Our Place in Time and Place
There is one thing in our lives we cannot deny — the day we are born. As soon as we enter this world, they record our gender, the time of birth, the date and the place. Time and place. So crucial in our lives. And their pivotal role in our existence continues right through our lifetime, whether we live fifty or one hundred years. Our place can change as happens with migrants and refugees for instance, and we become products of a second location whether it be a new city or a new country. Even if we stay in the same place, it can change too. Wars are one classic example of how Time and Place can change, usually quite suddenly, dramatically and tragically. Think of the Jews in the early 1930s living comfortable lives, owning successful businesses in German cities like Berlin, living their lives in relative safety, following their customs and religious rituals without interference or persecution. Now move on 10 years to the early 40s. These same Jews are unrecognizable, the few remaining are wearing threadbare clothes with a yellow star, their jaws sunken with starvation and terror, their eyes vacant. The others are dead already, brutally slaughtered in concentration camps, all their businesses and property are long gone, confiscated by Hitler’s Nazi regime and they can only pray as death is the one certainty. Let’s move half a century forward to 9/11 and the thousands of individuals who went to the Twin Towers that morning as they did every other day. By midday three thousand of them were dead, the buildings crashing down on them. Just like the German Jews, these Americans were not just a product, but a victim of Time and Place.

Three texts I read this year which strongly motivated and inspired me on the topic of Time and Place are The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nineteen-Eighty-Four by George Orwell and Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. In The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway adulates Jay Gatsby because unlike everyone else he sees around him in 1920s affluent, narcissistic, amoral America, he has risen above “the foul dust”, a metaphor of the time and place he inhabits. In other words, the American Dream. Nick perceives Jay as a man who does not seem to fit the Time and Place — far too sentimental, a dreamer, despite the ruthless, indifferent, cynical society around him. This text led me to the question: is it possible to live and survive outside one’s Time and Place? The next text — the dystopian Nineteen-Eighty-Four led me deeper into my journey about Time and Place. Winston Smith, the protagonist, is definitely an ‘outsider’, questioning a system which brutally crushes anyone even remotely suspected of rebellion against the omnipotent Big Brother. Living in a savagely totalitarian society in a futuristic 1984 England, he dares to question his Time and Place. Similarly set in a dystopian future, Bradbury’s sci-fi novel, Fahrenheit 451, is set in a Time and Place where the powers-that-be are determined to totally control people as a way to consolidate power, banning books as a means to manipulate minds. Like Winston, Guy Montag seeks to undermine this forced control by hiding books and reading through them.
Together, the three texts helped me to explore not just a particular Time and Place from 1920 New York to the two future-worlds in London and Chicago, but the impact that the two combined factors of Time and Place had on the lives of individuals — to what extent were they trapped? was there a way out? was it wise to rebel or was it better to resign oneself to the times? to what extent can Time and Place be blamed for the character’s fate? to what extent did the characters effect change?
THE GREAT GATSBY
“It is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.” — Nick Carraway
This is one of Nick’s most memorable observations about Jay Gatsby. Disillusioned with life in the Middle West of America, 30-year-old Nick was “restless” and was looking for new horizons. In 1922, the mid-west which seemed once like “the warm centre of the world” became for Nick nothing but “the ragged edge of the universe.” Here, Nick is an example of how our perception of time and place can change with experience. In his case, it was his service in the “Great War” that propelled his decision “to go East” to New York City, so convinced of the need for this change of place that he aimed to move “permanently” there, setting roots “as a single man” in the bond business.
Nick had certain preconceptions about New York, fueled by the lifestyle led by his cousin Daisy, who was married to Tom Buchanan, a member of the established rich who made their fortune during the Civil War in the 1860s. Looking around, Nick could sense the unquestionable and astounding affluence of the super-rich who lived in “the white palaces of fashionable East Egg” on Long island. The Buchanans were a classic example, with their rambling gardens, huge mansion, yacht and spur-of-the-moment holidays abroad such as spending “a year in France for no particular reason.” Coming from a wealthy but conservative background, Nick was amazed by not just the amount of money these people had, but by the way they led such a seemingly leisurely, carefree life where they did not have to work even though Tom was “in [Nick’s] generation.”
