Randall, B. (2016) A day’s time: the one-day novel and the temporality of
the everyday. New Literary History, 47(4), pp. 591-
610.(doi:10.1353/nlh.2016.0031)
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New Literary History, 2016, 47: 591–610
A Day’s Time: The One-Day Novel and the
Temporality of the Everyday
The day lives us and in exchange
We it
—James Schuyler, Hymn to Life (1974)
Bryony Randall
Introduction
T
his essay presents an initial, exploratory investigation of the
one-day-ness of the one-day novel—to ask what the effects of
this temporal frame, in literary form, might be. I approach this
question largely through the developing critical field of everyday life
studies, in particular on literature and the everyday. My main intended
audience is fellow literary critics; as I detail below, there is a surprising
paucity of literary criticism focused specifically on the narrative of the
single day, and I hope in this essay to launch further discussions of the
form, particularly insofar as instances of this form can also (paradoxically)
be read as novels of the everyday. But I am also addressing theorists of
everyday life studies more generally. Ben Highmore has recently sug-
gested that the “constructive and inventive” nature of the study of the
everyday means that the kind of “theory” that would be useful in this field
might be found not in the “dense and abstruse form of writing” where
we usually expect to find it but, among other places, “in the pages of a
novel.”
1
If this is so, then perhaps the one-day novel is an appropriate
form on which to base a more general investigation of the relationship
between the single day and the everyday.
I begin with a brief survey of the critical fields with which this essay
engages. The centrality of temporality to everyday life studies is not in
question: “Everyday life is above all a temporal term,” says Rita Felski in
her essay “The Invention of Everyday Life”;
2
Martin Heidegger insisted
in Being and Time that “basically nothing other is meant by everyday-
ness than temporality.”
3
There also appears to be consensus on what
constitutes this temporality. For example, Henri Lefebvre, one of the
founders of everyday life studies, asserted that “everyday life is made of
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592
recurrences”;
4
Felski’s important feminist revision of Lefebvre is equally
insistent upon the repetitive temporality of the everyday. Although
Felski reframes repetition and its related modality, habit, to insist on
their potentially positive qualities, while Lefebvre and other influential
early theorists of the everyday in modernity (such as Georg Simmel or
Sigmund Freud) tend to regard repetition as damaging or negative,
nevertheless there is a consistent focus across the critical field on the
“every” of “everyday” rather than the “day.” One notable exception can
be found in the work of Michael Sheringham, whose book Everyday Life:
Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present includes a section on
“The Space of the Day” in which he reflects on ways that “the figure of
the day can provide access to the totality which is the everyday.”
5
Sher-
ingham’s work indicates the untapped potential for everyday life studies
in focusing on the temporal frame of the single day.
Drawing heavily as it does on literary texts in his investigation of
theories of the everyday, Sheringham’s work has been central to the
growing interest in the everyday in contemporary literary criticism.
It is worth noting that most of the recent literary critical works that
specifically engage and interrogate the concept of the everyday and its
cognates are focused on modernist literature. The reasons for this are
most likely to do with the transformation in the way everyday life was
both conceptualized and experienced in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, to the extent that the emergence of everyday life
as a concept is frequently dated to around this time.
6
Indeed, as I will
discuss in more detail below, the modernist period produced two of
the most celebrated English language single-day novels, James Joyce’s
Ulysses (1922) and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925). In my own work
thus far, I have paid sustained attention to the temporality of modern-
ist texts of the everyday, but have not singled out the one-day novel for
particular attention as such.
7
Interestingly, other key critics in this field
such as Liesl Olson and Lorraine Simm have explicitly chosen the term
“ordinary” in preference to “everyday.” Their reasons vary, and of course
the two terms are not interchangeable.
8
But one outcome of this choice
is that the question of (daily) temporality does not press upon their
analyses as it might have done had their defining term been “everyday.”
By contrast, and as the title suggests, Michael Sayeau’s Against the Event:
The Everyday and the Evolution of Modernist Narrative explicitly engages the
term “everyday” as the antithesis of the “event.” I discuss these terms in
more detail later; for now, the intersection between Sayeau’s work and my
concerns are best expressed where he observes that “modernist writers
persistently resist the notion that works must be constructed according
to a normative rhythm of eventfulness and uneventfulness. The most
593
a day’s time
obvious example of this is the advent of the circadian, ‘single-day’ novel,
such as James Joyce’s Ulysses or Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, which
compresses the conventional temporal and thematic range of the realist
novel into a few hours of an ordinary day during which little, according
to usual literary standards, happens.”
