Tiempo en el laberinto de la soledad

The posited non-linearity of time is a concept that keeps cropping up in the literature of Latin American Nobel Prize winners. We saw this in La Hojarasca, both directly through assertions that time didn’t progress in the stagnant room of the dead man until the little boy moved and indirectly through García Márquez’ unconventional, non-linear narrative structure that jumped around from narrator to narrator and between past and present. We see a similar narrative style in Mario Vargas Llosa’s Historia de Mayta, as the narrative jumps around between past and present, sometimes mid-sentence, occasionally transitioning between first and third person narration. In El Laberinto de la Soledad, Octavio Paz explicitly remarks on this very phenomenon:

Hubo un tiempo en el que el tiempo no era sucesión y tránsito, si no manar continuo de un presente fijo, en el que estaban contenidos todos los tiempos, el pasado y el futuro. El hombre, desprendido de esa eternidad en la que todos los tiempos son uno, ha caído en el tiempo cronométrico y se ha convertido en prisionero del reloj, del calendario y de la sucesión. Pues apenas el tiempo se divide en ayer, hoy y mañana, en horas, minutos y segundos, el hombre cesa de ser uno con el tiempo, cesa de coincidir con el fluir de la realidad. Cuando digo "en este instante", ya pasó el instante. La medición espacial del tiempo separa al hombre de la realidad, que es un continuo presente, y hace fantasmas a todas las presencias en que la realidad se manifiesta. (Paz 88)

Paz tells us that there was once a time when time was non-linear, but we gave away that truthful, pure existence when we became prisoners of the clock and calendar and lapsed into chronometric time. He believes that we are now living in chronometric time, in which we divide, record, schedule every miniscule moment into quantifiable segments until we are far removed from reality and constantly living for the future. As he says, by the time one has uttered “in this moment,” the moment has already passed and thus due to our insatiable need to control, cluster, allot ourselves time we are instead robbing ourselves of time and essentially losing out on the present. I really liked the distinctions that Paz drew between chronometric time and the eternal present by saying that chronometric time “no es una aprehensión inmediata del fluir de la realidad, sino una racionalización del transcurrir” (89). I particularly enjoyed this comment, because I felt like it pointedly demonstrated the fundamentally human need to control or at least rationalize things beyond our realm of influence. Because we are unable to control neither the passing of nor our perception of reality, we must rationalize and quantify its passing. What a refreshing and insightful point of view! I could not agree more, although I wish that with this revelation there came any indication of how to escape from the prison of the clock and calendar… Paz’ solution for throwing off the shackles of chronometric time is the fiesta, in which he insists that chronometric time is destroyed, because for a brief moment the fiesta is reproducing, rather than merely celebrating an event. The result is that “por espacio de unas breves horas inconmensurables, el presente eterno se reinstate” (88). As wonderful as this sounds, I am doubtful about its real life applications!! Perhaps I’ll have to venture down to Mexico and see if I can escape the clock by attending a fiesta…