Time, Clocks, and Illnesses in Paul Harding’s Tinkers

ABSTRACT

Paul Harding’s Tinkers was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2010. This article examines how the novel employs a unique temporal rhetoric to present a post-Enlightenment worldview. As the chronological narrative sequence is disrupted by the main character’s reminiscences and hallucinations, time becomes disjunctive and fragmentary, which suggests that chaos often prevails in human consciousness. The narrative temporality thus becomes ontologically unstable and unreliable, representing a condition of abnormality and aberration. Moreover, this temporal condition is connected with the novel’s repeated descriptions of clock malfunctions and human illnesses, thereby further emphasizing the idea that disorders are an inevitable human condition. As Harding views the precise mechanisms of clocks as an embodiment of Enlightenment rationalism, the emphasis on these disorders signifies a subtle critique of Enlightenment ideals and a receptive attitude toward the inherent chaotic condition of life.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. One may argue that the terms “anticipation” and “retroversion” are not suitable here, because they indicate anachronies that are necessarily subjective. Gérard Genette suggests that we put aside “the distinction between subjective and objective anachronies” while analyzing narrative temporality, and use the terms “prolepsis” and “analepsis” instead (39–40). In Tinkers, however, we see that the anachronies can be viewed as subjective. Thus, I will use “anticipation” and “retroversion” in the following discussion.

2. Their page numbers are given here so that we can see how short and scattered these pieces are throughout this novel: 7–11, 12–13, 14–15, 18–21, 21–24, 28–35, 44–45, 48–53, 57–58, 64–66, 157–159, 159–161, 163–169, 175–176, 177–179, 182–184, 190–191.

3. Bergson has influenced many modernist writers and scholars have studied such an influence extensively. Important scholarly works include (but are not limited to) Shiv K. Kumar’s Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel (1963), Paul Douglass’s Bergson, Eliot, and American Literature (1986), Tom Quirk’s Bergson and American Culture (1990), Mary Ann Gillies’s Henri Bergson and British Modernism (1996), Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism (2013) edited by Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski, and Laci Mattison, and Literature and Modern Time (2020) edited by Trish Ferguson. Generally speaking, scholars have concluded that Bergson intends to accurately explain and describe how people experience time and that his conceptualization of time as “duration” has contributed to various modernist writers’ representation of time as a subjective experience.

4. Various scholars have examined unnatural narratives. Brian Richardson defines “the unnatural” as consisting of “events, characters, settings, or acts of narration that are antimimetic” (“Unnatural Narrative Theory” 389).

5. This description also appears on the official website of “The Pulitzer Prizes” as an introduction to the book as the winner of the Pulitzer Prize. See: “Tinkers, by Paul Harding (Bellevue Literary Press).” The Pulitzer Prizes. https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/paul-harding. Accessed 25 January 2023.

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Jin Hao

JIN Hao received his Ph.D. degree in Chinese and comparative literature from Washington University in St. Louis and is currently an associate professor at the College of Foreign Languages, Ocean University of China. His research interests include contemporary Chinese and American novels, particularly the representation of China’s and America’s frontiers.