Feeling Time. Amit S. Yahav
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