However, the decade that allowed these super-rich to live like royalty also made them restless. Nick noted how they “drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together.” They seemed aimless, almost reckless, “careless.” Tom and Daisy’s marriage was a sham. Tom had a mistress and Daisy had no choice but to let him be. She married a man with established wealth, prestige, high social status but a man who did not love her. She knew painfully that in this time and place — upper class New York of the 20s — the rich had abandoned their allegiance to moral even ethical standards such as loyalty, fidelity and respect as they narcissistically followed their desires — drinking, partying and having extra-marital affairs.

Gatsby’s parties are a perfect example of the goings-on that defined the hedonistic lifestyle of the 20s with its drugs, shortened sleeveless dresses, drinking, lavish extravagant parties, sexual liberation… This is why Nick cannot believe that a Gatsby could exist in the midst of this world where people sought pleasure as their ultimate purpose in life. Yes, Gatsby held wild parties and wooed all the rich and beautiful people, but he had one thing that these people had abandoned. He believed in love, not the one that exploits and uses others like Tom did with Myrtle, but a genuine and deep emotion that would give everything, even life itself, to be with the one you adore. He gave parties specifically to win his love, Daisy. In a time and place where love had lost its true meaning, Nick noticed that Gatsby displayed “a romantic readiness” that he had “never found in any other person.” This was also a time when people were cynical because they had lost their faith in religion or higher morals. Living in the “foul dust” of amorality, they were choking in cynicism and this is why Gatsby also stood out because he had “an extraordinary gift for hope.” The people surrounding Nick had everything of material value, yet they had nothing of emotional value. The times were such that the rich lived from day to day, an existential lifestyle void of any true hope, classically exemplified by Daisy’s bleak comment: ‘What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon, and the day after that, and the next thirty years?” Ultimately, Gatsby may have dared to defy the mindset of his time and place, and Nick did indeed recognize him for this, but by the end, the foul dust got him too and he paid the ultimate price for his deep love of Daisy.
1984
“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength”
These words are the official slogans of a fictional ruthless totalitarian regime that controls a London of the future. The novel, 1984, is set in Oceania, within a reality in which a government monitors and controls every aspect of a person’s life to the extent that even having a disloyal thought is against the law, or in other words, is considered a “thought crime.” The autocratic party has various tactics at its disposal to enslave its citizens, such as psychological manipulation, physical torture, propaganda, constant surveillance through telescreens, spies such as the Junior Spy League, the complete alteration of information and history as well as the application of technology to control the public. It is a place where everyone has to express undying unwavering love for the mysterious leader of the regime, Big Brother.

This is a time and place that produces victims. When an individual is too terrified to not just speak but think rebellion then he or she is definitely a victim as they have no freedom to be themselves. This is what Winston Smith is experiencing. As he tries to desperately hide from the telescreen that constantly invades his privacy even though he is in his apartment, he is frozen in fear, too terrorized to even show a facial expression as it may be interpreted by surveillance as a thought and in this society, thinking equals rebellion. The Thought Police were after you all the time, “every movement scrutinised.” The only time you could feel ‘free’ was in “darkness.” As Winston explains nervously, “even a back can be revealing.” A frustrated Winston tries his best to find some sense of freedom without getting caught. He speaks to himself in “a very low whisper” and keeps away as best he can from the range of the telescreen, knowing that at any time, the Thought Police could “plug in”, hoping to catch you committing a “thoughtcrime.” Ironically, and dangerously, Winston himself was involved in the state’s campaign to silence and control. As an employee at the Ministry of Truth, his job was expressly to rewrite the past — deleting, embellishing, distorting or simply recreating it so that it fitted perfectly into the propaganda expounded by the Party.
