Power and the pursuit of time

Time is a literary leitmotif, infinitely malleable, the writer’s fundamental unit – a fact underscored by Austrian author Christoph Ransmayr in his latest work, Cox oder Der Lauf der Zeit (Cox or the race against time, yet to be translated into English). Born in 1954, Christoph Ransmayr is considered one of the greatest contemporary German-language novelists. He rose to prominence in the 1980s with The Terrors of Ice and Darkness, and more recently Atlas of an Anxious Man which won several awards including the Jean Monnet European Literature Prize. Extensively travelled, Ransmayr is heir to the German tradition whereby the forces of nature are entwined with human destiny. His style is both poetic and descriptive, metaphysical and physical down to the smallest cog.

Cox oder Der Lauf der Zeit is about extraordinary timepieces; the kind which the Qianlong Emperor of China collected in abundance in the eighteenth century. Known also as the “Son of Heaven” and “Lord of Ten Thousand Years”, Qianlong extended an invitation to Alister Cox, the most famous maker of clocks and automata of his day, to journey to the emperor’s court in Beijing. Seven months after leaving England, Cox landed in Hangzhou with Jacob Merlin and two other assistants. The schooner’s holds were packed with clocks and automata, intended as gifts for this fearsome emperor… for Cox reached the port just as twenty-seven corrupt civil servants were to have their noses cut off, a punishment meted out by the emperor. Alister Cox’s own time stood still. His five-year-old daughter had not long died and since then his wife had refused to utter a word. His business was flourishing, thanks to the factories he owned in London, Liverpool and Manchester, and yet he was without joy. After a prolonged hesitation, this prodigious clockmaker had decided to up anchor and accepted the Chinese emperor’s proposition.

An exploration of China

Henceforth, nothing would happen as Cox had expected. First, Qianlong made it known that he had no interest in the precious gifts the English clockmaker had brought with him. Cox and his companions were then shown to their luxurious dwellings at the court; a workshop had also been reserved for them inside the Forbidden City. Following which they could do nothing but wait and wait until the emperor finally appeared. He was of slight build, yet still no-one dared look him in the eye. Through his interpreter Joseph Kiang, Qianlong expressed his wish for clocks that would show not shi jian – measurable time, time that runs and never stands still – but variable time; inward time as experienced by a lover, or a child, or a prisoner about to be executed. A clock that would measure not objective time but subjective duration. Of course, a request from the emperor was not just a request. It was an order.

And so Cox and his acolytes set to work. They began with a wind clock that would “make tangible, measurable the scudding of a wave, a breath of wind in its rise and fall, the leaps, drops, gliding, even the immobilisation of the time of a child’s life”. Cox styled his clock as a junk; the lightest breeze on its silk sails activated the mechanism inside and also set figurines in motion. His next invention was a fire clock which as it burned caused gears to slowly turn, as excruciatingly slowly as the last hours of a condemned man. Each clock required months of labour. Unexpectedly, Cox found himself able to take pleasure in his work: each of these impossible challenges reawakened in him the creative energy he had lost. The novel is also a journey into eighteenth-century China, the mechanisms of power and its intrigues, its cruelty as well as its refinement, the splendours of the Forbidden City, the great wall and the country’s remote provinces.

An impossible quest

Then came a truly impossible request: the emperor required a clock that would run for ever and an age without human intervention: a perpetuum mobile. Cox embarked upon this new invention at Qianlong’s summer residence in distant Mongolia. He sensed that to produce a clock whose time would exceed that of the all-powerful lord was an act of treason that would cost him his life. Still, he imagined a mechanism which, encased in thick glass, would be powered by changes in atmospheric pressure via a mercury barometer. Months went by, seasons changed, yet even in the thick of winter the emperor decreed that summer should continue, for only he had the power to suspend time…

Of course, this is nothing but an illusion, as sure as perpetual motion can never be achieved. Christoph Ransmayr’s novel is a fable, a subtle meditation on time. In his postface, the author willingly concedes that the variable-duration mechanisms to which he refers are entirely imaginary, although his meticulous descriptions suggest a sound knowledge of clockmaking in the inventive eighteenth century. And, he continues, there was indeed a talented clockmaker by the name of James Cox working in England at that time. And this Cox did build a perpetual motion clock that was driven by variations in barometric pressure – like Dutchman Cornelius Drebbel before him, and after him the watchmakers at Jaeger-LeCoultre, although the Atmos runs off variations in temperature and is a “virtually perpetual mechanical movement” as Jaeger-LeCoultre prudently describes it.

A perpetual clock is a physical impossibility because it goes against the laws of thermodynamics. It is a mirage, a fantasy, an invention of man’s hubris. Still, Christoph Ransmayr makes it real through a conceptual and metaphorical exploration. If only to remind us that time can be experienced but never grasped, not even by art.

Cox oder Der Lauf der Zeit, Christoph Ransmayr, published by Büchergilde Gutenberg, 2017.