Shipwrecked in a time-loop – Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume plays a long game
- Written by David McCooey, Professor of Writing and Literature, Deakin University
We tend to think of repetition, especially with regard to novels and other media, in negative terms. To say a work is formulaic or cliched is to say that it repeats exhausted tropes and plots.
But repetition is central to art. Tradition, character, genre and style are all types of repetition. Repetition is at the heart of various literary forms and modes.
On the Calculation of Volume IV – Solvej Balle, translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell (Faber)
The genre at play in On the Calculation of Volume, by the Danish writer Solvej Balle, is the time-loop narrative, in which a period of time is repeated, usually more than once, leading the protagonist to search for a way to return to “normal” time. This device is perhaps best known from films such as Groundhog Day (1993) and Palm Springs (2020), and the television series Russian Doll (2019-22).
On the Calculation of Volume was conceived before Groundhog Day, but its gestation has been notably long. Six books of the seven-book series have been published in Danish, the first in 2020, by Balle’s own publishing house. The fourth has now appeared in English (with the first two volumes translated by Barbara J. Haveland and the most recent volumes translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell).
The sequence is being translated into 20 other languages, perhaps one reason its English publisher has been keen to present the series as a literary sensation and a “page-turning masterpiece”. So far, plenty of critics agree.
While I would agree that these books are “page turners”, they are far stranger than that designation would suggest. As a time-loop narrative, On the Calculation of Volume is an extremely thoughtful thought experiment, rather than a simple romcom or sci-fi story. Like Jorge Luis Borges before her, Balle employs fantasy to philosophise on the nature of reality and our renderings of it.
A Socratic dialogue
The first volume opens with Tara Selter, a dealer in rare books, discovering that November 18th keeps repeating. (My plot spoilers here will be confined to what you can glean from the books’ blurbs.) Unlike Groundhog Day, Tara’s time loop does not move her back to the same point in space. This allows her, in the course of the novels, to move about freely.
Another peculiarity of this time loop is the way objects behave. Some things (such as documents) can remain with Tara if she sleeps with them nearby. But one of the resonant conditions of Balle’s virtual world is that consumed things, such as food, are not replaced at the beginning of each new November 18th. Tara can “fish out” a supermarket if she keeps returning to the same one, so she has to minimise the effect she has on her surroundings, in part by moving around.
Human consumption is one of the main concerns of On the Calculation of Volume, suggesting the work’s deep links with climate fiction.
The Robinsonade
A more important link with literary heritage concerns the Robinsonade. Taking its cue from Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe (1719), the Robinsonade is a genre that places a protagonist away from civilisation, usually shipwrecked on an island – or, in more modern instances, distant planets.
Well-known Robinsonades include The Swiss Family Robinson (1812) by Johann David Wyss and, more recently, the film Cast Away (2000) and Andy Weir’s novel The Martian (2011). Echoes of the Robinsonade can be seen in desert island cartoons and reality television shows such as Survivor and Alone. Literary versions of the Robinsonade include works such as Muriel Spark’s Robinson (1958) and J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986).
Time-loop narratives, I propose, are a modern instance of the Robinsonade, in which their protagonists are wrecked in time rather than space. This applies to On the Calculation of Volume. And it is suggestive, to say the least, that Balle’s first novel, Lyrefugl (The Lyre Bird) (1986), was an actual Robinsonade about a woman stranded on an island after a plane crash.
Illustration from a 19th century edition of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe – Walter Paget (1896).
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
In On the Calculation of Volume, as in any Robinsonade, the following tropes appear: becoming “shipwrecked”; getting provisions after the “wreck”; starting a calendar to keep track of time; establishing a new routine; establishing reserves of provisions; and the protagonist discovering that she is not alone.
More generally, the themes of isolation, self-reflection, inventiveness and social commentary are all found in Balle’s sequence, and images of storms and being shipwrecked appear throughout.
In volume IV, for example, characters remember when they thought they were unique in being wrecked in time. As one of them puts it, “you were adrift in a boat with no rudder or sail”. Another says, “the world is a rocking boat, a ship in a storm […] the world is a place that throws you overboard”.
What we also see in volume IV is a concern with the relationship between self-reliance and society, and between the “primitive” and the “civilised”. The possibility of seeing one’s deserted island as a pastoral (or idealised) space is a feature of the Robinsonade. For instance, at least one character sees being stuck in the time loop as a kind of freedom from the “rat race and the hamster wheel and the career ladder and competitiveness”.
Repetition as a productive force
Balle’s engagement with earlier literary genres and modes – the time-loop narrative, the Socratic dialogue, the Robinsonade – shows her deep investment in repetition as a productive force.
This is seen most obviously in the device of the time loop itself. But repetition as the foundation of style is also apparent. We see this in Balle’s use of effects such as anaphora (beginning phrases and sentences with the same word or words), catalogue (listing things in patterned ways), and iterative repetition (whereby individual moments are repeatedly recounted at different times and from different perspectives).
This last effect feels particularly self-reflexive, or “meta”. There is usually something “meta” about time-loop narratives, too. The repetition draws attention to the materiality of the medium, whether that is film or text.
To change the metaphor, Balle’s writing often feels musical. Like a jazz musician eking out every possible articulation of a particular phrase or scale, she plays with her numerous themes (also a musical term), such as sound, language and the everyday.
For this reason, I am not unduly worried that some of the more consequential moments in volume IV (which I will not divulge here) seem to go nowhere. I am confident that the themes raised by these events will reappear in later volumes. Balle is playing the long game.
Nimble and playful
As the most static and abstract of the four books available in English so far, this latest volume might be regarded as the least likely to be a “page turner”. And yet it retains the intellectual and aesthetic nourishment of its sister volumes.
One doesn’t really read On the Calculation of Volume for plot, or character, or descriptions of setting. Since action, character and setting are the fundamentals of narrative, this might suggest Balle’s novel sequence has nothing going for it. And yet, despite some longueurs, it is one of the most individual works I have ever read. Any frustrations with its idiosyncratic style are a small price to pay for a work that entertains so uniquely.
At the end of volume IV, Tara is again on the move, almost ten years after her first looped day. For a writer so uninterested in conventional plot, Balle’s liking for cliffhanger endings is amusing. Certainly, it gives the reader the necessary push into the next volume.
Balle’s novel sequence is deeply embedded in literary history, but it is profoundly concerned with contemporary problems. The emphasis on community, the sense of things being fundamentally awry and the desire to change how we live make it impossible not to read this work as an allegory of our “polycrisis” times.
The allegorical approach is all-important. Literature that simply wants to make a point (“sexism is bad”, “colonialism is bad”) is propaganda, and often enough facile and redundant; it is a form of politics, rather than the nimble, playful thing literature ideally is.
On the Calculation of Volume is indeed nimble and playful, and Balle’s charmingly unreal world powerfully deals with real problems. I look forward to reading the next three volumes.
Authors: David McCooey, Professor of Writing and Literature, Deakin University
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