by David Beer
Danish author Solvej Balle’s novel On the Calculation of Volume, the first book translated from a series of five, could be thought of as time loop realism, if such a thing is imaginable. Tara Selter is trapped, alone, in a looping 18th of November. Each morning simply brings yesterday again. Tara turns to her pen, tracking the loops in a journal. Hinting at how the messiness of life can take form in texts, the passages Tara scribbles in her notebooks remain despite the restarts. She can’t explain why this is, but it allows her to build a diary despite time standing still. The capability of writing to curb the boredom and capture lost moments brings some comfort.
There are no chapters, no endings, occasionally we are given the number of 18ths of November Tara has endured. Those occasional numerical markers replace dates in the diary. As a consequence, the volume of repetitions becomes the key metric. The day takes on extra dimensions when the limits of what is possible in a single 24-hours can be explored so intricately. Unlike similar conceptions, Tara can move around, waking wherever she ended the previous version of the same day. She also ages, a burn on her hand heals to a scar, and certain things stay where she put them too. The absences also remain. Repeated food purchases leave gaps on shop shelves. Inexplicably, those gaps remain. Yet it is the absence of uncertainty that weighs most heavily on Tara. When you know what is coming, unpredictability is lost, it has to be actively sought-out instead.
It is the combination of Tara’s agency, the traces of her repetitions and the materiality of the experienced loops that give this time loop its realist property. We see how reliving the same day alters perspectives on people, places, space, nature, and so on. There is no when and no if to the story, what we get instead is what happens to someone experiencing endless predictability. At first, the things that are the same stick-out to Tara. A piece of dropped bread that falls slowly to the floor, a rain shower, footsteps on stairs, all become overwhelmingly familiar. Over time, the inconsistencies start to become a preoccupation. Tara can’t understand why certain objects stay whilst others return to their original location. Perhaps we shouldn’t expect the outcome of a major temporal disruption to be well-ordered and logical.
Once the weather and people’s behaviours become so familiar as to be crushingly predictable, Tara starts to see the world as patterns. She looks elsewhere for something to bring reason to the situation. Other people provide little insight. Even when they listen and accept, they forget what she has told them. Tara looks further outwards, purchasing a telescope to study the stars and constellations. The interest in the cosmos, and something beyond the immediate, emphasises the distance and remoteness that comes when it is only her stuck on repeat. With one person aging whilst the others stay frozen, the rhythms get further apart each day. Even places become too immersive to bear for long unaltered periods.
With a nod to the format, theories of time loops are even considered by the characters. As Tara introduces and rejects various causes or explanations for her predicament, the book becomes a reflection on its own subject matter. Within a long entry for the 18th of November #123, Tara, frustrated in her attempts to find an answer from a conversation with her partner, concludes that “we were prepared to accept any theory that described our situation with only reasonable accuracy and ready to drop it again if we came up with another.” There is a quiet desperation in the willingness to find a theory that might illuminate, if only partially. It turns out that theories are of little help to Tara, especially ones that nearly fit or just-about explain, tempting as they may be as a source of solace. With that realization Tara moves away from pondering parallel universes, multiple worlds and other “tales of pockets, loops and labyrinths in time” and toward something more solid and material. Needing something more tangible, she shifts quickly from theorist to empiricist. Continuing to look for the 18th of November’s exit door, Tara begins to think that it must be hidden in the patterns themselves. There’s a futility to this too. The 19th never seems likely. Tara also never seems fully convinced that it will ever arrive. She starts to abandon epistemologies altogether and settles instead for some good old ontology.
Inevitably, a time loop story is going to be a reminder of the monotony of routine. It amplifies the ruts. It serves to tell us that we are in a cycle of habitual actions. Repetition is always going to be an obvious theme. It is surprisingly absent in Balle’s storytelling. The date remains, whilst Tara keeps altering things, making her the only one who can actually escape the ruts. Some repetition is necessary, but this is found in the world surrounding Tara rather than in her own actions. She isn’t repeating, everyone else is. In a time loop, there is always going to be the bind of having a story that emphasises the character’s experience of endlessness, whilst not also giving the reader too much of the same. The way the repetition is handled is by Tara telling us intermittently about selected thoughts and events, rather than us hearing each repetition. We tend to be told only those things that stand-out to Tara as either, to use her own terms, patterns and inconsistencies. The reader doesn’t lose time in the same way as the character, there is no laboured or boring accounting, but experiences it instead as extended highlights. There are clearly long passages of pointlessness that haven’t made the reel, we know that without having to see them. There are dozens of days unaccounted for. In the gaps there is a lot left unsaid, a lot that wasn’t deemed interesting enough to be written into the diary. This approach intensifies the feeling of being trapped rather than loosening it.
Another way to read On The Calculation of Volume is to conclude that Tara is the only character who is not locked in repetition. If we look at its inverse, focusing away from Tara and onto those she encounters, we see that everyone around her is trapped in the same day, reliving it in the same way, repeatedly. They are the ones in the rut. Their lack of awareness of having done all of this before, the wiping of their memory of the day, leads them into the same patterned grooves of behaviour. Tara can see them going over the same actions, unable to alter, unable to escape. Everyone else remains unchanged, unless they encounter Tara and the disruption brought by her awareness. She may be stuck on the 18th of November in the calendar, whilst being the only character who is actually able to experience that day differently. Knowing you are in a time loop brings an element of control and an ability to defy the repetitions of routine. The problem is that Tara can’t take others with her. It may always be the 18th of November, yet Tara is capable of variety where everyone else becomes only a pattern. If one person is in a time loop, then does that mean we are all then trapped in our patterns? Perhaps the point is something more to do with how routines and repetitions can only be broken when there is an awareness that they exist in the first place. By looking inwards at the experience of the same day over and over, and then calculating the volume of that day, Balle returns to questions about what time actually is: is it just a date on the calendar that proves that another day has arrived? How do we know that time is passing? Perhaps if everyone else in Tara’s world became aware that it was perpetually the 18th of November, then they could all move on and life could return to something more familiar.
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