed to him.According to relativity theory, the duration of anevent depends on the observer’s velocity andreference frame, from which the measurements aretaken. It is not necessary for the observer tohave a mind. The literary explorations of theconnection between time and consciousness havebeen influenced by philosophy – Henri Bergson’sphilosophy of duration, Sigmund Freud’s

10 Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and ofthe Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination:Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, trans.Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: Universityof Texas Press, 1981), 84.

28

Temporality in British Quantum Fiction: AnOverview

psychoanalysis, complicating the relationshipbetween inner and outer life, William James’spsychology of time, Martin Heidegger’s meditationon being-in-time and Edmund Husserl’sphenomenology of internal time-consciousness. Fromthe discrepancy between internal and external timeensues, in Derrida’s interpretation, the madnessof time. Derrida claims that time is “out ofjoint,”11 off its hinges, bemused, entangled, mad,as it is haunted by its otherness or specter. Timeis dismembered in its present and cannot achieveit as entirety.12 The connection of time toconsciousness and the consequent relativity andsubjectivity of time, its anti-linearity andmulti-facetedness, contrary to the linearity andhomogeneity of mechanical time, find theirexpression in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain(1924), Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913-27) and stream-of-consciousness novels by VirginiaWoolf and James Joyce who use the technique toreflect the meanderings and diversions ofpsychological time, as well as some postmodernistnovels (e.g. Ian McEwan’s Atonement, 2001). PaulRicoeur has called Woolf’s, Mann’s and Proust’snovels examples of Zeitromanen as they most fully

11 Derrida refers to Hamlet here: “The time is out ofjoint. Oh cursed spight, /That ever I was born to setit right!” William Shakespeare, Hamlet (Irvine, CA:Saddleback Educational Publ., 2003), 25.12 Jacques Derrida, “The Time is out of Joint,” inDeconstruction is/in America: A New Sense of the Political, ed. AnselmHaverkamp (New York and London: New York UniversityPress, 1997), 15, 24, 35.

29

Chapter Two

reinvent the ways in which to illustrate theexperience of private time.13

Late modernist and postmodernist notionsof time

Late modernism and postmodernism conceptualizetime differently from the old modernism. Literaryfiction starts to reflect “a schismatictemporality” which is, in Frank Kermode’sunderstanding, characterized by a new attitude tothe past: while the old modernism finds a sense oforder in the past, the newer modernism ignoresit.14 The 1980s brought the problematization ofthe notions of history and historiography, FrancisFukuyama’s announcement of the end of history andJean Francois Lyotard’s rejection of grandnarratives and their replacement with “littlenarratives.” Whereas modernism questions anddiscards the past but does not express anyskepticism towards the future, for many thinkerspostmodernism does away with the notion of timeitself.15

In the second half of the twentieth century, asHelga Nowotny argues, the notion of the future wassubstituted by the notion of the “extendedpresent.”16 Fredric Jameson has declared “the endof temporality” and the collapse of human13 See Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 2, 112-125.14 Frank Kermode, The Sense of An Ending. Studies in the Theory ofFiction with a New Epilogue (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2000), 115.15 Heise, Chronoschisms. Time, Narrative and Postmodernism, 35.16 See Helga Nowotny, Time: The Modern and Postmodern Experience(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998).

30

Temporality in British Quantum Fiction: AnOverview

temporality into the “perpetual present”: the“dramatic and alarming shrinkage of existentialtime and the reduction to a present that hardlyqualifies as such any longer, given the virtualeffacement of the past and the future that canalone define a present in the first place.”17 InJameson’s interpretation of Lacan, schizophreniaconstitutes a breakdown of the connection betweensignifiers, which is related to the impossibilityto access the Symbolic. As a result, theindividual lives in “a perpetual present withwhich the various moments of his or her past havelittle connection and for which there is noconceivable future on the horizon. … Theschizophrenic does not know personal identity inour sense, since our feeling of identity dependson our sense of the persistence of the ‘I’ and the‘me’ over time.”18

For Zygmunt Bauman, the perpetual present ofthe western man, engaged in the pursuit ofephemeral fashions, trends and pseudoevents,created by the media, which by the overload ofinformation facilitates forgetting, consists in asequence of episodes and projects “hygienicallyinsulated from their past as well as theirfuture.”19 They do not add up to the sequentialprogress, contributing thus to the experience of

17 Fredric Jameson, “The End of Temporality,” CriticalInquiry 29 (2003), 708.18 Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and ConsumerSociety,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed.Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), 119.19 Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization. The Human Consequences (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1998), 88.

31

Chapter Two

“liquid times,” which demand constant flexibilityand adjustability.20 As opposed to former realistliterature, in literary fiction this schizophreniaor slicing of time is reflected by the formalfragmentation of the narrative. Time in suchnarratives is not presented as a sequence ofmoments, nor is it perceived as such by thesubject who experiences “isolated, disconnected,discontinuous material signifiers which fail tolink into a coherent sequence.”21

On the one hand, therefore, the postmodernistfixation on the present is connected with thecapitalist economy, but, on the other hand, it islinked with the temporal organization of themedia; with the impact of technology, televisionand the Internet. The digital culture has blurredthe boundary between public and private time. ForPaul Virilio, “the new technological time has norelation to any calendar of events nor to anycollective memory. It is pure computer time, andas such helps construct a permanent present, anunbounded timeless intensity.”22 Bauman alsodescribes the liquidity of modernity as “unboundedtime” because “fluids … neither fix space nor bindtime.”23 “The insubstantial, instantaneous time”24

of the media allows immediate access to anytemporal segment, disturbing thus the temporal20 See Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: PolityPress, 2000), 91-129 and Liquid Times. Living in an Age ofUncertainty (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007).21 Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” 119.22 Paul Virilio, The Lost Dimension (Los Angeles:Semiotext(e), 1991), 15.23 Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 2.24 Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 118.

