The Aesthetics of Nachträglichkeit: Traumatic Temporality and the First World War in Proust, Joyce, and Mann

I investigate the unusual temporality peculiar to modernist literature in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), James Joyce’s Ulysses, and Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain). These contemporaneous novels, written in diverse locations, by unassociated authors, share a protracted temporality that extends the narratives to unexpected lengths. Time itself is interrogated in these novels, and in criticism is often characterized as an intensely subjective and private form of time, in reaction to major contemporary shifts occurring in public time, notably the ongoing implementation of Global Standard Time. I propose that the instability of time in these novels reveals a structure of the Freudian concept of Nachträglichkeit at work, a belatedness that is a form of coping with crisis, and that the major crisis to which this peculiar temporality responds is the First World War. These novels are not ostensibly preoccupied with the war, and yet convey how deeply war affects individuals and cultural production in ways that are often unanticipated and unacknowledged. Nachträglichkeit, the inherent belatedness of trauma, shapes the temporality of modernist literature in ways previously unconsidered. In these novels, trauma appears as what Cathy Caruth calls a “missed event”: its initial iteration appears minimally or not at all, and is instead represented through flashbacks (in the case of involuntary memory in Proust), allusions (in Joyce), or a trope of ineffability (in Mann). Although the affect related to a traumatic event is deferred, this deferral is part of a coping mechanism: it is the consciousness’ strategy of self-protection through gradual exposure, and this is the crucial component of the belatedness in these novels. The various ways in which time operates in the three novels demonstrates the diverse logic of Nachträglichkeit, particularly in their respective treatment of the war. Nachträglichkeit, in various permutations, is one articulation of the broader interrogations of temporality that were ongoing in the early twentieth century, and the most compelling explanation of the strange temporality of modernist literature, particularly as it invites a reconsideration of the constellation of Proust, Joyce, and Mann.

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