I have not been able to stop thinking about Lispector’s novel, about which I posted a few words last Thursday. Then, simply because it was on my nightstand table I began to reread Julio Cortázar’s From the Observatory, whose translation to English was published just this year in a nice edition by archipelago books. Cortázar’s prosaic poem (rather than poetic prose) begins with a perplexing reference to time, echoing, for me, the beginning of The Hour of the Star. From the Observatory begins:
“This hour that can arrive sometimes outside of all hours, a hole
in the net of time,
this way of being between, not above or behind but between,
this orifice hour to which we gain access in the lee of other
hours, of the immeasurable life with its hours ahead and on the
side, its time for each thing, its things at the precise time…” (11)
The introduction continues amid comma-filled fluidity for the next two pages, when finally a period–infrequent throughout the book– brings needed respite.
What hour is this that launches the text? I find this start to be inscrutable. While I need to wait till I can unpack it more, I notice that it echos, for me, Lispector’s determining yes at the beginning of The Hour of the Star, a yes that also emerges out of historical, linear time. This yes that points to an instant prior but not necessarily to a moment sequentially before, resonates with the “orifice hour” that creates a sense of pause and traversal “in the lee of other hours.” Both texts invite us to rethink time in search of a temporality that becomes an other to the linear chronology of historical temporality.
It seems to me that two theories of time can be extracted from the first page of the boom. While it has remained widely hegemonic in history, linear and sequential temporality is not the single conception of time. There are others. And part of the philosophical and critical work that took force in the 20th century is developing an alternate conception of time and temporality, one that may not be a mere disruption or interruption of chronological time. The second theory that jumps out of this part of the book can be grasped from the part that follows the above quote.
” to be in a hotel room or on a platform, to be looking at a shop
window, a dog, perhaps
holding you in my arms, siesta love or half asleep, glimpsing in
that patch of light through the door that opens onto the terrace,
in a green gust the blouse you took off to give me the faint taste
of salt trembling on your breasts,
and without notice, without any unnecessary warnings of
transition, in a Latin Quarter café or in the last scene of a film
by Pabst, an approach to what no longer follows the order god
meant it to, access between two activities installed in the niche
of their hours, in the beehive day, like this or in another way (in
the shower, in the middle of the street, in a sonata, in a telegram)
touching on something that doesn’t rest on the senses, a breach
in succession, and so like this, so slipping, the eels, for example,
the region of sargasso weed, the eels and also the marble instruments…” (11-12)
Time not only resides in things, but time becomes things. The orifice hour, the moment of the yes, emerges in between things. In other words, the orifice hour shows itself to us as a thing that by necessity requires to be spatialized, namely, linger in space. This alternate conception of time presupposes a conception of space and place.
Realism 