ESC: English Studies in Canada

R E V I E W S Samuel L. Macey, Clocks and the Cosmos: Time in Western Life and Thought (Hamden, Conn.: Shoe String Press, 1980). 260. $19.50 In 1776, Adam Smith used watchmaking as the most convincing example of what rationalized production methods, incorporating a division of labour, could do to reduce the cost and increase the quality of a product. A century later, Karl Marx would refer to Smith as having “penetrated to the physi­ ology, as it were, of the bourgeois system,” a system in which (as he phrased it in the Preface to Das Kapital) “ the commodity form of the product of labour — or the value-form of the commodity — is the economic cell-form.” The currency of thought changes with the times, and inflation and devalua­ tion take their toll; but two hundred years after Smith, and a hundred years after Marx, we still recognize the mechanical and the organic as constituting quite familiar intellectual exchange. Samuel L. Macey has written a book which attempts to chronicle the correspondence between technological and metaphorical structures having to do specifically with clocks and watches. It is a formidable task, not least because of the difficulty of separating concepts of time from notions about clocks, even if only in order to demonstrate their inseparability. Clocks and the Cosmos: Time in Western Life and Thought is mixed in its achievement, and it is certainly confused and confusing in its subtitle. Within certain limits, it marks a considerable contribution to our understanding of what Macey insists on calling the horological revolution (which he dates from 1660 to 1760), and beyond that of the origin and purpose of much of the language and imagery that informed various literary forms especially during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth cen­ turies. He is particularly good at demonstrating the interdependence of scientific and technological development with intellectual and artistic con­ sciousness, and he gives a fairly comprehensive account of the relationship between technical (including socio-economic) inventions and intellectual (including philosophical) discoveries. And yet, although Macey is given to such numbing statements as that “one of the advantages of history is that it E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C a n a d a , v iii, 3, September 19 82 permits us to see past trends in human affairs somewhat more clearly,” he somehow manages to defy himself by presenting a history of the horological revolution that is a bewildering combination of precision and vagueness. The first part of the book consists of three chapters on the horological revolution, and its relationship both to society at large and to the industrial revolution of which it was a part. There is some excellent material here, of which I was certainly not aware; nor, I must admit, was I fully aware of my ignorance. What Macey often fails to do is to convince me that my ignorance much matters, when my primary interest is literary. And this is odd, because his primary interest is clearly, and sensitively, literary. (Part n deals with philos­ ophers and the clock metaphor and the idea of the “watchmaker God,” while Parts in and iv focus on literary matters, respectively the influence on literature of the horological revolution itself, and the reaction of the roman­ tics to clockwork structures.) To some degree, the indirection is excusable. Macey is operating, quite reasonably, somewhere between notions of what one might call a final and an efficient cause: the final cause is, so to speak, an age itself — the tenor of its times, its achievements and artifacts, its language and its metaphors; while the efficient cause is an individual, specifically the artist or thinker. Or is it the other way around? That depends on your perspective; and Macey does not establish his carefully enough. He is not very adept at dis­ entangling these two complementary concepts, and as a result it is often difficult to tell whether he is talking about the purposeful or the accidental use of horological imagery. This is, of course, a perfectly justifiable confu­ sion; but it is not as clearly justified as it should be for the most effective development of...