Читать книгу Feeling Time - Amit S. Yahav - Страница 7

Introduction

The Sensibility Chronotope

SOON AFTER DISCOVERING a human footprint on his island, Robinson Crusoe concludes that “it must be some of the Savages of the main Land over-against me, who had wander’d out to Sea in their Canoes … [and] I should certainly have them come again in greater Numbers, and devour me” (113).¹ While he is right to suspect that the island’s visitors are cannibals, he turns out to be wrong about the threat they pose to his life; the natives are unlikely to devour Crusoe upon encountering him, since they arrive at the island already equipped with all they need for their ritual, not in search of supplies for it. And just as they welcome as neighbors the survivors of the Spanish shipwreck (161), they are also likely to welcome Crusoe as a living friend rather than as dead foodstuff. Yet, if contrary to Crusoe’s anxieties, other men do not eat and seem to have no intention of eating his body, they do consume his time.

While he thinks he is alone on the island, Crusoe approaches time as an abundant resource and an abstract measure; he enjoys a “prodigious deal of Time” (51), which he fills with a variety of tasks meticulously timed— twenty-four days to rescue supplies from his drowned ship (52), three and a half months to build a wall (56), two weeks for building a bower (75).² Indeed, during his initial years on the island, Crusoe feels he has “a World of Time” (79) at his disposal; “My Time or Labour was little worth, and so it was as well employ’d one way as another” (51), he confesses. But once he realizes that other humans are close by—from the moment he discovers the footprint on his island—his time no longer easily circulates among varying purposes, and he instead becomes solely devoted to formulating opinions about his new-found neighbors and devising strategies for an encounter. For “many Hours, Days; nay, I may say, Weeks and Months” (114), Crusoe is immobilized by anxiety, which then gives way to a spurt of defensive action—building a second fortification—and to superman fantasies: “For Night and Day, I could think of nothing but how I might destroy some of these Monsters in their cruel bloody Entertainment, and if possible, save the Victim they should bring hither to destroy” (122), which “pleas’d my Thoughts for some Weeks, and I was so full of it, that I often dream’d of it” (122). This self-aggrandizement then transforms into an effort at toleration, which lasts approximately another year (123), with Crusoe then sliding back to “above fifteen months … During all this Time, I was in the murthering Humour; and took up most of my Hours, which should have been better employ’d, in contriving how to circumvent, and fall upon them, the very next Time I should see them” (133). Then another two years of back and forth between vengeful superman fantasies and toleration, finally giving way to a pragmatic approach that leads Crusoe to a year and half’s preparation for the opportunity “to get me a Servant, and perhaps a Companion” (146).

What might it mean that an anxiety for one’s life and body materializes as an overwhelming of one’s time? Or that the proximity of other people takes its toll in the form of an all-consuming duration? Or that one’s sense of time comes to be indexed by alternations of mood? What kind of temporal conception supports such equivalences between bodies, life, feelings, and duration? And between one’s relation to other people, on the one hand, and one’s capacities for temporal command, on the other? Crusoe’s conflation of the integrity of his body (his anxiety about cannibals) and the autonomy of his time (his reluctant absorption with his new-found neighbors) underlines a shift within the novel from an approach that takes time as an external resource, one that is especially abundant on the island and thus also circulates easily, to an approach that considers duration as endurance and links time with persons, thus not only impeding its circulation and contesting its abundance, but also endowing it with human, emotional, and embodied qualities. And Defoe’s launching of this shift precisely at that point when Crusoe’s supreme isolation no longer seems credible underlines how this turn is tied to a recognition of a shared world—that a profoundly human durational experience has much to do with a thoroughly social conception of existence.³

I begin with this brief sketch of temporal transformation in Robinson Crusoe as a gateway to the case that this book makes for a wider cultural shift toward identifying duration with human endurance and, as such, increasingly focusing on varying qualities of temporal experience. The cultural shift in temporal attitudes during the eighteenth century has usually been understood as the story of the development of a mechanical technology for counting time that came to pervade public life and individual consciousness. Influential histories have focused on rationalization, promoting a notion of modern temporal consciousness as governed by chronometry and geared to support the efficiency and power of the social totality at the price of thinning, or even fully draining out, durational qualities from personal and collective experience.⁴ Programs of isolation and disciplinarity are, no doubt, key to eighteenth-century culture, as well as to modernity more generally. And yet eighteenth-century philosophy and literature have also undertaken extensive explorations of consciousness as a complex and nuanced interface of material, psychological, and social experience. Such investigations focus on the nexus of self and world, though not through frameworks of regimented schedules; and they underline a sociality different from, while also in complex relations with, the impersonal orders of commensurable exchange and print publicity. Feeling Time examines the vocabularies and logics used to explore temporal experience in such eighteenth-century discussions. It demonstrates that these yield accounts of duration that often attend to qualities no less than to quantities, intensities no less than extensities, and variations no less than regularities. It also finds that these eighteenth-century discussions identify felt duration as the crux of aesthetic pleasure and judgment, experiences described more as patterned durational activities than as static states.

