‘When time passes through us, the same quantity of time, the same “time of the clock,” impacts on each individual subject in qualitatively different ways depending on the situation that one is engaged in whether it be waiting, anticipating, enduring or healing. As a result this makes the concept of “real time” highly problematic’ (Helen Powell, Stop the Clocks!). In what ways, and with what significance, does your chosen text show differences between the “time of the clock” and time as experienced by human subjects?
By the “time of the clock,” Jack and Ma have spent five years in Room together. For the child, that has been his entire existence; but for the mother, it has been the final half-decade leading up to her escape from the prison her rapist has held her in for years. The two main characters in Emma Donoghue’s Room (2010) experience time differently and, as Powell suggests (Stop the Clocks!, 2012), the discrepancy between this and “real time” is indeed problematic. Individual subjects are influenced by, but ultimately exist separately to conventionally measured time.
Jack, the five-year-old, unaware captive, first person narrator, has a limited point of view and this experimental narrative lends itself to an unreliable description of time. Jack often exaggerates, which is a learnt behaviour from Ma, such as when she answer’s Jack’s question on how many seconds she had spent in Room before he arrived: “’Millions and millions of them,’ ‘No, but how many exactly?’ ‘I lost count,’ says Ma.” (Donoghue, 2010, p.3). In a way, this might limit the authenticity of the narrative. However, there is room for inexactitude within the temporal structure of narrative, as Nakhimovsky describes that we explain durations with a certain degree of fuzziness. For instance, “when we say that something happened a year ago, we typically don't claim to be precise to the day,” (1988, p.32). The challenging upbringing of Donoghues narrative character is significant in the terms used by him to denote his experience of time. Nakhimovsky further explains:
“We can communicate because our reasoning systems employ the same temporal quantity space, whose elements are arbitrary in precisely the same sense in which linguistic signs are arbitrary: each one of them could have been different, yet none of them can be changed by the individual speaker/reasoner, who acquires them in the process of cognitive and linguistic development. The same progression of ideas applies, with some modifications, to other one-dimensional scalars: distance, temperature, price, height/tallness, and speed.” (1988, p.33)
Jack’s coherence, at odds with his sometimes-sophisticated wording and emotional intelligence, shows the discrepancy which sometimes presents itself in Donoghues novel. It can be explained though; Jack’s every waking moment until the escape had been spent with Ma, and so his experience of time is always associated with her presence. When they are separate, his entire concept of time, which existed with Ma and Room as constants, is unbalanced. Jack’s exaggerations of time become more extreme in the latter portion of the book, with “curled beside [Ma] for hundreds of hours,” (p. 298). After the escape, without the routine and the constants that Room provided, Jack becomes frustrated waiting to get Ma to himself again, and confused about his own understanding of the passing of time, temporality, and spatiality.
“The illusory permanence of things,” (Schweizer, 2008, p.26) shows itself upon waiting. Donoghue exhibits this in the chapter After where Jack is confused when Ma throws his underpants in the rubbish. Up until that point, things in Room had been treated with far more significance than to be merely disregarded. Schweizer’s point that all objects exist only to stop existing eventually is a simple enough idea but to the naïve child, it is difficult for him to become aware that we are durational beings. Jack’s disorganised thought process is also shown in his epistemology division (whereby Jack has no deictic markers such as here/there). With the distinct divisions Ma has set in place in Room (such as real/TV, and room/outside) being discounted after the escape, Jack finds there to be too many rules in the world, which is an endearing conceptualisation of time from a five year old. He feels unsecure, unheimlich, and displaced without his constants. Where Ma sees freedom and experiences time healing, Jack’s sense of spatiotemporality is changed, being within and then without Room.
For Ma, although her lived experience of time was mostly spent outside of Room in her own childhood and adolescence, she had begun to lose her groundings since imprisonment and duration becomes torturous for her. Each moment that passes takes her further away from the life she once knew and grounds her more firmly in Room. Her time as a young woman lost, Ma was unexpectedly now in motherhood. Her time was no longer her own and her façade would sporadically break when the gravity of her situation broke through – a woman having to raise her rapist’s son in a converted shed – we see Ma “go.” This dissociative behaviour springing from a woman living with persistent PTSD who is always on guard to her
celebrity itself becoming a secondary trauma which only compounds the stress. Her time was first stolen by her captor Old Nick, then by the press and public hounding upon her release. Disturbingly yet fascinatingly familiar; there has been an intensification of our awareness of this type of enslaving and imprisonment, both in literature and reality.