Like most people living in Oceania, Winston is not just a psychological but a physical victim. The powers-that-be do not care about the people, even though they profess that they do. Orwell brilliantly uses descriptions of buildings and weather to create the most bleak, fatalistic setting suggesting that this time and place took away all hope and joy from the people. As Winston looks out of his window he notes “the grimy landscape” full of ‘’rotting nineteenth-century houses”, houses that are falling apart so badly that they have to be “shored up with baulks of timber.” The windows are “patched with cardboard” and the garden walls “are sagging in all directions.” This is supposed to be London, a future London, as the novel was written in 1948 (Orwell probably switched the digits changing 48 to 84). The message here is that a place, including London, can change so dramatically, especially if we are not wary. Orwell was reminding his audience of how quickly Fascist Germany and Italy, and Communist Russia or the USSR, came into existence, issuing a warning of how the ‘place’ can change so dramatically in so much ‘time.’ No wonder, Big Brother wanted to erase history as any memory of the past, a better past, could inflame rebellion. This is why in the opening chapter we see Winston scratching his head to try to dislodge, “squeeze out”, a memory from “childhood” to vindicate his growing suspicions that London may not have “always been quite like this.”
The novel asks: is it possible to change one’s surroundings, taking the ‘place’ back to a past ‘time’ when things were better? Winston has vague memories of a past long gone, when he was still a child. But to his deep frustration, nothing could come to mind, although the memory of London in the past, still remained as a radically different time and place, “a series of bright-lit tableaux”, suggesting joy and peace, a far cry from the time that is 1984 Oceania. Despite their vagueness, these memories spurred Winston’s will to change the time and place. He knew it was going to be difficult, maybe impossible, but meeting Julia gave him inspiration that he may just achieve victory against Big Brother. Emmanuel Goldstein too inspired him, even though the Party had crushed and vilified him as a traitor. Goldstein had advocated “freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought” all banned by Big Brother in the quest for total control. Winston dreamt of the day when these freedoms would return.
He started his own rebellion by buying a diary from an antique shop owned by Mr Charrington and starts to secretly record his thoughts, a seditious action totally unacceptable at this time. Charrington also helped to jar Winston’s memory of another time and place, so much better than the one under Big Brother. The old photograph of a church reignited a childhood memory he had of this place which he identified as the museum downtown. The nursery rhyme that Charrington teaches him also resurrects memories of another time and place. But, as Orwell warns, no amount of rebellion, even seemingly harmless inner rebellion, will succeed when an individual faces an enemy as formidable as Big Brother who controls not just bodies but minds and souls. It is only a matter of time before Winston is crushed, which is what happens after the brutal torture in Room 101 at the hands of the very man, O’Brien, who Winston had naively believed to be a potential co-conspirator. The end is truly bleak and despondent. Winston is an empty shell of the man he once was as he walks, robot-like, down the corridor chanting “I love Big Brother.”
FAHRENHEIT 451
“There must be something in books, things we can’t imagine.” — Guy Montag
Ray Bradbury’s message is slightly less fatalistic as he offers some hope of change, although it is only a glimmer. The title ‘Fahrenheit 451’ refers to the temperature at which books disintegrate or are vaporized. It is a society in the future, another dystopia like 1984 Oceania, where the powers-that-be want to control people’s minds, in this case, by ensuring that they are always happy. The authorities give them TV, making sure they are glued to it. The TV content is controlled by the authorities. And the people are not allowed to read books because books made the readers sad, opened up their imagination to tragic and disturbing scenarios and led them to feel depressed. If the people were kept happy all the time then they would also be happy with those who ruled them, not questioning the rights or wrongs of such total control (It is well noted that book burning was also used by the Nazis as powerful propaganda). But like Winston in 1984, there is a rebel in ‘Fahrenheit 451’, the fireman, Guy Montag. Montag is a fireman who ‘lights’ fires, the fires that burn books. In his time and place, they even created a robot called the Mechanical Hound which lives in a kennel “in a dark corner of the firehouse.” These hounds were once used to save people but were now used to hunt down offenders — people caught with books.