In his analysis of “Duration and Its Simple Modes” in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke famously argues that we derive our primary sense of duration from the succession of ideas, thus aligning his examination of time with his examination of the way our minds generate ideas from sensation and generate succession from what he calls “accidental Connexion.”⁵ Locke’s account remained a constant touchstone for both academic and popular inquiries of time and of consciousness in England throughout the eighteenth century, with subsequent discussions elaborating on the sensible qualities of ideas and the compositional variations of succession. David Hartley, for example, develops Locke’s associationism and sensationism in painstaking analyses of how various timings and orders of sensations—rather than their contents—yield meaningfulness. He identifies two forms of association, “the synchronous, and the successive,” and argues that repetition of strings of sensation promotes memory and anticipation so that when a single sensation within the string is activated others in the string are also recollected.⁶ Hartley thus suggests that a moment of sensation can be dilated into numerous associations, yielding analyses of near synchrony or, alternatively, compressed succession. And though Hartley does not comment on time directly, such recourse to memory and anticipation, synchrony and succession, makes it clear that regardless of what time might be in and of itself, it constitutes for him a fundamental operation of the mind.

Such eighteenth-century associationist and sensationist approaches resonate with more recent temporal phenomenologies in their insistent coupling of duration and experience—the double proposition that our sense of time arises from the operations of the mind and that the operations of the mind are constitutively temporal. Twentieth-century phenomenologies loop back the exploration of durational experience onto the question of what time is. For Edmund Husserl, the temporality of intention—the pattern by which a sensory present relates to what immediately precedes it (retention in Husserl’s vocabulary) and follows it (protention)—promotes a notion of transcendental temporality—that time consciousness is the very structure that enables the differentiation of subject from object. For Martin Heidegger, Being’s simultaneous groundedness in futurity (what Heidegger calls falling), pastness (existence), and presentness (facticity) becomes the fundamental support for an ontological idealism—the argument that ordinary time (external flow) is a form of originary temporality (the fundamentally temporalized structure of experience). And for Henri Bergson, recognizing states of consciousness as heterogeneous conglomerations of succession, near succession, and synchrony entails the notion of pure duration that refuses analogies of space and time, extensities and intensities, quantities and qualities. But eighteenth-century discussions do not extrapolate transcendental or ontological claims about time from temporal experience. Newton distinguishes between absolute time—time in and of itself—and relative time—our sense of duration—and Locke and Hume follow Newton in presupposing a strict separation between the two; relative time can at best approximate absolute time, but never be identical to it.⁷ Moreover, Locke’s and Hume’s focus on what Newton calls relative time (though they use different terminology), involves a turn to what may best be described as habits: descriptions that refuse distinguishing minute levels of awareness—distinctions between pre-reflective and reflective consciousness. Yet without pressing explorations of durational experience back into a metaphysics, and while remaining at pragmatic levels of analysis, the eighteenth-century discussions I examine in Feeling Time offer rich analyses of felt duration, as well as of ethical and aesthetical implications of approaching time in this way. No less than Bergson’s or Husserl’s philosophies, many of the writings I examine consider how we perceive art as a salient analogy for how we feel time; no less than Bergson’s or Heidegger’s works, many of these discussions explore the temporal structures of authentic decision making and of care, and argue the case for these as durational experiences.⁸

My aim in this book, however, is not to recover a prehistory of twentieth-century phenomenology, but rather to consider eighteenth-century explorations of qualitative duration on their own terms and within the broad culture with which they are in conversation.⁹ I begin this study with Locke’s and Hume’s comments on time, attending to their focus on mental processes that yield accounts of durational feelings. But these philosophies serve as points of departure for tracking engagement with qualitative durational experience across various genres. I consider Joseph Addison’s and Denis Diderot’s comments on the pleasures of reading, Francis Hutcheson’s formulations of the moral sense, musicological and elocutionary treatises, Edmund Burke’s and Adam Smith’s aesthetic inquiries, and novels by Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, and Ann Radcliffe. For all of these, temporality turns out to be key for psychoperceptual, ethical, and aesthetical explorations. Put together these discussions add up to what we might call a sensibility chronotope—shorthand for the temporal underpinnings of a culture that features a wide-ranging set of commitments to sensation, emotion, reflection, and sociability, and that develops alongside, though not in full agreement with, chronometric consciousness.

Sensibility, as many studies have shown, is an especially baggy and fluid category that conjoins feeling with thinking and judgment and is sometimes interchangeable with, and sometimes encompassing of, other terms such as sentiment, sentimentality, delicacy, and experience.¹⁰ What began in the seventeenth century with research of psycho-perceptual processes—Newton’s research of the vibratory constitution of nerve perception, Thomas Willis’s explorations of the animal spirits, and Locke’s analyses of the empirical origins of knowledge—came to be aligned in the eighteenth century with examinations of social relations and aesthetic preferences—Hutcheson’s elaborations of a moral sense and a sense of beauty, Hume’s and Smith’s discussions of sympathy, as well as more popular treatises on domesticity, polite persuasion, and appreciation of art and literature.¹¹ Though not lending itself to the kinds of analyses that seek sharp focus and unequivocal differentiations, sensibility’s capaciousness seems to me—as it seemed to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers—to be an especially useful concept. For sensibility’s alignment of broad epistemological and moral concerns turned it into an encompassing worldview, a thoroughgoing culture that could house under the same title such varying manifestations as Richardson’s didacticism and Sterne’s irony, and whose precepts could extend beyond its orthodox proponents as well as beyond its heyday in the mid-eighteenth century.¹² Moreover, as Jane Austen makes clear through her compelling characterization of a Marianne Dashwood, sensibility’s capaciousness enables it to stand for a wide spectrum of feelings—intuitive yet also reflective, strong yet also capable of composure, erroneous yet also thoroughly ethical, dynamic and varied yet also self-identical.¹³ And sensibility’s nuanced yet comprehensive approach to emotion well captures the range of feelings that Feeling Time discovers in eighteenth-century discussions of durational experience.