32

Temporality in British Quantum Fiction: AnOverview

order. The process of channel hopping and surfinga few websites at a time results in ajuxtaposition of “radically disjunct times andspaces in visual simultaneity” and forces theviewer to concentrate “on a rapid succession ofmicroevents,” separated from the past or future.25

Temporality becomes thus schizophrenic, orkaleidoscopic. It can be described by AllanRodway’s category of fugal time to point tonarratives in which “time can be treated likespace and shifted about kaleidoscopically; it canbe layered, as in counterpoint.” In fugalnarratives “overall time-structuring iscontrapuntal, but each separate episode, ofcourse, is linear.”26

An example of a fugal narrative is PenelopeLively’s Moon Tiger (1987) in which she alternatestimes, tenses and standpoints: some of the novelis narrated in the first person in the past tenseby Claudia, the protagonist, looking back on herlife, while other passages are narrated in thepresent tense in the third person. Claudia’smemories are alternated with the same eventsnarrated from the other characters’ points ofview. The experience of time as something orderedand sequential is discarded here as well as theobjectivity of reality and history: time is“broken up into a hundred juggled segments, eachbrilliant and self-contained so that hours are nolonger linear but assorted like bright sweets in a

25 Heise, Chronoschisms. Time, Narrative and Postmodernism, 26.26 Allan Rodway, The Truths of Fiction (New York: SchokenBooks, 1971), 117, 126.

33

Chapter Two

jar.”27 She thus supports the kaleidoscopic viewof time, comparing it to computer time:

The question is, shall it or shall it not belinear history? I’ve always thought akaleidoscopic view might be an interesting heresy.Shake the tube and see what comes out. Chronologyirritates me. There is no chronology inside myhead. I am composed of a myriad Claudias who spinand mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water.The pack of cards I carry around is forevershuffled and re-shuffled; there is no sequence,everything happens at once. The machines of thenew technology, I understand, perform in much thesame way: all knowledge is stored, to be summonedup at the flick of a key.28

Likewise, in Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time (1987) theprotagonist, Stephen, is “lost in time,” arrestedin a perpetual present when his daughter iskidnapped. His friend, Thelma, is a theoreticalphysicist and through her the insights of quantumphysics are introduced. They explain a variety ofexperiences of time with its changing quality andspeed Stephen undergoes: the repressive time of agovernment committee, the memories of his lostchild, the empty timelessness of watchingtelevision, the aridity of eternal present, thepeculiar slowing of time when he is on the vergeof a car accident or the vision during which hecan see his mother pregnant with him through awindow pane.

27 Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger (London: Penguin Books,1988), 107, 108.28 Lively, Moon Tiger, 2.

34

Temporality in British Quantum Fiction: AnOverview

Postmodern(ist) temporalitiesAs postmodernist literary fiction reflects time

revealed by scientific discoveries, such asquantum mechanics, but also geology, evolution,radioactivity and the expansion of the universe,fictional time and temporality are no longerrooted in character psychology. The nanoseconds ofcomputer time in James Gleick’s “the epoch ofnanosecond”29 are juxtaposed with “deep time”(geological time) and cosmic time; the macroscopicscale of relativity theory with the microscopicscale of quantum mechanics, producing timedependent on the scale of the event. Our sense oftime thus “‘falls apart’ into different temporalscales which have a simultaneous reality and yetcannot be contemplated simultaneously”30 since thereis no underlying “intrinsic” notion of time,clamping all the perspectives.31

Accordingly, postmodernist writers haveresponded to these disjointed multipletemporalities by producing narratives in whichtemporality is divorced from the human scale. Ifvarious points of view in a modernist novelcomplement each other to give a consistent accountof the events, various perspectives in apostmodernist novel are contradictory and lack theorganizing narrator.32 While a modernist novel

29 James Gleick, Faster. The Acceleration of Just About Everything(New York: Pantheon Books, 1999), 6.30 Heise, Chronoschisms. Time, Narrative and Postmodernism, 42.31 See Paul Davies, About Time. Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution(London: Penguin Books, 1995), 178-182.32 Heise, Chronoschisms. Time, Narrative and Postmodernism, 53.

35

Chapter Two

constitutes a juxtaposition of private times,which can be comprehended as a literary responseto Einstein’s relativity theory, I argue that thepostmodernist novel with its mutually exclusivetales transpires to be the counterpart of HughEverett’s many-universes interpretation of quantummechanics. Modernist literature depicts thus humantemporality whereas postmodernist literaturereacts to and fictionalizes non-commonsensicaltheories of quantum physics, employing them as anarrative framework and/or thematizing them.

