Solvej Balle’s Philosophy of Time

It is as a philosophical novel that On the Calculation of Volume merits attention and acclaim. This is a slippery genre, since most works of literature explore broadly philosophical themes. But certain novels do so with special directness and, moreover, pursue questions about philosophy’s methods and scope. Balle’s novel is philosophical in this robust sense. Its range is ambitious, encompassing all three of the questions that, according to Immanuel Kant, comprise philosophy’s fundamental concerns: What can I know? What must I do? What may I hope?

Balle’s own academic training has been nontraditional, unfurling over many years: she took occasional philosophy classes in her twenties (in Paris, then at Cornell) and later earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in the subject in Denmark. She has written across genres—a book on aesthetics, a memoir that incorporates social criticism, a quartet of philosophical parables—and her work testifies to an intense interest in how philosophy arises from the experience of living. While trained philosophers (like me) will notice the influence of various thinkers and ideas throughout On the Calculation of Volume, no specialist knowledge is required to join in the philosophical inquiry staged by the novel. Tara’s predicament is at once wildly implausible and relatable: the experience of being marooned in one’s own consciousness is familiar to us all. So is the fact that each day involves some combination of sameness and difference, and that each human life holds some combination of knowing and not-knowing. Our lifetimes, too, tend to be divided into “befores” and “afters”: perhaps by the death of a parent or the birth of a child; by a war or a regime change; by a pandemic or an ecological disaster. All selves are liable to be displaced.

So although Tara’s time loop requires a deep and sudden plunge into metaphysics, it is also a reminder that we are already swimming in these waters. This elaborately reflexive novel, in which thought is plot, provokes us to consider what knowledge really is—and what methods might achieve it. Is philosophy, in particular, an academic discipline, with boundaries maintained by certain institutional practices and norms, or is it something more amorphous, more broadly human, more anarchic, more quotidian, more artistic? Is it done alone in one’s head, as in Descartes’s Meditations? Or So although Tara’s time loop requires a deep and sudden plunge into metaphysics, it is also a reminder that we are already swimming in these waters. This elaborately reflexive novel, in which thought is plot, provokes us to consider what knowledge really is—and what methods might achieve it. Is philosophy, in particular, an academic discipline, with boundaries maintained by certain institutional practices and norms, or is it something more amorphous, more broadly human, more anarchic, more quotidian, more artistic? Is it done alone in one’s head, as in Descartes’s Meditations? Or together in conversation, as in Plato’s Symposium? Are we right to hope that theorizing and debating will help us to act well? What if all this thinking distracts us from acting at all?

in her programmatic 1946 essay “Literature and Metaphysics,” Simone de Beauvoir reclassified metaphysics as a “situation,” an “attitude,” and an “experience.” “One does not ‘do’ metaphysics as one ‘does’ mathematics or physics,” she argued. “In reality, ‘to do’ metaphysics is ‘to be’ metaphysical.” Beauvoir distinguished “two divergent fashions” of making this experience explicit: theoretical treatises and fiction. The choice between these genres turns on a question that runs through Balle’s work: What does philosophy have to do with universities?

One treatise that looms especially large behind her novel is Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, a landmark of twentieth-century existentialism that attempts to explicate human “temporality.” In her diary, Tara reckons with the same experiences that Heidegger analyzes in this daunting tome: recollecting the past, anticipating the future, having a mood, embarking on projects, becoming absorbed into a social milieu. Yet Being and Time is a careerist book, written according to an academic template and designed to secure its author a university job—and Balle challenges this “fashion” of philosophizing. In volume three, Tara wanders into a university lecture “about the role of philosophy in the world.” The elderly lecturer’s words sound a little slurred: one of his teeth has come loose, and it falls out while he’s speaking. As Balle explains—somewhat unnecessarily—this incident illustrates the “toothlessness” of academic philosophy.