Underlying what I’m calling the “sensibility chronotope” is Mikhail Bakhtin’s use of the term “chronotope” as a conjoining of culturally specific conceptions of time with their epistemological and moral underpinnings, as well as with their conventional forms of representation. If, as Giorgio Agamben claims, “Every culture is first and foremost a particular experience of time,” then, according to Bakhtin, at stake is a complex feedback loop by which cultures, in their favoring of specific compositional forms over others, mediate temporality no less than they are constituted by it.¹⁴ I should acknowledge, however, that the “chronotope” denotes spatiotemporal connectedness, and Bakhtin in the concluding remarks to his “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” stresses the inseparability of time and space. But throughout his influential study, Bakhtin treats time as “the dominant principle in the chronotope” (86)—a privileging already announced in the essay’s title, with its double iteration of the temporal dimension.¹⁵ In this study I follow Bakhtin’s lead and focus on the temporal dimensions of the sensibility chronotope and do so for two reasons. First, we are still missing an extensive examination of sensibility’s temporal underpinnings. Second, under the horizon of a modern chronometric consciousness, the connectedness of time and space has done much to obscure the rich and various dimensions of durational feelings.

James Chandler argues that at stake in sentimental representations is a logic of spatial, rather than temporal, transport that constitutes what he calls “sentimental probability.”¹⁶ Sentimental literature worries less about effects distant in time—the panning out of actions into their consequences—than about effects distant in space—how the conditions of any given moment are imagined to affect people occupying varying positions, not just characters, but also readers of novels and audiences of plays. Chandler demonstrates how from Shaftesbury’s use of visual metaphors to underscore the reflective dimensions of soliloquy to Sterne’s spatial and ocular descriptions of processes by which a spectator becomes spectacle, sentimentalists develop a unique logic of probability that relies on imagined swapping of positions located in space. This concern determines, in turn, a privileging of probable reflective and identificatory situations over probable plots. Chandler’s privileging of the spatial over the temporal implicitly presumes a long tradition of scholarship that has focused on the eighteenth century’s development of chronometry and chronology—an approach to time that, as Bergson recognized, spatializes duration and has only limited resources for recognizing varieties of temporal feelings. Bakhtin also contributes to such spatialization of time, albeit indirectly. When in his wide survey of chronotopes Bakhtin arrives at the eighteenth century, he identifies a form whose spatial components are key and whose temporal components are especially ghostly. Bakhtin claims that “a new feeling for time was beginning to awake” (228) in the eighteenth century, one that he calls nostalgia for the idyll. Nostalgia for the idyll associates emotion with recollection and pastness, sometimes also with hopefulness for future recuperation, but not with present experience. It is also a chronotope that strongly attaches feeling to a starkly differentiated spatial locale—to rural settings or to an insulated domestic sphere.¹⁷ Bakhtin’s discussion indicates that if in the eighteenth century a rising chronometric culture comes to pervade public life as well as private experience, then nostalgia for the idyll offers an alternative, but only in transport to a different time—past or future—or place—remote peripheries or enclosures. Nostalgia for the idyll thus highlights a compensatory imagination that coheres well with an understanding of the eighteenth century as the moment when temporal consciousness becomes impoverished by the rising power of an alienating rationalized approach. To feel the richness of idyllic time, one must be necessarily less than satisfied with one’s present and imagine oneself elsewhere.

The “new feeling for time” that Bakhtin identifies in the eighteenth century, then, amounts to something like a negativity—a hollowing out of present temporal experience, compensated by imaginative transport along historical and geographical axes. But Stuart Sherman more recently demonstrates that chronometric consciousness need not be understood as a negativity. Sherman examines diurnal form as the textual counterpart of the invention of the minute and second hands on clocks and of the ratification of Greenwich Mean Time and longitude lines. By his analysis, these representational techniques enable precision and regularization while also securing opportunities for individualized content. “The particular forms of time proffered by the clocks, watches, and memorandum books so new and conspicuous in the period,” he explains, “seemed to many serial autobiographers to limn a new temporality—of durations closely calibrated, newly and increasingly synchronized, and systematically numbered—durations that might serve as ‘blanks’ in which each person might inscribe a sequence of individual actions in an individual style” (18).¹⁸ And yet even as chronometric notation increases opportunities for individualization, the timekeepers’ paradigm gauges temporal experience by way of numbered measure and conceives of collective consciousness by way of abstractions. Thus there is little qualitative variation to an account of the duration of a walk that only imparts its length, to recall Sherman’s evocative discussion of “minutes” in Pepys’s diary (89), or to an account of the duration of work that only refigures task time as tasks timed” (229), to recall his interpretation of Robinson Crusoe. Likewise, there is little social bonding through concurrent participation in abstract grids; in the final analysis, Sherman explains, such abstractions encourage an “obsessively cultivated privacy” (114) and promote “a larger program of textual isolation” (245).¹⁹ And finally, conceiving of eighteenth-century temporal conceptions solely in terms of chronometric consciousness renders continuous the private and the public spheres, leisure and work time, subsuming all under the logic of utilitarian efficiency and abstract commensurability.