Physics fiction and Quantum fictionThe term “physics fiction” was used for the

first time by Vladimir Nabokov in his Ada, or Ardor: AFamily Chronicle (1969). There is some ambiguity inits employment by various critics and scholars.Alan J. Friedman includes in the category bothfiction with direct references to physics and itsmetaphorical employment; “using models, images,and language from science to discuss an aspect ofthe human condition that the author perceives tohave similarities to a topic in the physicaluniverse.”33 Dennis Bohnenkamp, on the other hand,defines the strand in fiction as depending “quiteheavily, and quite overtly” on the new physics; itis “a fiction quite literally ‘about’ physics.”34

He distinguishes physics fiction from sciencefiction which similarly relies on physics. In33 Alan J. Friedman, “Contemporary American PhysicsFiction,” American Journal of Physics 47 no. 5 (1979), 392.34 Dennis Bohnenkamp, “Post-Einsteinian Physics andLiterature: Toward a New Poetics,” Mosaic 22 no. 3(2002), 26.

36

Temporality in British Quantum Fiction: AnOverview

contrast, Amit and Maggie Goswami employ the term“physics fiction” to indicate the strand inscience fiction which uses physical lawsaccurately.35 I will use the term “physicsfiction” to refer to narratives which relate tophysics explicitly or implicitly, and “quantumfiction” to describe narratives which relate toquantum physics (explicitly or implicitly).

Quantum fiction, a term coined by the Americannovelist Vanna Bonta, and introduced with her bookentitled Flight: A Quantum Fiction Novel (1995), refersto a new literary genre that appeared in thetwentieth century. It reflects the experience ofreality as described by quantum mechanics. Quantumfiction, “a new term bringing science up to speed,for when thought meets matter,”36 constitutes, inBonta’s delineation, “the realm of allpossibilities,” as opposed to science fiction thatdepicts “the real.”37 Contrary to science fiction,primarily defined by content, quantum fiction ismainly identified by the technique of writing, andanything can become its subject matter; thenarrative can but does not have to be science-oriented. The narratives employ non-chronologicalplots and disrupted temporalities to render thecharacters’ experience of quantum reality, such asparallel worldlines in multiverse, synchronicity(mirroring quantum entanglement), the

35 See Amit Goswami with Maggie Goswami, The Cosmic Dancers:Exploring the Physics of Science Fiction (New York: Harper, 1983).36 Vanna Bonta, Flight: A Quantum Fiction Novel (San Diego:Meridian House, 1997), 339.37 “Vanna Bonta Talks About Quantum Fiction,” authorinterview by Laurel van der Linde, 2007, <IMDB.com>.

37

Chapter Two

impossibility of (quantum) suicide, consciousnessas an active participant in the creation ofreality, the unpredictability of reality, holism,and so on.

A Spanish author, Gregorio Morales, enumeratesthe features of quantum aesthetics in his essay“El cadaver de Balzac” (“Balzac’s Corpse,” 1998),a manifesto of the movement called QuantumAesthetics. Some of the features are: “1) Theartist has the power to break away from the wallsimposed by Newton. 2) Reality is not restricted towhat is visible or knowable. 3) The implicate andinvisible order is differentiated from theexplicate and manifest order. 4) Matter and spiritare the same thing; they form a continuum. 5) Thelaws of causality become relative. In fact, we caneven find an acausal relationship between thepsychological and the physical realms – asynchronicity. 6) Nothing is distinct. Even themost distant corpuscles influence one another. 7)Both observer and observed are tied together. … 8)We can remain within the visible world, that is,the preceding tenets should not be taken asfetishes. … 10) a primary concern for freedom anddiversity” which supports “an ethics based ontolerance, anti-dogmatism, and a strong defense ofdemocracy. … 11) We prefer the extraordinaryrather than the common, eroticism rather than thephysiology of sex, maturity rather thanjuvenility, individuality rather thancollectivity, internal transformation rather thansurgery, and consciousness rather than fluids.”38 38 After Francisco Javier Peńas-Bermejo, “QuantumLiterature,” in The World of Quantum Culture, eds. Manuel J.Caro, John W. Murphy (Westport, Connecticut, London:

38

Temporality in British Quantum Fiction: AnOverview

The term “quantum fiction” seems to be thecounterpart of Susan Strehle’s term “actualism”which she derives from Werner Heisenberg. Hedistinguishes between the real and the actual –reality is active, dynamic, fluent, provisional,actual, rather than real at the subatomic level.Strehle employs the term “actualistic fiction” torefer to a literary representation of reality asunderstood by the new physics.39 She rejects thedivision of fiction into realistic, reflectingNewtonian universe, and anti-realistic,interrogating the reality of the external world.Although contemporary fiction moves away fromrealism, Strehle argues, it does not abandon itsinterest in reality, but only transforms the wayin which reality is understood. Both actualisticfiction and the new physics render reality asrelative, irregular, subjective, statistical,uncertain and energetic,40 and proposeconsciousness to be an aspect of reality.

The crucial difference between modernist andpostmodernist fiction, according to Strehle, isthat modernist fiction mostly depicts theNewtonian view of the world, while postmodernistfiction reflects the world as proposed by the newphysics. Both modernist and postmodernist fictionsare non-chronological, offering new paradigms ofcausality and “simultaneity, reflexive reference,and juxtaposed motionless glimpses fit into a

Praeger, 2002), 61 n. 17.39 Susan Strehle, Fiction In the Quantum Universe (Chapel Hilland London: The University of North Carolina Press,1992), 7.40 Strehle, Fiction In the Quantum Universe, 3, 6, 15.

