Chapter 14 - Deep Time’s Hauntings

Summary

Our standard accounts associate modernism with the new, the now, the punctual. This chapter reckons with a countervailing type of modernist temporality: moments when the contemporary is perforated, displaced, or haunted by deep time. Such moments can look back on the present from a time to come, or they can peer back from the present into pre-modern or pre-historic times. After tracing an array of literary modernist engagements with deep time, particularly in Virginia Woolf’s novels, the chapter turns to the work of O. G. S. Crawford, the British archaeologist and former RAF observer who used aerial photographic techniques honed during World War I to discover and study Neolithic sites during the 1920s and 1930s. In Crawford’s crossing of cutting-edge flying and seeing technologies with long human and pre-human timelines, we encounter an invitation that Woolf and other modernists accepted: to close the gap between punctual and longitudinal time.