Addressing these concerns, Deidre Lynch considers the many ways in which eighteenth-century practices of leisure reading emphasized familial rituals of communal activity whose express purpose was to generate affective durations. Underwriting the valuation of these rituals was an associationist psychology that “identified the essence of feeling with its reiterative practice” (171), as Lynch puts it, and that operated on the primary levels of perceptual processes shared by all humans, as well as on the secondary processes of consciousness that constitute the cultural bonds of more specific communities. Nonetheless, Lynch assimilates this rich experience of leisure time to the chronometric logic that increasingly came to govern work and discipline. Building on Sherman’s study, she presents literature’s contribution to what she calls “quality time” as arising from the shift into a temporality of measure, and she highlights sensibility’s steadying of emotion through practices that make reading seem like clockwork, emphasizing the extent to which these habits were supported by and promoted rigid schedules and diurnal form.²⁰

Sherman and Lynch make nuanced cases for literature’s participation in a chronometric culture, and they conceive of chronometric culture as complexly integrating feeling and individuation into the predominance of measure and standardization.²¹ But while these studies have done much to complicate our understanding of what we might call a chronometric chronotope, in Feeling Time I delineate a sensibility chronotope that cannot be fully understood—or even perceived—from a perspective that presumes the primacy of chronometry and chronology. Alongside diurnal form and the persistence of idyll in the face of chronometry’s ascendancy, we find in eighteenth-century literature a sensibility chronotope that, I will soon argue, might best be understood as a modern refiguration of romance. At stake in identifying a sensibility chronotope is recognizing the ways in which the literature of the period offers occasions for off-the-clock breaks as presence—in the present of reading—and as integral to modernity. And at stake in making the case for the sensibility chronotope as the refiguration of romance is to offer a way of understanding how this temporal conception is importantly tied—though not limited to—the genre of the novel.

William Wordsworth famously charges modern regularization with producing personalities afflicted with something like manic-depressive swings—“the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies” and that also reduces minds “to a state of almost savage torpor.”²² Romantic poetry aims to ameliorate this condition of manic craving followed by depressive torpor by offering for its readers occasions for pausing from the ordinary business of “getting and spending,” as Wordsworth puts it in his sonnet “The World Is Too Much with Us.” It conceives of these lyrical pauses as tranquil recollections of passionate feeling, as Wordsworth would have it, or as intense insight being teased out of thought, as John Keats would have it. Thus Romantic poetry, as both reading material and a mode of thinking, offers its modern readers the opportunity to recompose into more varied and nuanced emotion and thinking. In its rural settings and its fascination with nature, such poetry’s alternative to the chronometric resonates with Bakhtin’s nostalgia for the idyll. And yet what distinguishes it from the chronotope that Bakhtin explores is its explicit the-matization of acts of poetic thinking as off-the-clock breaks in the present for its speakers and readers. Nostalgia for the idyll cannot transform chronometric consciousness and only offers its readers occasions to recall other possibilities located at other times and places. Romantic poetry, by contrast, offers itself as an alternative that can be realized in the here and now of poetic reading and thinking, even as such alternate durational experiences can materialize only as temporary breaks.

Through such studies as M. H. Abrams’s Natural Supernaturalism and Michael Clune’s Writing Against Time, we have come to identify the possibility of pauses from our predominantly chronometric consciousness with the Romantic lyric and to take the alternative it offers as aiming for an atemporal eternity. Abrams maintains that the Romantics render significant moments as the “intersection of eternity with time” (385) and cast “timelessness as a quality of the experiential moment” (386).²³ More recently, but in important ways similarly, Clune describes the “Romantic quest to defeat time” (17) as focused on art’s impossible ambition to sustain the intense sensory experience of first encounters.²⁴ And yet I argue in this book that by recognizing a sensibility chronotope, we can identify the ways in which literature has offered itself as pauses from the chronometric that are thoroughly durational, rather than atemporal. Indeed, Christopher Miller and Julia Carlson in studies that attend more carefully to the ways in which Romanticism draws on earlier eighteenth-century sources have been able to recognize poetry’s mobilization of pacing and rhythm in techniques aimed to shape both represented durations and the duration of reading.²⁵ I show that a comprehensive sensibility chronotope has already in the eighteenth century self-consciously and fully conceived of leisure reading as off-the-clock durational breaks, and that prose writing and especially novels have most thoroughly taken up this task. That novels featured and provided such pauses for alternative duration is a capacity of the genre that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers and authors were well aware of, but that more recent scholarship has by and large overlooked. It may be that the Romantic lyric’s more direct and programmatic response to the effects of rationalization has contributed to obscuring the ways in which an earlier sensibility approached this very same task. And yet the novel’s orientation toward alternative durations arises precisely from what Romantic lyric and early novels share: a self-conscious engagement with, and refiguration of, romance.

If in the last quarter of the eighteenth century “the romance revival had become a major scholarly and poetic industry,” as Ian Duncan puts it, then novels of sensibility have been preparing the grounds for such revival throughout the century.²⁶ From the perspective of novels of sensibility, romance isn’t “revived” by Romanticism—neither by romantic lyric nor by the romantic novel—nor are Scott’s historical novels the first to recognize romance as a mode of historicization. What Duncan identifies as the insight Scott discovers and develops from Gothic romances is only one way by which romance historicizes: delivering itself, as Duncan recognizes, “as modern culture’s construction of a symbolic form prior to itself” (10–11). Romanticism continues early novels’ persistent refiguration of romance, which involves not only—or even primarily—chronological priority, but a commitment to probable temporal experiences whose logic is other than chronological or chronometric.