39

Chapter Two

formal unity,” yet, in modernist literature “thepicture of reality emphasizes its own composednature … but it composes according to Newtonianprinciples.”41 A perfect example is Durrell’sAlexandria Quartet where he misinterprets Einstein’stheories, confusing them with quantum mechanics.42

Although the Quartet and other modernist novelsaspire to mirror the reality of the new physics,they do not expose the plurality of subjectivetruths or the modernist conviction of theunknowability of truth, but allow the binding ofthe various perspectives together, presenting thusthe ultimate truth.43 A ‘proper’ example ofrelativity theory in fiction is a work by anAmerican writer, Edmund Wilson, entitled I Thought ofDaisy (1929), where Daisy is shown from a fewperspectives, mutually exclusive andcontradictory.

A Guyanese writer, Wilson Harris, is one of thewriters who have most profoundly contributed tothe poetics of quantum fiction. He himselfdescribes his writings as quantum fiction andemphasizes the fact that he was not familiar withthe concepts of quantum physics at the time ofwriting Palace of the Peacock (1960).44 His narrative

41 Strehle, Fiction In the Quantum Universe, 17.42 See Lawrence Durrell’s “Preface” in Balthazar (Dutton:New York, 1958) and “Space, Time and Poetry” in A Key toModern British Poetry (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1970),24-48.43 See Sarah Cain, “The Metaphorical Field: Post-Newtonian Physics and Modernist Literature,” TheCambridge Quarterly, vol. 28, no. 1 (1999), 54-55.44 See “Michael Gilkes Interviews Sir Wilson Harris,”Knews (July 18 2010),

40

Temporality in British Quantum Fiction: AnOverview

structure is fluent and multiple, informed bywave-particle duality and multiverse theory. Histechnique consists in fluid metamorphosingimagery, “the convertible imageries,”45

representing simultaneous parallel possibilities,described by Nick Herbert as “polyhistory.”46

Harris describes the difference betweentraditional and quantum fiction thusly: “Thequantum concept is that if one fires out anobject, it breaks into particles and waves.Conventional novelists go along a linear road, butthe quantum split can bring the past into thepresent in a new art of fiction.”47

What is interesting, while scientists leaveEinstein’s theories in the macroscopic scale andquantum mechanics in the microscopic one, bothseparated from everyday reality, fiction writersadjust them to the human scale and effect theirimport on the everyday reality of the characters.The notions of the new physics referring to time

<http://www.kaieteurnewsonline.com/2010/07/18/michael-gilkes-interviews-sir-wilson-harris-2/>.45 Wilson Harris, “The Author’s Note,” in Palace of thePeacock (London, Boston: Faber and Faber, 1988), 10.46 Nick Herbert, Quantum Reality (New York: AnchorPress/Doubleday, 1985), 27. Rebekka Edlung borrows theterm “polyhistory” to analyse Harris’s fiction. See her“Carnival and quantum theory. Metaphors of identity inWilson Harris’s The Carnival Trilogy,” in The Society forCaribbean Studies Annual Conference Papers, vol. 7, ed. SandraCourtman (2006), 1-7. 47 Maya Jaggi, “Redemption Song,” The Guardian (Saturday16 December 2006),<http://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/dec/16/featuresreviews.guardianreview15>.

41

Chapter Two

and temporality that writers rework aestheticallyinclude, apart from relativity theory, paralleluniverses, the backward flow of time and holism.

Parallel universesAccording to Everett’s multiverse theory, the

wavefunction does not collapse, as in Copenhagen’sinterpretation of quantum mechanics, but realitybecomes a many-branched tree, wherein everypossible outcome is realized in the parallelactual universes. In fiction the first forking-path narrative was D. R. Daniels’s “The Branchesof Time” in which in 1935, twenty two years beforeEverett’s many-worlds theory, he utilizes quantummechanics for a time travel plot. Travelling tothe past leads here to producing alternativeuniverses, which exposes the attempts to alter thepast as futile.48 However, it is not Daniels’sshort story but the more influential “The Gardenof Forking Paths” (1941) by Jorge Luis Borges thatis usually mentioned as the first textillustrating parallel time streams. With thisstory, Borges invents a hypertext novel, but healso describes a theory of the universe based uponthe structure of such a novel. Forking-pathnarratives encompass the narrative of alternate

48 Although time-travel is allowed by the general theoryof relativity, even if we had a time machine,travelling in time would mean producing a new branch,rather than taking part in two time-lines in oneuniverse contemporaneously. Previous time travelstories, pioneered by H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine(1895), utilize relativity theory as the underlyingscientific framework.

42

Temporality in British Quantum Fiction: AnOverview

history (multiverse or a history counterfactual toours, e.g. Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair, 2001), thenarrative of transworld exploration (where all theworlds are located within the same space-timecontinuum, e.g. Star Trek, 1966- ) and the time-travel one (where the protagonist triggers thedevelopment of new branches by travelling intime).49

Everett’s theory presupposes no spatiotemporalrelations between the worlds – the universe andthe observer bifurcate into many differentincarnations but in each of them s/he observesjust one definite state. This rule is usuallyviolated by literary fiction, e.g. in JeanetteWinterson’s Sexing the Cherry (1989) or AndrewCrumey’s Sputnik Caledonia (2008). In Sexing the Cherrytwo protagonists, Jordan and the Dog-Woman, existin the seventeenth and twentieth centuriessimultaneously. Whereas the bodies are different,the consciousness, traits of character andattitudes are the same. The characters do not haveepistemic access to parallel trajectories;sometimes however, they have flashes from theother life.50 Winterson thereby utilizes the newphysics to underline postmodern multi-facetednessand the fragmentation of the subject.