In her aversion to institutional theorizing, and in choosing fiction over the treatise, Balle takes a path marked out by Denmark’s best-known philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, for whom philosophy was never a ready-made body of knowledge or system of concepts but a profoundly human art that could only be meaningfully practiced in the first person. Kierkegaard’s writing sought to awaken readers to this practice so they could examine and question (and perhaps discover) themselves. His experimental, intensely literary works emulate the playful and duplicitous style of his hero, Socrates, who philosophized not in lecture halls but on the streets. They performatively disdain academic conventions—sometimes directly, through satire, or else by defying summary and explanation, the trusted tools of the professorial trade. Usually voiced by some fictional “I,” they channel Kierkegaard’s own experiences and juggle multiple genres: letter, diary, parable, pastiche. His 1843 novella Repetition seems especially pertinent to Balle’s project: it, too, enacts an inquiry into repetition—and its effect on identity—in narrative form. Taking as its starting point the ancient debate on identity and flux ignited by Heraclitus, Repetition asks how it is possible to stay true to oneself under radically changing circumstances.

Balle’s own fiction fuses two narrative forms, the parable and the diary, to pursue some similar philosophical aims. The time loop evokes biblical themes of fall and exile (Tara feels she has “fallen out of the world”) while echoing modern parables such as Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus. The diary form, meanwhile, accentuates subjectivity. In her seclusion, a diarist occupies a place of both privileged observation and intensified alienation. Tara’s deadpan first-person narration recalls the mid-century estrangement fictionalized by Camus, Sartre, Beckett, and Beauvoir herself.

A diary is, of course, a literary form explicitly indexed to quotidian time. By altering the very concept of dailiness, Balle addresses a methodological problem common to both philosophy and art: how to bring into view something as ubiquitous as time, which the muffling effects of habit make hard to perceive, much less understand. Marcel Proust described habit as a “heavy curtain” that “conceals from us almost the whole universe,” and philosophy’s long history is a catalogue of schemes to draw back this curtain, deploying radical skepticism, thought experiments, or devious literary tactics to funnel attention in fresh ways.

Tara’s time loop proves a simple and ingenious method for dramatizing “that strange moment when the ground under one’s feet falls away and all at once it feels as though all predictability can be suspended,” and for interrogating the realization such crises yield: “that everything can change in an instant, that something which cannot happen and which we absolutely do not expect, is nonetheless a possibility.” This insight rehearses a well-known argument by the Scottish philosopher David Hume, who insisted that even our most reliable beliefs lack rational foundations. Our judgment that another day will dawn tomorrow can’t be proved; it’s just a habitual thought, formed piecemeal by accumulated experiences. Hume steadied himself by taking breaks from philosophy—a hearty dinner and a game of backgammon worked for him—but in Tara’s universe, there are no opportunities to slip back into unexamined life. Derailed from their well-worn tracks, her thoughts are swept in a cosmic direction; she marvels “that there are human beings on what we call our planet, that we can move around on a rotating sphere in a vast universe full of inconceivably large bodies comprised of elements so small that the mind simply cannot comprehend how small and how many there are.…That we exist at all.”

Tara’s account of her “before”—her final November 17—is peppered with the language of routine: “usually,” “often,” “as always,” “as a rule,” “mainly.” She speaks on our behalf when she observes that “we have grown accustomed” to the thought of our chancy origins, and instead of living “in constant amazement, we behave as if nothing has happened, take the strangeness of it all for granted.” By throwing both protagonist and reader into an altered existence in an otherwise familiar world, Balle tears down the curtain of habit to reveal the question of time, then amplifies this effect through Tara’s hyperattentiveness to detail. Time becomes both form and subject matter, both “container” and content.

in the first two books of Balle’s septology, Tara is alone in her time loop, cast into a bewildering new life that urgently brings to the fore the first of Kant’s famous questions: What can I know? Severed from the world, her “I” must rediscover itself. While the people she encounters on (or, rather, in) November 18 retain no memories of this day, leave no traces on it, and remain the same age, her own remembered and embodied time keeps passing. Slowly, her hair and nails grow; eventually, her skin shows signs of aging. Although she is temporally trapped, geographically she can travel freely, since she wakes up wherever she has slept the night before. She can accumulate new experiences, run experiments, take time to investigate her situation.