Novelistic realism emerges as part and parcel of a renewed interest in historicism—as narratives that aim to tell the truth in a particular form, one that, as Elizabeth Ermarth emphasizes, constitutes empiricist epistemology not only as a commitment to descriptive detail but also as the prizing of a serial continuity that conceives of identity by way of cross-temporal comparisons. Medieval historiography, Ermarth reminds, relied on “the contrast between time and eternity and not upon the contrast between past and present”; the latter—which is the premise of a modern historiography that emerges in the Renaissance—“homogenized the temporal medium by finding past and present mutually informative” (25).²⁷ And, Ermarth continues, such interest in the revelations of sequence … finds its fullest aesthetic expression in the temporal medium of literature and its fullest literary expression in the realistic novel, where the unfolding of structure and significance receives its most thoroughgoing serial treatment” (41). But as Michael McKeon argues, if what we take to be novelistic realism emerges from the epistemic transformations of “the early modern historicist revolution” (53), then what immediately precedes novels and their realism never ceases to leave its traces in them.²⁸ As McKeon points out, the form that precedes and persists most importantly in realist novels is romance. Romance has a remarkably long and diverse history, yet this genre endures, McKeon argues, because its most fundamental task is to figure an encounter of a nonhistoricist, nonchronometric mindset with a historicism that, more recently, we have come to identify as modern. Romance poses an alternative to such historicism precisely as it is embedded within it. McKeon’s brief discussion of the Greek enlightenment demonstrates how romance succeeds myth. Romance thus delivers an encounter with this enlightenment’s historical consciousness, rewriting mythic timelessness as “historical rupture between movement ‘forward’ and movement ‘back’” (32). And McKeon’s analysis of the twelfth-century Renaissance identifies romance as an encounter with historicism that continues to insist on a “qualitative standard of completeness” (38). If historicism pushes toward serial continuity, romance pushes toward an intuitive completeness that arises from human connectedness. “To be ‘true’ to another is a mode not of empirical veracity but of human connection coordinated by suprahuman principal [sic] or essence,” McKeon explains (38).

Ermarth proposes that genres succeed one another discretely—from medieval revelational history to modern empiricist chronology, from typological plots to realistic plots—while allowing transitional phases, which she identifies with eighteenth-century novelists such as Defoe and Richardson. McKeon argues that genres internalize one another as they progress—a historiography that reshapes myth, a novel that refigures romance—and thus his analysis opens up room for an investigation of the refiguration of romance within modern chronometric consciousness and its allied novel form. The Origins of the English Novel does precisely that, but McKeon focuses on the components of response that we might call ideology—how debates about questions of truth and virtue came to be clinched together, thus transmuting and incorporating the plots of romance into the plots of realism to support a liberal regime that can at once house conservatism and progressivism. However, we can find in novels much more varied and nuanced techniques—well beyond emplotments and the specific ideologies these promote—for transmuting the temporal logic of romance. As I demonstrate extensively in subsequent chapters, eighteenth-century novelists developed techniques ranging from sentence-level effects of rhythm to patterns of memory and anticipation foregrounding time-consciousness as the bare bones of realist character; they also carefully attended to plot lines, not only for their causal chains, chronologies, and for endings’ emplotments of meaning, but also for their complex constructions of metonymic relations between scenes and narrative wholes. All these techniques recast the principles of romance so as to feature qualitative durational experiences alongside chronometric frameworks and as part and parcel of a modern probabilistic culture.

Because romance is such a capacious form with such a long history, its principles are many. For the purpose of this study I rely on those identified by Bakhtin, McKeon, and Patricia Parker, whose studies take into account the form’s transhistorical persistence. In his analyses of the romance chronotope in Greek fiction and in chivalric tales, Bakhtin highlights two main principles. First, he identifies adventure time that functions as “a hiatus that leaves no trace in the life of the heroes or in their personalities” (90); thus “all the events of the novel that fill this hiatus are a pure digression from the normal course of life” (91). Second, he identifies distortions of time—“hours are dragged out, days are compressed into moments” (154). In her study of romance as a poetic mode with a long history from Ariosto to Keats, Parker elaborates the epistemological underpinnings of digressions; such dilations and suspensions of narrative progress, Parker argues, complexly and ambivalently explore errors as these impede a quest for truth. And McKeon, as we’ve already seen, identifies romance as founded on intuitive completeness through human connectedness underwritten by a suprahuman order.