49 Marie-Laure Ryan, “From Parallel Universes toPossible Worlds: Ontological Pluralism in Physics,Narratology and Narrative,” Poetics Today 27:4 (2006),656-658.50 See Sonia Front, Transgressing Boundaries in JeanetteWinterson’s Fiction (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2009),182-186.

43

Chapter Two

The Scottish theoretical physicist and writerAndrew Crumey has employed the framework ofparallel universes in all of his novels. In thefirst part of his Sputnik Caledonia, a nine-year-oldboy living in Kenzie, Scotland, dreams of being acosmonaut and asks “a disembodied transcendentalhigher intelligence”51 to take him to anotherworld. In the second part, Robert, now at the ageof nineteen, is trained to go on a space missionin the Installation, the British DemocraticRepublic’s top secret military base. During themission he is to free-fall from a rocket so as tocome into telepathic contact with a black hole,called the Red Star. He dies but the voice informshim, “Your life is over, Robert – but not your story.”52 In partIII, back in Kenzie, a forty-year-old Robert Coylewho claims to have seen “many worlds”53 appears inthe park. It transpires that the boy who dreamt ofbeing a cosmonaut died at the age of nineteen. Thethree parts can thus be treated as parallel livesof the protagonist as the text is full ofintrusions from his other trajectories. Althoughthe novel seems to be written in a traditionalchronological way, the vision of reality itpresents is far from classical. When one gets theholistic view of the three parts of the book, theydo not coalesce into a linear narrative but abifurcating one.

51 Andrew Crumey, Sputnik Caledonia (London: Picador,2008), 121.52 Crumey, Sputnik Caledonia, 422. Emphasis in original.53 Crumey, Sputnik Caledonia, 452.

44

Temporality in British Quantum Fiction: AnOverview

The arrow of timeOther narratives which utilize the exploding

temporalities of the new physics embrace thosewhich violate the direction of the arrow of time.This includes texts in which the character’sbiological processes are reversed and s/he livestowards birth, and/or narratives with reversedchronology. While physics does not differentiatebetween the forward and backward directions oftime, as Stephen Hawking explicates, the phenomenonof the effect following the cause can beattributed to the thermodynamic arrow of time, theresult of the second law of thermodynamics,according to which in an isolated system entropytends to increase with time.54 This is accompaniedby the psychological arrow of time since we havethe sense of continuing from the past into thefuture. Stuart Hameroff maintains that the secondlaw of thermodynamics does not apply “in quantumsystems which may become more ordered.”55 Time canflow backwards here. Information can be sentbackward in time, for example by OR events (RogerPenrose’s name for conscious moments), which isused e.g. in quantum cryptography.56 Whether the54 Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to theBlack Holes (London: Bantam, 1988), 160. See also PeterConveney, Roger Highfield, The Arrow of Time. The Quest to SolveScience’s Greatest Mystery (London: Flamingo, 1991), 147-181.55 Stuart Hameroff, “Time, Consciousness and QuantumEvents in Fundamental Spacetime Geometry,” NATO ScienceSeries II: Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry, vol. 95 (2003),<http://www.quantumconsciousness.org /time.htm>. 56 Hameroff, “Time, Consciousness and Quantum Events inFundamental Spacetime Geometry.”

45

Chapter Two

reversal of time’s arrow is possible in physics,or not, certainly it has captured the imaginationof several writers. The arrow of time isdisrupted, for instance, in Holocaust fictionwhere the irrational temporality of the novel isan attempt to deal with an irrationalunrepresentable experience.

In Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow (1991) the narrator,a kind of secondary consciousness inhabiting aGerman doctor, experiences time running backwardsuntil the protagonist disappears in his mother’swomb. Whilst with the reversed chronology theeffects precede the cause and the narrator isconfused with the world around him – in whichpeople vomit their food onto plates, formvegetables and meat and then uncook them to sellthem in the supermarket, or after seeing thedoctor patients wait for an hour in the waitingroom – finally in Auschwitz things start to makesense: “Our preternatural purpose? To dream arace. To make a people from the weather. Fromthunder and from lightning. With gas, withelectricity, with shit, with fire.”57 Invertedtemporality reflects thus the Nazi inverted waysof thinking and reasoning.