Tara spends her first 366 postlapsarian days trying to find a way back to her Edenic life with her husband, Thomas. It’s a futile, all-too-human quest that reveals how intimacy shapes identity, how marriage can come to constitute a world. In Tara’s case, this seems to have been a happy world—and, like every paradise, doomed to be lost. Thomas was her Archimedean point: the safe, stable place she returned to day after day, which anchored her notion of objective truth. Now she discovers that a shared life is impossible without shared time. She tries spending each November 18 with Thomas, but every morning she must again explain why she isn’t in Paris, that she has fallen out of time. As ever-increasing reiterations of her day form an incomprehensible tail behind her, Tara is literally growing apart from Thomas: there is more and more she has to explain—or (her only alternative) to conceal. Neither explanation nor concealment is conducive to real intimacy. Ironically, Tara wants nothing more than repetition. She longs to be the person she used to be, moving through her days alongside Thomas without having to explain herself.

Her diary, a chronicle of exile and mourning, seems to take shape as a substitute for her relationship. Thomas does not remember any previous November 18ths, but “the paper remembers. And there may be healing in sentences.” In his Meditations, Descartes—having had all his customary beliefs upended—searched for a “firm and immovable” Archimedean point, “one little thing that is certain,” and Tara’s writing is a similar attempt to ground herself: on paper, a new self begins to be built up out of this new story. Yet because she is without goals and plans and expectations, the future is a blank page she can’t fill. “I have lost my way,” she writes in a moment of despair. “I am no longer Tara Selter, antiquarian bookseller with an eye for detail and an instinct for collectable works.…It is the Tara Selter with a future who is gone.”

One recourse is to seek out Tara from the past. After four hundred November days, Tara is longing for December, and for Christmas. She visits her parents in Brussels, explains her predicament, and asks them to help her re-create Christmas Day. For this hyggelig episode, carved out of the novel just as a festive period is carved out of regular life, Balle loosens her grip on realism: the narrative takes on a fairy-tale or dreamlike quality as Tara’s mother and father calmly accept that their daughter has fallen out of time and rustle up a turkey, brussels sprouts, and a bûche de Noël. Such nostalgic fantasies are comforting but unsustainable. Tara cannot regress to her childhood self any more than she can return to her marriage. “If I am to have a future,” she realizes, “I will have to build it myself.…I am working my way toward a template, a pattern by which to live.” In her former life, she followed a “template” largely shaped by inherited hopes and shared habits; now she must make it entirely from her own choices, to fit a unique situation.

Psychologically entering a new year, Tara travels to reconstruct the cycle of seasons—a natural form of looping time. First, she heads north in search of frost and snow, ending up in Norway, then to southern Europe to enjoy springlike and summery weather. She is pulling her self together, fabricating a patchwork world from recollected scraps of her old life. But this grown-up, self-made pattern also turns out to be unsustainable. Tara notices that anything she consumes—food she eats, logs she burns—is not replenished: “If time is a container then it can be emptied, and if I am not careful I will soon start to see traces of myself all over town: things being used up, empty shelves, the tracks of a plundering monster.”

This discovery awakens the ecological consciousness that sharply distinguishes On the Calculation of Volume from its existentialist ancestors. Balle’s narrator is not just an alienated subjectivity thrown into an indifferent world but a conscientious consumer, mindful of the impact of her body’s needs and desires; in referencing Archimedes’ bathing pool, the novel’s title evokes rising water levels and displacements on a global (and, again, biblical) scale. Now the time loop becomes a microcosm of ecological change, where the consequences of one woman’s modest consumerist habits are locally and immediately visible. Increasingly aware of her privileged position—no matter what she spends, her bank balance resets overnight—Tara sees herself as “a monster in a gilded cage,” moving with ease through “a world full of turmoil.”

