Feeling Time. Amit S. Yahav
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