Feeling Time. Amit S. Yahav

      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