Balle thus holds up a mirror to a society that rampages hungrily across the earth, consuming more than it restores. As her narrator travels through France, Belgium, Scandinavia, England, and Spain before settling in northern Germany, Balle’s critique of late-modern Europe—secular, cosmopolitan, affluent, disoriented—takes shape. Tara becomes obsessed with the Roman Empire: an antecedent, she notes, to her “gilded world.” She wants to understand why the Romans eventually stopped advancing and expanding, why they reached a limit, just as her own journey through time reached a limit at November 18. She begins to study ancient history at universities in Düsseldorf and Cologne—where she will make a dramatically different discovery.

Books one and two of On the Calculation of Volume juxtapose personal and cultural loss: a couple falling out of sync, a civilization in decline. And they tentatively settle on a quietist, consolatory response. Tara’s melancholy detachment evolves from a mood to an ethic as she learns that loving a person and loving the world might require you to let them be, to refrain from interference. Isolated even in the midst of a city, she finds solace in fleeting aesthetic pleasures: “a scent wafting by…a friendly face,” wildflowers you can gather just “with your eyes.” In a depleted world, she discovers a plenitude of human kindness and natural beauty: “There is enough for everyone and nothing is taken from anyone.” It’s a serene thought, but serenity may not be what’s called for as Tara continues to use up limited communal resources.

such limits, and the pressures they exert, turn the spotlight on Kant’s second question: What must I do? More precisely, what must we do? Because at the end of Balle’s second volume, Tara discovers that she is not alone in her time loop after all. As the novel’s cast expands, its philosophical perspective shifts from a secluded Cartesian self to a social self. In theory, the novel’s widening scope should make for a more interesting story, yet it has the opposite effect: as Tara’s diary records fewer of her own thoughts, more of the thoughts of others, the narrative voice grows increasingly bland. While this textural shift tests the reader’s patience, it enacts an argument about what Heidegger called “being-with-others”; both he and Kierkegaard believed that individuals tend to become so submerged in the crowd that they fail to be their authentic selves.

Significantly, it’s at a university that Tara encounters her first fellow “repeater”: Henry Dale, a Norwegian sociologist who got stuck in November 18 while attending an academic conference in Düsseldorf. Thinly drawn as a character, Henry chiefly serves to introduce a dialectical element into Tara’s meditations and underscore the novel’s sociological thesis. Before he fell out of time, Henry researched human responses to “sudden changes,” for which he coined the term “existential abruptions”; he invites Tara to read his article “Homo Abruptus: The Sociology of Identity Ruptures.” He vocalizes in a more didactic fashion Tara’s comparison between ancient Rome and modern Europe: he believes, Tara writes, that “we have come to a standstill in a time that is starting to crumble. Europe in free fall. The final days of the West.” Here Balle herself leans toward the treatise mode. We now learn that Tara, too, has a background in the human sciences: she studied anthropology before she became a bookseller. As they interact, she and Henry seem more like personifications of different outlooks and academic disciplines than two human beings. Henry is separated from a young son in America, and though Tara claims to “hear the longing in his voice” when he talks about his child, it is in fact difficult to hear in her voice the emotions she tells us she is feeling.

Tara and Henry gradually connect with more “repeaters” from various European countries, a sizable community that eventually settles into a large suburban house in Bremen. These proliferating characters, little more than names tagged to anecdotes and opinions, create a flattening effect that replicates on the page what Kierkegaard called “leveling”: the mediocritizing tendency of modern mass culture, which erases meaningful differences between individuals.

In book four, as her “I” gives way to “we,” Tara’s world becomes rather bureaucratic. Her lengthening diary entries about communal life resemble the minutes of an ineptly chaired faculty meeting—a very far cry from the cosmic wonder voiced in her early days of solitude. The housemates’ “recurring debates” digress from practical and logistical matters to abstract questions and disputes about jargon. “Apparently, before we can find the right words, we must discuss everything at great length, with everyone speaking all at once. In the end, we decided to hold another meeting today,” Tara notes. As the repeaters spiral into metadiscourse while trying to decide whether their time loop is a “catastrophe” or “anastrophe”—an overturning or a reversal—we begin to suspect we’re reading a Kierkegaardian satire of academic philosophy: “Were we trying to describe an event or a state?…Maybe we ought to hold a meeting about the phenomenon itself, our suspended day, and postpone the discussion of terminology until we knew exactly what it was we wanted to name.” Those suspicions are confirmed when the community organizes a two-day conference on “explanations and the mechanics of time,” complete with PowerPoints, plenaries, breakout rooms, and of course coffee breaks (which fuel “mild euphoria”). Some presenters favor “diagrams and models and calculations,” while others call upon “fragments of ancient texts or references to poets and mystics,” but all they come away with are plans for “follow-up sessions.” It’s hard not to think of the COP climate summits, now running for thirty years: less an intervention in business as usual than a fixture of it.

