In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

TIMEPIECES
All kinds of timepieces are invading the world of fiction. In the opening
sequence of Hemingway's novel The Sun Also Rises, a young Frenchwoman
with a "wonderful smile" (and bad teeth) gets invited out for a
drink-and later to dinner-by Jake Barnes, the first-person narrator.
[see Americans in Paris] Between the drink and the dinner, Jake and
Georgette drive through the streets of Paris in a horse-drawn cab: "Settled
back in the slow, smoothly rolling fiacre we moved up the Avenue
de l'Opera, passed the locked doors of the shops, their windows lighted,
the Avenue broad and shiny and almost deserted. The cab passed the
New York Herald bureau with the window full of clocks. 'What are all
the clocks for?' she asked. 'They show the hour all over America.' 'Don't
kid me'" (Hemingway, 15). It is unclear whether Georgette understands
jake's explanation about the clocks in the window of the New York
Herald. Does she know that the globe is divided into twenty-four time
zones? Is she aware that, at the moment she is talking to Jake, the time
of day in Paris is different from the time in each of the other twenty-three
zones? [see Polarities] At any event, temporal simultaneity is not a form
of experience that matters to Georgette. Her life depends on random
encounters in the streets and cafes of Paris, and needs no horizon beyond
this limited world.
There are few literary protagonists who ever think about time zones
or the relativity of time, and even fewer who can return from the sphere
of relativity into closed individual chronotopes. The banker John S. S.,
233