In The White Hotel (1981) D.M. Thomas in sixsections with different narrators employs thetechnique of disjunction, deploying a collectionof documents: a poem, prose, a journal, apsychoanalytic case study and postcards to slowlyarrive at the massacre in Babi Yar, Kiev. Theprotagonist is Sigmund Freud’s patient, Anna G.,who is psychoanalyzed as she suffers from acute

57 Martin Amis, Time’s Arrow (Vintage, 1992), 119-120.

46

Temporality in British Quantum Fiction: AnOverview

psychosomatic pains. While Freud looks for thejustification in her childhood, in fact this isonly part of the story. Anna’s pains appear to bethe memories of the future since she is going tobe violated in Babi Yar. Freud’s method appearsthus a consistent but partial form of rationalcontrol over human psyche; he assumes humanidentity to be essential and coherent and does nottake Anna’s subjection to the violence of historyinto account. The ruptured temporalities of Time’sArrow and The White Hotel corroborate that genocideand suffering resist all attempts to explain themtheoretically; “you can no more imagine Babi Yarthan you can conceive a world where time andcausality run in opposite directions.”58

HolismHolism is the idea that natural systems and

their properties should be viewed as wholes,rather than the collections of parts, whichresults from the assumption that systems operateas wholes and that their workings cannot be fullyunderstood merely on the basis of theirconstituent parts. Ontological holism wasadvocated by two independent thinkerssimultaneously: the physicist David Bohm in hisWholeness and the Implicate Order (1980) and theneurophysiologist Karl Pribram. Bohm elucidates:“Parts are seen to be in immediate connection, inwhich their dynamical relationships depend, in anirreducible way, on the state of the whole system

58 Marie-Laure Ryan, “Temporal Paradoxes in Narrative,”Style, vol. 43, no. 2 (2009), 156.

47

Chapter Two

… . Thus one is led to a new notion of unbrokenwholeness which denies the classical idea ofanalyzability of the world into separately andindependently existing parts.”59

It must be noted, however, that popularizers ofquantum physics overemphasize the significance ofhuman consciousness in quantum theory while infact few physicists support this interpretation(Von Neumann-Wigner interpretation). In spite ofthat, the decisive role of consciousness is thecentral point of many popular science books and“paranormalists of every stripe, from psychic toastrologers to physicists to cosmologists, [who]proclaim the oneness of the human mind and thefabric of the cosmos.”60 Similarly, Bohm’s modelof wholeness produced widespread interest inreligious, philosophical and New Age circles, andhis ideas were used in the holographic model ofconsciousness.

The idealist interpretation transpires to bethe theme of many fictional works. It might be sobecause fiction writers rely heavily on popularscience books, and have been influenced by theirstress on quantum consciousness, holism andunbroken wholeness, or perhaps because these ideasseem to have an attractive literary potential.

59 David J. Bohm and Basil J. Hiley, “On the IntuitiveUnderstanding of Nonlocality as Implied by QuantumTheory,” in Foundations in Physics, (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1961), 319. See also David Bohm,Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London: Routledge, 1980).60 Victor J. Stenger after Elizabeth Leane, “KnowingQuanta: The Ambiguous Metaphors of Popular Physics,” TheReview of English Studies, New Series, vol. 52, no. 207(2001), 422.

48

Temporality in British Quantum Fiction: AnOverview

Therefore, holistic imagery, mainly rejected by‘serious’ science, abounds in literary fiction,entering common imagination through this backdoor.In the holistic unity, figured asquantum/universal consciousness, the temporaldimensions break down. Already T.S. Eliot in hisFour Quartets (1945) advocates holism and thesimultaneity of past, present and future, proposedby Einstein: “the end and the beginning werealways there/ Before the beginning and after theend./ And all is always now.” In theaforementioned Sputnik Caledonia the Red Star is theembodiment of the idea of holism as it stands foruniversal consciousness. By means of the Star’smind the protagonist connects with his ownconsciousness in parallel universes. The Starappears thus as a kind of channel to bifurcatinguniverses but contemporaneously, it constitutes arepository of time, history, memory and selves; atotality of contingent pasts and futures, existingall-together.

In Scarlett Thomas’s The End of Mr. Y (2006), theprotagonist, Ariel Manto is able to mentallyaccess a kind of virtual reality calledTroposphere where she can leap into other people’sminds. Troposphere, as Thomas presents it, isuniversal consciousness, the underlying reality,where the distinctions between temporal dimensionsand between mind and matter collapse, and allthings are connected. In her attempt to theorizethe experience of Troposphere Ariel argues,

we all potentially know everything about whatother people are thinking and doing. We allpotentially have access to one another’s thoughts.

49

Chapter Two

I wonder properly where the Troposphere is, andwhat it is, now that I’m convinced it isn’t just afigment of my imagination. Is it hovering lessthan a particle away from us, perhaps in anotherdimension to which we have access only some of thetime? Or does it work in another way entirely? ButI am suddenly sure that the moment when you catchsomeone’s eye, or the moment when you thinksomeone’s looking at you, or the moment when youthink of someone and then they ring, or the momentwhen you start getting lost in a building you knowso well because most other people in it are lost –these aren’t accidents. They relate in some way tothe structure of the physical world, to the factthat all our minds are as connected as everythingelse.61

At the end of the book when Ariel and herboyfriend Adam decide to stay in Troposphere,their earthly bodies already dead, they findthemselves in a quantum vacuum, that is “thebasic, fundamental and underlying reality of whicheverything in this universe – including ourselves– is an expression.”62 The vacuum isconceptualized as “a sea of potential,” where “Younow have infinite choice.”63

Holistic is also the vision of the universeproposed by Jeanette Winterson in Gut Symmetries(1997). For her, the universe and human beings are

61 Scarlett Thomas, The End of Mr. Y (Edinburgh, New York,Melbourne: Canongate, 2007), 380.62 Danah Zohar in collaboration with I.N. Marshall, TheQuantum Self. Human Nature and Consciousness Defined by the NewPhysics (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc.,1990), 225.63 Thomas, The End of Mr. Y, 452.