In her 2010 autobiography of her harrowing time in captivity 3,096 Days, Natascha Kampusch writes about how important she found measuring time, and keeping some sense of rhythm to remember normality. Upon being given one by her captor, Kampusch writes “every tick-tock of the alarm clock proved to me that time had not come to a standstill […] in stasis, without any sense of time or space, the alarm clock was my ticking connection to the real world outside.” While enduring her hellish years as a captive, experienced time became less reliable and her “real,” measured time was the best way to draw parallels in her mind to the reality for those in the world such as her mother and friends. Conversely, as for real-life captive Kampusch a clock becomes a “ticking connection to the real world outside,” (2010, p.108) Ma’s experience differed: “I drove myself crazy looking at my watch and counting the seconds.” (Donoghue, 2010, p.118). Waiting was how she experienced her time before Jack; but in waiting we become aware of the time that we’re in and have an uncanny discomfort (Schweizer, 2008, p. 15) and what we don’t like is feeling. As humans, we don’t want to feel bound up in time, so we try to externalise that feeling into something else; keeping busy trying to exercise some sense of control over it, all the while wanting to escape.
As Schweizer theorises, “Waiting is more than a certain amount of time, it is experienced time” (2008, p. 127). The way that Ma structured their days and the routines she created helped not only her own processing of the trauma, but it also shaped Jack’s entire concept of time. In an otherwise desolate and tiny room, Jack gives Ma a reason to hope, prepare, and do. Anticipation of getting out of room also lies with the reader. The first half of the novel taking place within such a sparse setting and little development, we too become eager to get to the culmination of cabin fever.
Structurally there is a climax at the midpoint. The chapter names are a movement towards life and rebirth. Towards the end of the chapter Dying and into After, the tone is determinedly a scared one. It is almost exactly at the centre of the physical book where this stark change between Jack experiencing his time inside Room and Outside takes place. Jack pretending to be dead and emerging into the real world is the first time we see him experience time in relation to more than just his mother and furniture.
Time passes through not only Jack and Ma differently, but also the reader. Powell’s Stop the Clocks! looks at “real time” in the sense of filmmaking and portraying it visibly. In cinema, a film may be ninety minutes. In today’s world, a person may pause or rewind the film but it remains that those ninety minutes are a finality and most people who have watched, currently are, or will in the future watch the film will do so at the speed determined by the filmmaker. In literature however, pace is more relative and, importantly, it is controlled by the reader. The individual act of reading isn’t constant, and a person’s speed can change depending on innumerable variables such as proficiency, genre or time constraints. With the ellipses in the novel, the reader infers the passing of time where Jack doesn’t use words. The repeated use of this technique by Donoghue allows the reader a degree of subjectivity on experienced time. Powell looks at Bergson’s opposition to the homogenisation of time, which is a resistance seen frequently in contemporary literature, and on form and structure rather than content, Donoghue has made a stand to resist convention alongside Bergson.
It has been established that the human experience of time and “real time” can indeed be very different, but the degree to which it is problematic is subjective. To endure such a traumatic existence as Ma and Jack, perhaps a separation between time in the mind and time as conventionally measured is beneficial. Donoghue’s novel sets apart the grown-up, firmness of temporality and through the innocent narrative of a child it becomes flexible and plastic.
Ideas:
How sensory deprivation can affect our relationship with time.
• “waiting is more than a certain amount of time, it is experienced time” (Schweizer, 2008, p. 127)
– Bergson (Rather than perceive time as a succession of instants, as a spatial series, he argued that we experience ‘real time’ mentally. That is to say, through memory we move back into the past and through our own imaginings we move on into the future.
Bibliography
Birth, K. (2012). Objects of Time: How Things Shape Temporality. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Donoghue, E. (2010). Room. London: Picador.
Kampusch, N. (2010). 3,096 Days (J. Kreuer, Trans.). London: Penguin. (Original work published 2010).
Nakhimovsky, A. (1988). Aspect, Aspectual Class, and the Temporal Structure of Narrative. (Computational Linguistics, Volume 14, Number 2). Retrieved from http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/J88-2004
Powell, H. (2012). Stop the Clocks! : Time and Narrative in Cinema. London: I.B.Tauris.
Schweizer, H. (2008). On Waiting. London: Routledge.