What Time Collects

Arguing that one of the most negative consequences of modernism’s traditional designs has been the way they have tended to marginalize or exclude major writers on the basis of ideological assumptions that are never made explicit, this chapter reads Australian novelist Eleanor Dark and American fiction writer James T. Farrell alongside each other. Both writers interrogated conventional understandings of modernism as a phenomenon predicated upon a rhetoric of liberal progress. Instead, Dark and Farrell both seek aesthetically to track back into the past, and they both adduce in their different ways a collectivist understanding of society, one in which individualism is interwoven in complex ways with communal sympathies. Hence the complex fictions of both writers mediate a heterodox version of temporality, in which the recursive passage from present to past carries as much weight as the existential charge from present to future.