50

Temporality in British Quantum Fiction: AnOverview

“patterned together.”64 Identity is in theperpetual state of becoming, its constituentsfluctuate to expose in the holographic manner “Thedead, time, light patterns of millennia opening inyour gut.”65 “Gut” and “gut feelings” areparalleled here with GUT, an attempt at a singletheory to explain the world. One of thosetheories, constantly referred to in the novel, issuperstring theory, which proffers the particlesand fundamental forces of nature to be thevibrations of super-symmetric strings. By means ofthe images of guts but also of a river, time isconceptualized as a vortex. Rather than referringto the simplistic understanding of the movement ofthe river as an unvarying linear flow of water,Winterson encompasses its turbulences, twists andcountercurrents: “A river cannot flow against itscurrent, but it can flow in circles: its eddiesand whirlpools regularly break up its strong pressforward. The riverrun is maverick, there is a highchance of cross-current, a snag of time thatreturns us without warning to a place we thoughtwe had sailed through long since.”66 This model oftime presupposes polytemporal experience,fluctuating modes of the past, present and future,memories spiraling back to the past, thelabyrinthine quality of mental life. Similarly toMichel Serres’s understanding, time flows in achaotic way; it “percolates.”67

64 Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries (London: Granta,1997), 98.65 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, 218.66 Winterson, Gut Symmetries, 104.

51

Chapter Two

ConclusionQuantum fiction manifests itself as a response

to the crisis of representation; to the need,recognized by many authors and critics, forcreating a new language, literary technique andgenre to describe quantum reality. Our language,which relies on commonsense logic is not capableof dealing with the issues of physics and the newmetaphysics. McEwan argues that “We are forced toimagine something beyond language.”68 Hayleswrites about the difficulties of language toreflect new notions of time, especially when therelationship between cause and effect ismultidirectional, “when every cause issimultaneously an effect, and every effect is alsoa cause – the language of cause and effect isinadequate to convey the mutuality of theinteraction. Causal descriptions will not dobecause causal terminology implies a one-wayinteraction that falsifies the essence of what wewant to convey.”69 Therefore, as I havedemonstrated, various writers have developed newways of addressing the concepts of temporality,from relativity theory, to superstring theory, tothe arrow of time, to holism, to paralleluniverses (whether interpreted as the enactment ofEverett’s theory, or bifurcating narratives, or

67 See Michel Serres with Bruno Latour, Conversations onScience, Culture, and Time, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor:University of Michigan Press, 1995), 57-59.68 Ian McEwan, Ryan Roberts, Conversations with Ian McEwan(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010), 141.69 Hayles, The Cosmic Web. Scientific Field Models and LiteraryStrategies in the Twentieth Century, 20.

52

Temporality in British Quantum Fiction: AnOverview

hypertext, or polyhistory or Multiple Draftsnovels70). Through representing these concepts,fiction attempts to address the questions ofrelativity and the subjectivity of time, thetemporality of psyche, and, most important of all,the relation between time and human identity.

References

Amis, M., 1992, Time’s Arrow, New York: Vintage.Bakhtin, M. M., 1981, “Forms of Time and of the

Chronotope in the Novel,” in Holquist, M., ed.,Emerson C., and Holquist, M., trans., The DialogicImagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, Austin:University of Texas Press, 84-258.

Bauman, Z., 1998, Globalization. The Human Consequences,New York: Columbia University Press.

—. 2012, Liquid Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press. —. 2007, Liquid Times. Living in an Age of Uncertainty,

Cambridge: Polity Press.Bohm, D., 1980, Wholeness and the Implicate Order,

London: Routledge. Bohm, D. J., and Hiley, B. J., 1975, “On the

Intuitive Understanding of Nonlocality asImplied by Quantum Theory,” Foundations of Physics5(1), 93-109.

Bohnenkamp, D., 2002, “Post-Einsteinian Physicsand Literature: Toward a New Poetics,” Mosaic 22(3), 19-30.

70 See Stephen J. Burn “Reading the Multiple DraftsNovel,” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 58, no. 3 (2012), 436-458 where he interprets a few novels through the lensof Daniel Dennett’s the Multiple Drafts model ofconsciousness.

53

Chapter Two

Bonta, V., 1997, Flight: A Quantum Fiction Novel, SanDiego: Meridian House.

Burn, S. J., 2012, “Reading the Multiple DraftsNovel,” Modern Fiction Studies 58 (3), 436-458.

Cain, S., 1999, “The Metaphorical Field: Post-Newtonian Physics and Modernist Literature,” TheCambridge Quarterly 28 (1), 46-64.

Conveney, P., and Highfield, R., 1991, The Arrow ofTime. The Quest to Solve Science’s Greatest Mystery, London:Flamingo.

Crumey, A., 2008, Sputnik Caledonia, London: Picador.Davies, P., 1995, About Time. Einstein’s Unfinished

Revolution, London: Penguin Books.Durrell, L., 1958, Preface to Balthazar, Dutton: New

York.—. 1970, “Space, Time and Poetry,” in A Key to Modern

British Poetry. Norman: University of Oklahoma, 24-48.

