In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

TIMEPIECES 237
structure, continuity, and control. Thus, in Ramon del Valle-Inclan's
novel Tirano Banderas, cathedral bells ring twelve times before the outbreak
of a revolution that will end a bloody dictatorship: "The cathedral
clock fell silent. The twelve peals still hung in the air ... Stampedes of
gunpowder. Military bugle calls. A crowd of nuns, bareheaded and in
their shirtsleeves, came to the profaned door of the convent shouting and
praying" (Valle-Inclan, 266). In a poem by Federico Garcia Lorca, when
the paramilitary guardia civil attacks a town of gypsies, all clocks come
to a standstill:
The town, free of fear,
multiplied its gates.
Forty members of the civil guard
came through them to plunder.
The clocks stopped,
and the cognac in its bottles
disguised itself as November.
(Garcia Lorca, 456)
Feeling victimized by the chaos that results when all structured forms of
historical time vanish, Professor Cornelius in Thomas Mann's story "Unordnung
und fruhes Leid" ("Disorder and Early Sorrow") becomes an
unlikely ally of Garcia Lorca's gypsies. He "hates the newfangled ways
because they are lawless, incoherent, and aggressive" (498), and he
therefore overreacts whenever his young servant Xaver Kleinsgutl mistakenly
tears off more than one sheet from the calendar on his desk:
"Every morning, while the professor is having his breakfast, he tears a
leaf from the calendar in the study-but doesn't make the slightest effort
to dust the room. Dr. Cornelius has often told him to leave the calendar
alone, for he tends to tear off two leaves at a time and thus to add to the
general confusion" (Mann, 512-513).
More and more, it seems as if keeping time is keeping the world from
falling apart. [see Present = Past (Eternity)] During the apocalyptic frenzy
of a World War battle, Ernst Junger views his wristwatch as "the only
reality": "Only the little circle that the watch makes on my wrist is still
real. Ghosts may appear or the world may come to an end; nothing can
surprise me at this point. I don't hear the shooting anymore-I'm beyond
the point of noticing it. And my perception no longer registers individual