Academic conventions are an easy target for satire, but here they dramatize Balle’s larger subject: the stultifying effect of habits and rituals, the way attempts to order thought and life can entrench collective inaction. One idealistic repeater who used to work in tech logistics is an effective-altruist type who wants to gather global data on all the accidental deaths that happen on November 18, then intervene to prevent them. But he struggles to galvanize support for his program. Instead, the community members devote their energies to more insular, less ambitious ends: making clothes, furnishing their house, fixing their bicycles, and refining their democratic principles.

For the reader, all this is both wryly amusing and tedious (a mixed effect often produced by Kierkegaard’s writing too). In the novel’s first volume, Balle’s frictionless prose and Tara’s flat affect are counterbalanced by the shock of the new. By book four, all urgency and suspense have dissipated. We loop through November 18 #2000, November 18 #3000. Tara’s predicament—whatever you want to call it—is increasingly mundane. The rupture has itself become routine. Balle’s prose mirrors her iterative plot: just as one November day follows another, so one similar noun phrase or sentence structure follows another. She’s (hopefully) teasing us when Tara, describing a particularly long-winded housemate, remarks that “you might find yourself wondering if the pace couldn’t be picked up.”

Only as book four ends, with a breathtaking metaphysical twist, do we realize that Balle has been steadily lulling her readers, along with Tara, into a new habit. She has made us complacent—and through the shock of another improbability, brings that complacency into view. As with Kierkegaard’s writing, which persistently seeks to provoke and edify, this novel is always about you, the reader.

at its best, On the Calculation of Volume is not offering a series of lessons in philosophy but creating a philosophical experience. Balle’s novel works reflexively to expose and unsettle our expectations about narrative form itself. Are we reading a metaphysical detective story? Are we trying to crack its code? Should we anticipate a denouement? Is this a hero’s quest, or are the self-involved early volumes just the prequel to an epic social history? (One question left hanging from book four’s metaphysical cliff is whether the repeaters can create new life: cultivate crops, have children.) How are we supposed to make sense of a story where we have no idea what the rules are; where, as we’ve been warned, literally anything might happen?

So it seems appropriate to spend extended time—while we wait for Balle and her translators to publish their work—in this questioning state, suspended somewhere indeterminate. Over halfway through the novel, it’s impossible to predict the shape and scale of Balle’s project. We cannot even estimate the dimensions of Tara’s world, or of the reading experience it generates.

Old habits die hard: I can’t help wanting to know—if the repeaters have already passed the point of no return, if things can ever be the same again. And: Will Balle’s philosophical project stretch to something more constructive than a critique of academia, of moral inertia, of personal and political inauthenticity? Again, we can flip this question on ourselves. Are critiques and finely formed observations the best we can do? Aren’t they—ethically speaking—just variants of Tara’s quietism? Moreover, criticism of traditional institutions is now complicated by the real threat of their demise. Universities, for example, have trained our schoolteachers, our climate scientists, even our artist-philosophers (Kierkegaard and Balle included). Whatever their flaws and blind spots, let’s not forget to ask where we would be without them.

Here’s my prediction. On the Calculation of Volume’s forthcoming installments will increasingly turn toward Kant’s final and most mysterious question: What may we hope for? Perhaps Tara has been inhabiting this question all along, with only a hazy sense of its contours: some hope is needed to seek knowledge, to sustain action. Hope alone, without these endeavors, risks being false and futile. Still, hope seems necessarily to exceed the limits of what we can know or do. It keeps spilling over, beyond each day, even beyond our lifetimes.