Edlung, R., 2006, “Carnival and quantum theory.Metaphors of identity in Wilson Harris’s TheCarnival Trilogy,” in Courtman, S., ed., TheSociety for Caribbean Studies Annual Conference Papers, Vol.7, 1-7.

Friedman, A. J., 1979, “Contemporary AmericanPhysics Fiction,” American Journal of Physics 47 (5),392–395.

Front, S., 2009, Transgressing Boundaries in JeanetteWinterson’s Fiction, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

Gilkes, M., 2010, “Michael Gilkes Interviews SirWilson Harris,” Knews, July 18 2010,<http://www.kaieteurnewsonline.com/2010/07/18/michael-gilkes-interviews-sir-wilson-harris-2/>.

Gleick, J., 1999, Faster. The Acceleration of Just AboutEverything, New York: Pantheon Books.

54

Temporality in British Quantum Fiction: AnOverview

Goswami A., and Goswami, M., 1983, The CosmicDancers: Exploring the Physics of Science Fiction, New York:Harper.

Hameroff, S., 2003, “Time, Consciousness andQuantum Events in Fundamental SpacetimeGeometry,” NATO Science Series II: Mathematics, Physics andChemistry,

<http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/time.htm>.

Harris, W., 1988, Palace of the Peacock, London,Boston: Faber and Faber.

Hawking, S., 1988, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bangto the Black Holes, London: Bantam.

Hayles, K. N., 1984, The Cosmic Web. Scientific Field Modelsand Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century, Ithaca andLondon: Cornell University Press.

Heise, U.K., 1997, Chronoschisms. Time, Narrative andPostmodernism, Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.

Herbert, N., 1985, Quantum Reality, New York: AnchorPress/Doubleday.

Jaggi, M., 2006, “Redemption Song,” The Guardian, <http://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/dec/16/featuresreviews.guardianreview15>.

Jameson, F., 2003, “The End of Temporality,”Critical Inquiry 29, 695-718.

—. 1983. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” inFoster, H., ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on PostmodernCulture, Seattle: Bay Press, 11-125.

Joyce, J., 2013, Ulysses, London: Urban Romantics.Kermode, F., 2000, The Sense of An Ending. Studies in the

Theory of Fiction with a New Epilogue, Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.

55

Chapter Two

Kern, S., 2003, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918:With a New Preface, Cambridge, Massachusetts,London, England: Harvard University Press.

Kuhn, T., 1996, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Leane, E., 2001, “Knowing Quanta: The AmbiguousMetaphors of Popular Physics,” The Review of EnglishStudies, New Series, 52 (207), 411-431.

Lewis, W., 1957, Time and Western Man, Boston: BeaconPress.

Linde, L., 2007, “An Interview With Author, VannaBonta Regarding Flight, A Quantum Fiction Novel,”<http://www.gather.com/view Article. action?articleId=281474977238495>.

Lively, P., 1988, Moon Tiger, London: PenguinBooks.

McEwan, I., 2010, The Child in Time, Random House.McEwan, I., Roberts, R., 2010, Conversations with Ian

McEwan, Jackson: University Press ofMississippi.

Nowotny, H., 1998, Time: The Modern and PostmodernExperience. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Parker, J. A., 2007, Narrative Form and Chaos Theory inSterne, Proust, Woolf and Faulkner, NY: PalgraveMacmillan.

Peńas-Bermejo, F. J., 2002, “Quantum Literature,”in Caro, M. J., Murphy, J. W., eds., The World ofQuantum Culture, Westport, Connecticut, London:Praeger, 47-70.

Ricoeur, P., 1990, Time and Narrative, Volume 2,McLaughlin, K., and Pellauer, D., London,trans., Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rodway, A., 1971, The Truths of Fiction, New York:Schoken Books.

56

Temporality in British Quantum Fiction: AnOverview

Ryan, M., 2006, “From Parallel Universes toPossible Worlds: Ontological Pluralism inPhysics, Narratology and Narrative,” Poetics Today27 (4), 633-674.

—. 2009, “Temporal Paradoxes in Narrative,” Style,43 (2), 142-163.

Serres, M., and Latour, B., 1995, Conversations onScience, Culture, and Time, Lapidus. R., trans., AnnArbor: University of Michigan Press.

Shakespeare, W., 2003, Hamlet, Irvine, CA:Saddleback Educational Publ.

Strehle, S., 1992, Fiction In the Quantum Universe,Chapel Hill and London: The University of NorthCarolina Press.

Thomas, D.M., 2012, The White Hotel, Hachette UK. Thomas, S., 2007, The End of Mr. Y, Edinburgh, New

York, Melbourne: Canongate.Urry, J., 2000, Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the

Twenty-First Century, New York: Routledge.Virilio,P., 1991, The Lost Dimension, Los Angeles:

Semiotext(e).West-Pavlov, R., 2013, Temporalities, New York:

Routledge.Whitrow, G.J., 1989, Time in History. Views of Time from

Prehistory to the Present Day, Oxford, N.Y.: OxfordUniversity Press.

Winterson, J., 1997, Gut Symmetries, London: Granta.—. 1989, Sexing the Cherry, London: Vintage.Woolf, V., 1996, Mrs. Dalloway, Ware: Wordsworth

Editions.Zohar, D. in collaboration with Marshall, I. N.,

1990, The Quantum Self. Human Nature and ConsciousnessDefined by the New Physics, New York: William Morrowand Company, Inc.

57

Chapter Two58