This time and place is quite “different” from the past in more ways than one. 17-year-old Clarisse tells Montag that her grandfather keeps reminding her that there was a time “when children didn’t kill each other.” She is worried that “six of [her] friends have been shot in the last year alone.” She deplores the fact that in this time and place the notion of “responsibility” is no more. And the sad reality that no one is curious and everyone says “the same things” and “nobody says anything different from anyone else.” Those in power created a place where people had no notion of non-conformity and individuality. No books, not even paintings, only “abstract” ones. But Montag started to ask questions. Just like Winston, he wonders whether it was “always like this…once upon a time.” He had already started his rebellion, hiding books stolen during his job, and stashing them in various parts of his house. And, all the time, living with the fear that the Hound may be “out there” catching the sniff of books and offenders. This is exactly what happened. Montag was finally caught. He was made to burn his own house. He had to flee. However, unlike Winston, Montag survived.

Like Orwell, Bradbury asks why it is that people find it so hard to rebel? The character of Faber provides some answers. He confesses in shame that like so many other citizens, despite the fact that he loved books he eventually surrendered to the will of those in power and “let them go.” Faber sees himself as a “coward”, too scared to defy and challenge. He could see “the way things were going” — how his place was changing for the worse — but “said nothing.” He “could have spoken up” but remained silent. Even when they “set up the structure” to burn the books, all he managed was to “grunt a few times and subsided.” He was too frightened to be the lone voice protesting against change as “no others” were protesting. Like Orwell, Bradbury warns against remaining silent when we see changes in our ‘place’, changes that will take us into a nightmarish world where all we enjoyed in the past is gone. However, while Faber says that it is “too late”, the novel provides some hope that Faber may be wrong. Montag finds a group of people outside the city who have preserved books in their memory and with them, after he watches Chicago burn from enemy bomb raids, he heads to a new time and a new place — the city of Phoenix and “a time to speak.”
The various societies that these books explore play a paramount role in establishing how people become products of the very time and place they live in. In the Great Gatsby, Nick notes that despite the fact that the super-rich of 1920s America lived like royalty, this affluence also made them reckless because they felt that they had vast amounts of power with their money. Being drunk with power soon led them to fail to comply with moral or even ethical standards They had lost all direction and meaning in life. To them, life soon revolved around drinking and partying- essentially, just having fun. Gatsby at first, seems no different, but readers soon realise that he breaks this mold. Unlike anyone else who hails from the astoundingly rich families of New York, Gatsby, is one who believes in love. This love is indeed true, as readers are shown that he would go to the extent of dying for it. But it is this dedication for his love towards a materialistic Daisy, that finally kills him. Gatsby was truly great in the sense that he didn’t abandon his humanity, but in the end, the foul dust got to him.
1984 brings light to the horrors of a totalitarian society where those who speak up are brutally and efficiently silenced. A fictional autocratic government led by a mysterious figure by the name of “Big Brother” aims to control the very thoughts of people and eventually bend them to its will. The entirety of the novel is quite bleak as Orwell used imagery as well as thorough descriptions to paint a dreary Oceania where the powers-that-be do not care for its own people. Utterly sick of being manipulated and controlled, Winston Smith, actively rebels against the party, by thinking and writing in his diary. He later takes it to the next level, having a relationship with a woman he loves and conspiring to rebel against the government with her and an inner party member, whom is a traitor and ultimately tortures him enough that he becomes a hollow shell of what he once was- emotionless, careless and completely obedient to the will of “Big Brother.” Throughout the text, Winston attempts to dive back into the past and fish out any memories that he had with his mother, when the government didn’t rule its people with an iron fist. He knew that it had been a joy-filled time, but all he could do was think about it. He couldn’t do anything about his situation and attempting to change it only resulted in himself being completely silenced.
Fahrenheit 451 offers the prospect of hope within a world where all the odds are stacked against you. This book is very similar to 1984 and describes a time and place in which books are burnt by the government in order to keep its citizens from “getting offended”. This of course, is to ensure that the citizens are so happy that they fail to question the rights or wrongs of the government that rules over them. Guy Montag, a fireman who burns books, gets told of a past where everything was totally different and immediately takes interest in it. Just like Winston in 19884, Guy also actively rebels by stealing books from the fires he burn. Eventually he was caught too. He was forced to burn his own house down, but he still wanted to rebel against those who had had been deceiving him for so long. His mind was set on changing the world for the better, so with this determination, he escaped.
Time and place shape our lives and finding our place in the time we live in makes us who we are, but bravely setting out to change place and time for the better makes us heroes.