All of these principles feature prominently in the sensibility chronotope, but they are also crucially revised by it. Adventures, rather than leaving no trace on the biographical time of characters, are grafted onto characters’ bodies and minds. Everything Crusoe does and that happens to him after he stumbles across the footprint participates in his deliberations about the cannibals; it is manifest in his thinking, in mood swings, and in somatic responses such as nausea and vomit. Similarly, as we will see in subsequent chapters, Richardson insists on one’s accounting for all adventures in one’s life story, Sterne casts adventures as contests of opinion and then further attaches these opinions to pulsating bodies, and Radcliffe flags the key difference between gothic-romance characters and sensible-novelistic ones through the latter’s integration of their adventures into continuous psychologies. Moreover, temporal distortions, rather than left standing as features of narration or plot, are presented as the qualitative variances of personal experience—the intensities of reading, conversation, thinking, and writing that can make any mere hour seem like an age not only in Sterne’s renderings of conversations but also in Addison’s discussions of leisure reading, in Richardson’s lengthy presentations of moments, and in Radcliffe’s version of the gothic as the supernatural explained. The epistemological quests that underline romance’s digressions in Parker’s account are refigured in sensibility as phenomenological descriptions. Instead of highlighting errors on a quest for truth, dilations in the sensibility chronotope draw attention to what such suspended moments feel like—what it feels like to imagine an unpredictable future in Richardson, or to talk not for the sake of getting things right but for the sake of staying in touch in Sterne, or to labor to craft consistency through whatever corpses or dolls, ghosts or nuns one encounters at any given moment in Radcliffe. Finally, the human connectedness that underwrites romance’s sense of completion according to McKeon is revised by sensibility to punctuate the plot, rather than necessarily to end it, and to be explained not through suprahuman principles but through interpersonal durational experience. As we saw in the example from Robinson Crusoe and as we will see in Sterne’s presentation of sympathy and in Radcliffe’s presentation of courtship, connecting to other humans takes time, and this time is marked not as providential or unnatural intervention but, rather, as mood fluctuations of sympathy, anxiety, and intention.

One aim of this book, then, is to demonstrate how the sensibility chronotope refigures the temporal dimensions of romance through various techniques of plot, narration, and characterization to present qualitative duration within novels’ diegetic worlds. But in arguing that the sensibility chronotope takes up a qualitative duration of off-the-clock breaks, I mean not only that within their fictions novels feature conceptions of qualitative temporality, but also that they aim to mediate such durational experiences for their readers. In attributing such a task of mediation to novels, I follow the lead of Paul Ricoeur, to whose seminal study Time and Narrative I want now to turn. Ricoeur has developed an especially cogent explanation of why and how narrative mediates temporal experience. He argues that Aristotle’s mimesis encompasses not just the form of tragedy, but also, far more generally, the way narrative composition conjoins the temporality we see in action with the temporality we experience in thinking. He thus discovers in Aristotle’s mimesis three different stages and locations of representational activity that are also constitutively temporal. What he calls mimesis1, or prefigured time, invokes symbolic structures of meaning; what he calls mimesisi2, or configured time, refers to emplotted events; and what he calls mimesis3, or refigured time, denotes the reading process.²⁹ With such an expansion of mimesis, Ricoeur can establish that the referential significance of narrative representation has less to do with its better or worse mirroring of objects than with its activation of temporal experience constitutive of our actions and understanding. He can also establish that novels extend compositional principles to the representation of consciousness. Such expansion of action into consciousness challenges those who associate the novel with formlessness because of the genre’s psychological emphases; the focus on minds, Ricoeur contends, highlights the very compositional dimensions that minds and narratives share. He thus reconceives our understanding of the referential function of representation to privilege mediation over imitation. He also calibrates our view of novelistic technique so that we can recognize compositional dimensions not only in the ordering of plot but also in characterization. And, finally, the focus on mediation and on composition enables Ricoeur to highlight the constitutive durationality of narrative, a duration that has often been obscured by formalist analyses.³⁰

Ricoeur, however, understands experiential duration as fundamentally intellectual. His case studies of Mrs. Dalloway, The Magic Mountain, and Remembrance of Things Past privilege novels that feature characters and narrators directly contemplating time, thus risking conflating what he calls, following A. A. Mendilow, “tales about time” with philosophizing.³¹ Moreover, though Ricoeur uses the word “experience” often in his discussions of reading, here too he focuses on the intellectual horizon of meaning, overlooking the meaningfulness that registers not just in understanding, but also in emotional and embodied effects. He thus cannot but underestimate eighteenth-century novels that focus their efforts less on communicating facts than on communicating “perception[s] of impressions,” as a defender of sensibility in a 1796 installment of the Monthly Magazine puts it.³² At stake is a literature that, as this eighteenth-century apologist continues, presumes that “no man is happy because he knows a truth, or believes a fact, but because he is conscious of a pleasing emotion” (708), and that aims less to inform its readers than to move them—to get them “sighing over a pathetic story, or weeping at a deep-wrought tragedy” (706). Think, for example, of Tristram Shandy’s relentless disavowals of its meaning and its displays of expressive bodies, and you might begin to imagine how the transformations of temporal experience that this novel famously achieves are never clarified by its notorious double philosophizing about time, but become more coherent in the somatic and emotional responses it evokes.³³ In order to gauge the durational dimensions of novels of sensibility I extend Ricoeur’s analyses of literary mediation beyond concepts and understanding to attend to the material aspects of language and its effects and to the somatic and emotional registers of temporal consciousness. Sterne’s and Radcliffe’s prose, I suggest, cannot be fully accounted for without attention to its sonority; and Burke’s aesthetics, I argue, cannot be fully understood without attention to his haptic descriptions of perception.

