Feeling Time. Amit S. Yahav
experience. And thus the eastern fable of Spectator 94 also serves a second purpose: to suggest how different aesthetic forms varyingly construct durational qualities for their readers. The eastern fable transports readers to other times and places—from England to the East, from witnessing a head momentarily immersed in water to following an entire lifetime. Spectator essays, alternatively, transform readers’ own time—from dull fixations or passionate eruptions to more safely enjoyable pleasures, or, as Addison puts it in the beginning of the essay, “Thoughts on many Subjects … entertaining a quick and constant Succession of Ideas.” And with this Addison indicates that duration varies not only by whether we approach it quantitatively or qualitatively, but also by how different compositional principles shape our experience of it. The genre of the eastern fable mediates for readers other-worldly transport replete with awe-inspiring achievements; the genre of the periodical essay mediates for readers more ordinary emotional qualities.
Addison’s discussion is, of course, Orientalist in Edward Said’s sense, using an “eastern fable” as a vehicle for formulating insights about Addison’s own English sense of time. As Srinivas Aravamudan points out, the oriental tale was extremely popular in England in the early and mid-eighteenth century, “trolling for the same readers” as realist genres, which suggests that Addison uses this anecdote to comment about English readers’ expectations and experiences of their leisure reading materials more than about those of easterners.19 Moreover, scholars have recently presented the contrast that Addison maps geographically as a historical succession of chronotopes—from the emblematic to the chronometric, and from the romance to the novel. The temporal conception of Addison’s “East” resembles in crucial ways the Christian framework of eternity and its emblematic resonances of moments, even as it is being supplanted by a historicist paradigm organized by linear succession in rational grids.20 It also resembles romance’s spatiotemporal transports that leave no trace on psychologies and bodies, to recall Mikhail Bakhtin’s analysis of adventure time and Patricia Parker’s discussion of digressions, which I discuss in the Introduction. But in Addison we can already begin to see how sensibility refigures romance, as the spatiotemporal transports of fable are undermined by the emotional transports of the periodical essay, which may be equally digressive but, nonetheless, retain a strong connection to people’s ordinary experiences in their ordinary lives.21
As I argue in the Introduction, the sensibility chronotope adapts, rather than more simply negates and supplants, the romance chronotope. We can see especially well such adaptation at work in Diderot’s essay “In Praise of Richardson” (1762). Diderot combines Addison’s genres of the eastern fable and the periodical essay by describing a probable novel in the vocabulary of romance abundance, while transforming spatiotemporal transports into purely durational intensities—diverse qualitative temporal experience. When reading Richardson’s novels, Diderot explains, “In the space of a few hours I had been through a host of situations which the longest life can scarcely provide in its whole course. I had heard the genuine language of the passions; I had seen the secret springs of self-interest and self-love operating in a hundred different ways; I had become privy to a multitude of incidents and I felt I had gained in experience” (83).22 If a few hours with a Richardson novel offer more intense and varied experience than an average lifetime, then the duration of reading is of such a unique quality that it cannot possibly be assessed by chronometric measures. And yet if such overabundance recalls Addison’s eastern fable, then Diderot emphasizes that reading Richardson doesn’t take us elsewhere, but rather enables us to experience our own time more intensely: “The world we live in is his scene of action…. The passions he portrays are those I feel within me…. He shows me the general course of life as I experience it” (83). Addison primarily describes durational experience in an intellectual vocabulary of the succession of ideas—the “useful or amusing Thought” that leisure reading prompts in the wise man of number 94, the “notions,” “ideas,” “thoughts,” and “meaning” that a methodical essay promotes in number 476, and, more generally, “the time and leisure to reflect” of number 418. Diderot overhauls the vocabulary of thinking into the vocabulary of feeling, as might be expected of a sentimentalist of the midcentury for whom, as Jessica Riskin reminds us, “Sensibility was the ‘first germ of thought’ and ‘the most beautiful, the most singular phenomenon of nature.’”23 But even as for Diderot thinking and feeling are continuous, it is precisely the shift from one to the other that emphasizes the extent to which the incorporation of romance into a specifically durational aesthetics is at stake. For when the intensities of adventure (a key to romance) are rewritten into the intensities of feeling in novels such as Richardson’s, then we can confidently inhabit a sensibility chronotope that does not violate spatiotemporal probabilities by insisting that transport belongs with the varieties of qualitative duration. As Diderot follows the characters and plots in Richardson’s novels, he barely moves in space or time; but within this more probable stationary position he is moved to feel strongly and, most important, diversely—a succession of feelings that enable us to fully recognize the reappraisal of quantities as qualities and the refiguration of romance into the sensibility chronotope.
In his adaptation of fable to cohere with essay and of romance to cohere with novel, Diderot flags for us the way in which the chronometric and sensibility chronotopes complement one another. But this is far from being his last word about the relation between these different temporal conceptions. For in Diderot’s estimation—as in many more recent accounts of the rationalizations of modernity—the quantitative and the qualitative jostle over the same turf. “Take care not to open one of these enchanting works if you have any duties to perform” (85), Diderot begins; and he concludes with pathos: “Emily, Charlotte, Pamela, dear Miss Howe, as I talk with you, the years of toil and the harvest of laurels fall away, and I go forward to my last hour, abandoning every project which might also recommend me to future ages” (97). One might either assess one’s exertions by counting the hours, days, years it takes to accomplish a task, or one might immerse oneself in the duration and assess its value by the various feelings it conveys and, thus, lose count of time. But Diderot presents himself as among the few who privilege their qualitative durational experience over the demands of a chronometric public sphere. What Addison identifies as an individual philosopher’s oversight—Locke’s failure to directly specify qualitative dimensions of time—Diderot suggests is a more pervasive problem of modern culture. Richardson’s greatness, he argues, rests not simply on his novels’ excellent mimesis of the ordinary but, rather, in their defamiliarization of the ordinary: his novels draw attention to mundane actions’ durations to which his contemporaries have been desensitized by chronometric habits. “You accuse Richardson of being long-drawn-out!” Diderot writes, and then returns the accusation: “You must have forgotten how much trouble, care and activity it takes to accomplish the smallest undertaking, to see a lawsuit through, to arrange a marriage, to bring about a reconciliation. Think what you will of these details…. They are trivial, you say; it’s something we see every day! You are wrong; it is something which takes place every day before your eyes but which you never see” (86). Richardson’s novels restore people’s sense of the duration of ordinary actions such as marriage and contract, which we no longer seem to notice, and such desensitization arises from overlooking the varying qualities of attention solicited by the durations that these actions inhabit. If a courtship, lawsuit, or reconciliation may be chronometrically summarized to have occupied twelve months, two years, or a decade, such summaries eclipse the abundance of “trouble, care and activity” that one must have experienced while in the midst of these endeavors. With this Diderot flags another way by which sensibility adapts romance: it turns the early genre’s loosely stitched digressions into a length necessary for a truer verisimilitude of action as it constitutes character. And finally, Diderot flags the way in which quantitative assessments overrun all attempts to make the qualitative cohere with the quantitative. The quantitative way of knowing, he suggests, habitualizes time so thoroughly that many cannot tolerate Richardson’s novels’ demands for reactivation of the sensations of original durations.24
In the next paragraph Diderot attributes the temporal compression to which his contemporaries have been habituated to market-driven theatrical aesthetics that shorten and thin out audiences’ capacities for absorption. “For a people open to a thousand distractions, whose days have not enough hours for all the amusements