Basel, Switzerland, in the year 2125, an ultramarine paradise on stilts in the Sea of Switzerland
Time and place (let’s call it space) play a big role in the novel Drifting on the Edge. The reason is simple. I’d just read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. But I had also just been reading a very different book. It was about refugees crossing the border near where I live on the Swiss frontier outside Basel. In eyewitness interviews, people talked about how WWII changed their lives on the border, how refugees (many from Eastern Europe) crossed each day to flee the Nazi regime, how the border closed, and how eventually it was sealed by a barbed wire fence from the Rhine River upstream and downstream from Basel.
This fence cut through the town of Weil am Rhein and then through fields and dense forest above the German town of Grenzach. There was only one small section left open. It’s called Eiserne Hand (Iron Hand), and it’s less a hand than a finger of Switzerland that pokes into Germany’s fleshy rump in deepest Southern Black Forest. The Nazis wanted to put their fence across its narrow opening, because anything else would have meant fencing off its entire perimeter of about 4km. The Swiss were, quite understandably, petrified that they wouldn’t get it back. So it stayed heavily guarded but open. As I write, Eiserne Hand is about 100 meters behind me. I can feel this long Swiss finger poking into my neck.
Other books tended to find their way obliquely into the novel too. I was probably reading some pulp fiction at the time, because I’m decidedly “carefree” about distinctions between “high” and “low” literature.
These three things came together in Drifting.
But there was a problem. Space was fine. It was this border region on the edge of France, Germany and Switzerland. Most of the novel is set in Basel, Switzerland. But the novel was set in the past, the present and the future, as if it were in blocktime — this four dimensional time and space in which everything exists everywhere, all at once, for any theoretical observer, wherever that person may be.
NOVELISTIC BLOCKTIME
Blocktime is a tough concept to grasp, because in Western culture we see time generally as a straight line running from the past, through the present (now, whenever that is) and into the future (which hasn’t happened yet, but will eventually become the present and then the past).
But physicists (Einstein of all people, but others too) tell us it’s more complicated than that (there’s a small matter of entropy, and cause and effect, to consider). But, as Sabine Hossenfelder explains in this video excerpt:
“ALL EVENTS EXIST NOW. ALL OBSERVERS’ VIEWPOINTS ARE EQUALLY VALID — EVERYTHING EXISTS NOW.”
This is a bit of a downer for us non-physicists, because we see the world very differently — in that progressive straight line of past, present and future, and not as some kind of weird block of spacetime. It’s confusing for us to imagine a “shoebox” containing all time and all space everywhere at once.
Drifting takes the shoebox as its starting point to create the architecture of time in the novel — still not real time, because its in a novel.
A BUMMER FOR THE READER
This is a big bummer for the reader, because novels usually start somewhere in the present (which in an historical novel is a reconstruction of the past), they progress as the plot thickens, and the reader ends up happily or unhappily ever after at some future time, which is our present again. THE END. GOD WE FEEL GREAT.
But wait a minute, events in novels aren’t real, are they? They’re imaginary. We make them up, often wrapping them in a cloak of realism to make them seem real. We make them up as writers. And as readers. Between writer and reader is a terrible collusion. We create imaginary timelines (I’m tempted here to say contemporary songlines) that are completely ridiculous in terms of representing reality. And we believe these timelines as if they were real.
Alright, so we imagine reality in a novel, even though it’s just fancy and fantasy. Who cares? We suspend our disbelief and get on with enjoying the ripping yarn.
DRIFTING IS PROFANE
By disregarding the conventional timeline and placing everything in a novelistic shoebox, Drifting is profane. And as one of the main characters, Klarissa (a theoretical physicist), says:
“Everything that ever happens is already out there, and it all comes down to how we experience this. Maybe that’s an infinite line. Maybe it’s a circle, a spiral, an hourglass, a whirlpool, or something else.“
Different cultures see time differently. And space, too. Mere mortals see it as a line in Western culture. Erudite physicists see it as a shoebox stuffed with everything, everywhere, at once. Cultures with strong roots in recurring seasonal changes tend to see time as cyclical.
As well as disregarding conventional time in the novel, Drifting disregards the distinction (and the conventions we use to distinguish) high literature from low literature. It’s as if you put Kinky Friedman in the same shoebox as Shakespeare (Shakespeare gets quoted quite a lot in the book) and tell them that each of their perspectives is equally valid. Isn’t that what a theoretical physicist would say too?
And it’s not all that far flung, because Shakespeare was a popular writer in his age. Both Kinky and the Bard were masters of the crude joke, profane language and innuendo. Both were enjoyable in their time, even if I still do think Shakespeare was the better writer. That, though, is just a perspective. Some might not agree with me. Maybe a time will come when the values of Western civilisation change so drastically that we see Shakespeare as just a guy who could tell a dirty joke, and “the Kink” as the man who described the human condition so astutely.
I doubt it, though — and I hope not.
THIS DRIVES READERS CRAZY
Profanity can get the goat of some readers.
I know this, because I’ve sat at dinner tables and in an author group with them. A few really lost the plot. Shakespeare, like a Jewish cowboy from Texas who thinks all cats are Republicans? You must be joking!
Yes, I am.
Some readers might feel their fantasies are being deliberately disrupted.
By this I mean fantasies of real time, real space, time in fiction, and the fantasy of high literature versus low-grade pulp fiction. Throw in the fantasy that some places are just so important that we can’t help but describe them (Berlin, Dublin, London, Paris, and all those famous cities that once popped up in cigarette advertisements), and we’re talking about a cold slap on the cheek with a leather gauntlet.
Indeed, I completely understand why a reader might feel very un-cosy on the reading couch. I’d feel the same way if some guy — one who writes travel guides for a living for God’s sake — jumped into the wrestling ring of absurd fiction and suddenly asked, “So, imagine that and make sense of it!”
THE BAD NEWS — WHAT HAPPENS IN FICTION IS NOT REAL ANYWAY
Cold fact. Time in the novel is invented. It’s not real. Hold the front page! Life doesn’t make sense any more, and yet we are still trying to make it fit together perfectly. Hold Page Two, Joe, for a full-page picture of this!
But really, tell me, dear blog reader, when did life ever make sense? Go ask the philosophers.
And so, Dear Novel Reader, to put you out of your temporal misery, I’ve called upon a video by the theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder.
Sabine explains blocktime and, unwittingly, almost explains why, in one chapter of Drifting, two characters watch the same football match at Basel’s football stadium but see different things happening at different times.
Well, they would see different things at different times if they were moving at vastly different speeds or were at massive cosmic distances. They’re not. But their drinks were spiked, weren’t they, with an unknown substance. That can change observations too.
So, here we go, Dear Blog Reader. Sabine’s video, sliced to the relevant section on blocktime. But I can recommend going back afterwards to watch the whole thing.
DOES THE PAST STILL EXIST