Additionally, my analyses of compositional construction extend beyond the elements of emplotment to which Ricoeur remains committed. Ricoeur focuses on the Aristotelian template of tragedy with its emphasis on causality, content, and the ethico-juridical perspective. He thus recoups characterological dimensions for compositional analysis, but emplotment remains the main paradigm in his tool kit. As he puts it in the introductory comments to his discussion of configured time in fiction (what he calls mimesis2): at stake is plot, defined as “an integrating dynamism that draws a unified and complete story from a variety of incidents” (2: 8). But the plot structure of novels of sensibility tends to be episodic—privileging incompleteness and noncausal relations—and these novels tend to offer multiple perspectives on the same events—highlighting variety in attitudes rather than variety in incidents.³⁴ But these novels suggest that the durational experience triggered by compositional activity—that refigured time activated by the configured time of representation—requires less causal logic (or its inverse in chance) than something more akin to musical patterning, which privileges similarity and contiguity. Thus in this study I emphasize how eighteenth-century associationist and sensationist philosophy highlights the contiguous and analogous compositional principles of consciousness, and how novels develop such noncausal compositional models in their techniques of narration and characterization.

The first chapter of this book considers the associationist and sensationist logics of eighteenth-century empiricism and their bearings on discussions of time. I begin by examining how Locke and Hume not only attend to our knowing time, but also identify duration with a consciousness that feels time and, more specifically, whose feelings of duration and about duration vary by intensities and compositional arrangement. If Gilles Deleuze reads Hume’s account of human nature as a fully developed temporal phenomenology, in this chapter I discover the conditions of possibility for Hume’s phenomenological approach in Locke’s analysis of human understanding. I then turn to considering how these models of a temporalized consciousness are developed in Addison’s and Diderot’s comments on the durational makeups and effects of discursive compositions. Addison and Diderot emphasize that the compositional dimensions of durational experience and the qualities that these dimensions generate are made—that in preferring certain forms to others, writers shape the temporal experience of readers and can cultivate particular temporal qualities. Addison comments on relations between discursive compositions and time in a number of his Spectator pieces, presenting leisure reading as a means for evoking varying feelings by way of varying compositional principles. Such shaping of durational experience, according to Addison, constitutes the aesthetic pleasure of literature. Diderot brings this approach to bear on novels. According to Diderot, the pleasures of Richardson’s novels arise from their combining conversational immediacy with lengthy narratives—a peculiar digressiveness that promotes attention to durations that we often overlook in our ordinary rush toward worldly achievements.

After this initial examination of eighteenth-century philosophy and popular essays, each of the subsequent chapters looks at a specific formal dimension of novels and considers the way it features the sensibility chronotope. Techniques of plot serve to develop solutions for difficulties of judging in time—the challenging assessment of action in medias res, while action continues to roll on to its destination and collide with other actions that divert it from its intended course—as well as to give readers occasions for experiencing the durationality of judgment. Techniques of narration serve to raise solutions for the difficulties of emotional attachments, helping to sustain love and sympathy for others through long durations by way of shared rhythms. And techniques of characterization engage the difficulty of bundling disjointed experiences into continuous identity, drawing on aesthetic theories that highlight the crafting of holistic durations out of disparate momentary stimulation and offering instances of aesthetic immersion as occasions for cultivating such continuous subjectivities.

Chapter 2 focuses on two related problems: the peculiar logic of plot in novels of sensibility and the difficulty of judging in time as it has been raised in theories of moral sentiments. While Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments may suggest, as Vivasvan Soni notes, that if actions cannot reliably reach their ends, then the value of the ethical must be found elsewhere than in end-directed action,” other models of sentimental morality continue to insist on what we might call a durational ethic that tackles action and its temporal discontents, as well as the experience of trying to comprehend such arcs from the position of an ever-rolling present.³⁵ Hutcheson and Richardson, I argue, develop a complex relation between the moment of experience and the continuums of narrative, suggesting that only such a double focus can yield an adequate understanding of what it means to be a moral agent not only operating within time but also constituted by time. Both writers value immediacy and authenticity—herein lies the significance of Hutcheson’s “moral sense” and of Richardson’s renderings of consciousness in flux—but both also insist on unpacking the moment as a position from which a fuller trajectory of the impelling force of action ought to be assessed. Hence Hutcheson commits to utilitarian calculations of the long arc and wide impact of actions, and Richardson insists on the necessary prolixity of his novels. Moral sentiments are thus incompletely surveyed when we focus on the spatial-spectatorial models of sympathetic identification while overlooking the durational models of narrative judgment. And Richardson’s “writing to the moment” is misunderstood when presented as solely about effecting immediacy of character and presence, for it considers discrete segments of time not as freestanding experiences but as the very problem of configuring such segments into plots. With its insistence on both prolixity and immediacy, I further indicate, Richardson’s technique refigures romance digression from an epistemological quest for truth into a phenomenological exploration of what it feels like to try to get things right when you know that you cannot possibly achieve such a result.