9
While I do turn in this essay to the
question of what “happens” in the novel of the single day, , I am more
concerned with how the one-day novel might present its happenings, or
nonhappenings; the specific opportunities offered by this literary form.
The one-day novel has received only superficial attention from literary
critics specifically in terms of its overall temporal structure; still less has
there been much attempt made to link it with contemporary theories
of the everyday.
10
This is despite the fact that certain canonical one-day
novels frequently form the jumping-off point for theoretical discussions
of the everyday, the most obvious example being the discussion of Ulysses
that opens Lefebvre’s foundational text of everyday life theory, Everyday
Life in the Modern World.
11
And where critical attention is paid to the
temporal aspects of the one-day novel, this tends to pass quickly over the
fact of it being a narrative of a single day without sustained reflection on
the implications of this structure. So, for example, while critics cannot
fail to notice and may make passing comment on the one-day structure
of Mrs Dalloway or Ulysses, attention tends quickly to turn to the larger
temporal structures that these novels employ—the “tunnelling” method
of Mrs Dalloway, the mythic structure of Ulysses.
Some examples will help illustrate what I see as the lacuna in the
current critical field in relation to the one-day novel. On the one hand,
there is Robert Weninger’s approach in his essay on the one-day novel
as homage to Joyce. Weninger treats the one-day frame as a “‘classifica-
tory function’” analogous to the Foucauldian author-function that, per
Foucault, “‘permits one to group together a certain number of texts,
define them, differentiate them from and contrast them to others.’”
12
But Weninger then does little more than note how six other one-day
novels are like or unlike Ulysses, in various ways, without focusing in
particular on the effect of their one-day temporality. On the other
hand, there are numerous critics who write on the one-day novel, and
who write on temporal aspects of the text, but do not directly address
its status precisely as one day. For example, in his landmark work Fiction
and Repetition, J. Hillis Miller devotes a chapter to each of Mrs Dalloway
and Between the Acts, but makes only passing reference to Mrs Dalloway’s
one-day structure, famously describing it as “a general day of recollec-
tion.”
13
Between these two positions, there is a void around attention to
the specific features of the one-day novel as such.
new literary history
594
Miller’s neglect of this aspect of Woolf’s texts is perhaps not surprising,
given what appears to be a fundamental incompatibility between repeti-
tion (the topic of his book), which by common and critical consensus
defines the temporality of the everyday, and the frame of the one-day
novel. If the temporality of the everyday is a “lived process of routiniza-
tion,” then this routinization, repetition, habit, and so on—the charac-
teristics of the temporality of dailiness—will in principle be invisible in
the text that narrates one day and one day only (IEL 95).
14
But it remains
a paradox—one I explore below—that while in principle the one-day
novel ought to be very poorly suited to capture everyday temporality,
in practice novelists often use the frame of the one-day novel in order
to evoke the habits and routines of everyday life.
As with any project that proposes to broach new critical ground, the
question of methodology is key. In this case, I had assumed I would
need to begin by reading as many one-day novels as possible and mak-
ing observations about their characteristics and effects. However, it soon
became obvious that sustained close reading of any text or texts would,
ultimately, be at odds with my larger project. Rather, in order to focus
on the specifically formal aspects of this kind of text, I needed to take
a more abstract approach. Following Lefebvre in his Rhythmanalysis (a
text with its own specific relevance to the topic at hand), I propose
that “instead of going from concrete to abstract, one starts with full
consciousness of the abstract in order to arrive at the concrete.”
15
I will
of course give some concrete examples from one-day texts to illustrate
my discussion. But since this does not pretend to be a comprehensive
survey of all one-day novels (however one might define such a thing),
it is more appropriate to pursue what might be characterized as a pri-
marily deductive approach, offering initial observations about what the
one-day narrative might offer in principle, and testing these hypotheses
out against what some such novels do in practice.
Questions of scope and focus should, however, be given a little further
consideration. David Higdon argues that “the circadian novel’s creation
had largely to wait for the time-obsessed twentieth century”; a literary
history of the one-day novel is beyond the scope of this essay, but part
of the development of a full narrative of the one-day novel in literature
would have to address questions of period and, indeed, nationality.
16
Of
course any discussion of the one-day novel cannot and should not avoid
Mrs Dalloway and Ulysses; indeed, the fact that these novels are also among
the most celebrated texts of modernism means they will have significantly
influenced our expectations, as readers, of the one-day form. Evidently,
however, observations on Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway alone will not get us
very far, not least precisely because they are already so overdetermined