In Chapter 3 I turn to models of sympathy that privilege aurality and take up musical paradigms for conceptualizing both duration and community. The problem addressed here is the synchronization and endurance of fellow-feeling, a difficulty for which early musicology, eighteenth-century elocutionary theories, and novels of sensibility find solutions in rhythmic sound-strings. An understanding of sympathy as harmonious and rhythmic synchronization may blunt the passions and contrast with libertine renderings of love as excess, but it also enables emotion to be reliably shared over time. And it specifies sympathy as an occasion for experiencing a peculiar duration—one that, while relying on a recursive beat, is variously sonorous and emotional. The chapter looks at the early musicology of Roger North, Joshua Steele’s importation of musical time into the study of elocution, and Laurence Sterne’s sonorous narration as it combines with his notorious experiments in novelistic temporality. Sterne, I suggest, highlights the extent to which novels can convey the rhythms of language and thus at once represent moments of sympathetic immersion among characters and mediate such moments for readers. Sterne refigures both romance digression and its privileging of human connectedness as the fellow-feeling generated by sonorous discourse. Equally important, he considers how such sonorous and embodied sympathy might be communicated in print—made available at any time and any place. If literature consciously provides for ways in which its claims can be successfully iterated along long histories, as McKeon has argued, then for Sterne a novel’s successful iteration in homogenous empty time relies on its ability to recreate particular qualities of duration—its capacity to mediate experience such that its pattern or order cannot be abstracted from human bodies that manifest and feel it.³⁶

Chapters 2 and 3 engage theories of moral sentiments—looking, first, at their conceptions of the narrativity of action and judgment and, second, at their conceptions of the rhythmicality of sympathy. The final chapter of Feeling Time returns to aesthetic theories for their examinations of durational subjectivities. I draw attention to a tradition that extends Addison’s durational aesthetics of reading to visual and sonorous artifacts. Burke emphasizes the temporality of sensation in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, and Smith highlights the compositional pleasure we take in instrumental music in his “Of the Nature of That Imitation Which Takes Place in What Are Called the Imitative Arts.” Radcliffe adapts such insights for the purpose of thinking through the gothic motif of the eclipse of time as horror. Radcliffe, following Horace Walpole, identifies the genre of her fictions as romance; yet she also casts them as stories of sensibility. Thus while her plots are full of chance ruptures and her narration highlights what may be taken as distorted temporal perceptions—the end of time in romance’s encounter with historicist chronometric consciousness—these principles are reshaped by sensibility into psychological processes. Radcliffe, I argue, devises a technique of characterization that relies not on details of content but on musical compositional form as theorized by Smith and on the processual nature of sensation as theorized by Burke. And she takes her mimetic reference to be the human mind as eighteenth-century associationist and sensationist philosophy conceives of it, highlighting the fundamental activity of crafting durational identities out of disparate moments. If realist characters are charged with representing the humanity of persons, then for Radcliffe this entails not underlining their individuality—as many scholars have presumed she ought to—but, rather, highlighting the typicality of the indispensable durational crafting that constitutes human consciousness.

During the last decades of the eighteenth century, gothic fiction viewed the eclipse of time as a possibility it needed to sound the alarm on vigorously. Today the alarm sounds no less urgently, warning us of an early twenty-first-century culture in which, as Jonathan Crary puts it, “the imposition of a machinic model of duration and efficiency onto the human body” (3) and the generalized inscription of human life into duration without breaks” (8) effect “a static redundancy that disavows its relation to the rhythmic and periodic textures of human life” (8–9).³⁷ This is a 24/7 ideology, to which Crary provocatively ascribes horrific techniques of torture and military fantasies, as well as the more familiar but only slightly less disturbing daily realities of nonstop digital interfaces and consumerist opportunities. In Crary’s account, it seems, romance has been so thoroughly internalized by realism that the historicist chronometric consciousness has come to seem like a suprahuman and hermetic principle. Crary clearly intends to be a provocateur, amplifying the familiar into the uncanny as a way of moving us to recognize—as gothic novels aimed to do—the grave risks our ordinary lives currently run. And while he is aware that twentieth- and twenty-first-century technologies only intensify and more fully realize the logic of capital and of disciplinarity launched some three hundred years ago, he also suggests that the kind of breaks for reconnecting with the various rich rhythms of durational experience that sensibility found in aesthetic pleasure, fellow-feeling, and judging have become increasingly rare. With the advent of televised entertainment and screen interfaces that are available almost anywhere and any time and that keep us connected to markets and to work, with the almost complete commodification of nature into remote and specially designated preserves, with an extremely capitalized art market that makes access to aesthetic pleasure rare and expensive, with friendships often conducted through screens and electronic messaging, and with judgment often reduced to consumer choices—the opportunities for pauses and our capacities for using them to recover thick and various human rhythms have significantly diminished. Moreover, if it was the very act of reading that the culture of sensibility believed could activate these capacities, then today we spend less time reading elaborate discursive strings, and fewer of us spend time in this way. Our exposure to a compositional experience of the world is diminishing and since, as Ricoeur reminds us, we still “have no idea of what a culture would be where no one any longer knew what it meant to narrate things” (2: 28), this is an especially frightening prospect.

“And yet … and yet” (2: 28), Ricoeur insists, and I agree. For Radcliffe and her contemporaries, occasions for transforming the chronometric into qualitative, profoundly human durations also seemed to demand—and to be worth—a struggle. It is not only that the apocalypse has been developing over at least three centuries, as Crary notes, but also that it has been recognized as the more specific threat of an end to human time for most of this period. We seem never to tire of telling stories about our end, and perhaps with such relentless narration of the threats to our endurance, we defer the end and enhance the qualities of the time that remains.³⁸ That we are an age of crisis is part and parcel of the modern sense-making form, Frank Kermode reminds us.³⁹ But it may also be that the machines, just like Defoe’s cannibals, do not seek to annihilate us, but only insist that we share our duration with them. This is a possibility I explore in this book’s coda.