Abstract
Each of the two books under review offers itself as a corrective to chronometrically centred readings of eighteenth-century temporality purveyed over the past decades by, among others, Walter Benjamin, E. P. Thompson, Michel Foucault, David S. Landes and (to drop precipitously from major to minor) me. Such clockwork reckonings, Amit S. Yahav and Christina Lupton both suggest, leave out at least half the temporal terrain: the varied ways, not always tethered to clocks and calendars, by which eighteenth-century writers and readers constructed and experienced the passage of time. Each book in its own way seeks to supplement or supplant Benjamin’s oft-quoted characterisation of modernity as an epoch of ‘homogeneous, empty time’ with the richer palette of what Georges Poulet dubbed ‘human time’, reckoned as a matter of choice and feeling rather than measurement. Although the old guard was never quite so monochronistic as Yahav and Lupton suggest, these correctives make sense: it’s time for the pendulum of time-studies to sway the other way.
In Feeling Time: Duration, the Novel, and Eighteenth-Century Sensibility, Yahav grafts a history of ideas onto close readings of novelistic temporalities in order to ‘delineate’ what she dubs, in her book’s core phrase, the ‘sensibility chronotope’ (p. 9): structures of feeling about time which undergirded the theory, practice and fictions of sensibility throughout the period. After an exordium that scans the time-thought of Locke, Hume, Smith and Diderot, there follow three chapters in which Yahav pairs one novelist with one or more treatise-crafters, showing how her designated chronotope functioned within the period’s novels and philosophy to posit, against the emptiness of measured time, the moral values intrinsic to ‘embodied and emotional experiences of qualitative duration’: the textures of timespans inhabited not just chronometrically, but affectively and socially (p. 48). Under Yahav’s yoking, Francis Hutcheson and Samuel Richardson cultivate a temporal double allegiance both to the ‘moment’ (that intense instant of emotion on which sensibility thrived) and to the longer durations, so palpably enacted in the thousand-plus pages of Clarissa (1748), wherein the sequence of nearly innumerable moments models for readers the difficult life-task of forming, and then rethinking and re-forming, our judgements across wide spans of time. Sterne too, in the spectacularly recursive, self-echoing prose of Tristram Shandy (1759), enacts those ‘effects of rhythm’ advocated by contemporary musicologists and elocutionists as the richest means for moving the auditor (whether of a symphony or speech) through the ‘various qualities of time’ (p. 124) that give shape and texture to lived duration. Anne Radcliffe, in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), deploys both a Burkean ‘sensationism’ – a prizing of the intense instant – and an ‘associationism’ mapped by Adam Smith, in which ‘recollection’ can ‘compose’ such moments into a richer understanding of a long duration. Radcliffe, Yahav argues, distinguishes her novel’s characters accordingly, between the Burkean-Gothic (fierce, momentary, evanescent) and the Smithian-compositional (self-aware, contemplative, abiding).
The book’s juxtapositions of philosophy and fiction yield mixed results. Yahav does develop her useful general claim that eighteenth-century writers and their readers conceived, propounded and absorbed temporalities of experience grounded less in measure than in duration. But the connections between temporal treatises and long novels remain tenuous. Yahav deals mainly with analogies between the ideas and the fiction rather than with the influence of one upon the other and it is difficult to judge how contemporary readers might have assimilated the two. She repeatedly, for example, draws parallels between temporalities in prose and music, without ever weighing (or weighing in on) the complexities that have haunted that comparison for millennia in thinkers and novelists from Plato to Joyce. Her readings register as more a matter of intelligent redescription. What she says of Clarissa’s ‘duration’, Tristram’s ‘rhythms’ and Udolpho’s Gothic/realistic dialectic comes across less as new than as newly contextualised, in ways that don’t always newly illuminate.
Time, elusive and abstract, is tough to write about; feelings about time must be tougher still. In Feeling Time, those difficulties mark many pages. Yahav’s key terms remain unfocused: from the start, she explicitly drops the tope (i.e. ‘space’) from ‘chronotope’, so that the Bakhtinian term operates at something like half power; she applies the phrase ‘qualitative duration’ and its variants so widely that it comes to mean less than the argument needs it to. Even in the closing summation, Yahav’s wording tends to vaporise the claims it strives to condense: From the perspective of the sensibility chronotope, what we do, how we feel, and who we are, are all questions that have everything to do with the temporality of our existence, and the temporality of our existence has everything to do with the way our experiences are composed into sensible patterns. (p. 148)
Lupton’s book, by contrast, clicks on all cylinders, in part because it undertakes a more straightforward task. Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century offers a history not of big ideas but of specific, individual experiences. Examining the practices of a few readers (trackable in their journals, correspondence and published prose), Lupton asks and compellingly answers a few simple, resonant questions: in a culture newly inundated (like ours) with ‘short-form’ reading (newspapers, letters, essays, advertisements), how did people make time for reading books? How did their different practices reflect and shape their feelings about reading, about time and about time spent – or not spent – reading? Lupton sorts the variegated answers into four categories and devotes to each a chapter: ‘Time Divided’, about readers so pressed for time that they had constantly to come up with tactics for tucking their reading into small interstices (early mornings, minute intervals of leisure and, often most amply, Sundays after church); ‘Joining Up Time’, about the practice of rereading cherished books, carried out across a lifetime; ‘Other Times’, about readers who found in the form of the codex book the opportunity to shift temporalities, reading the text out of order, returning repeatedly to favourite passages, re-reckoning the whole into its cherished parts; and ‘Time to Come’, about readers pinched for present time who envision and deeply value the idea of a future phase of life devoted plentifully to the reading they must currently forgo. Where Yahav deals mainly in canonical texts, Lupton dives into paratexts that have rarely if ever been closely read; their freshness forms part of the book’s pleasure and contributes to its almost documentary transparency. Here, Lupton persuades us, are the ways in which these people (and by easily imaginable extension, many of their contemporaries) read, engaged with and absorbed their books, within and across time.
By attending closely to the activities of these self-documenting readers, Lupton manages to craft a nuanced larger argument. Her book offers in effect a double corrective: not only to a purely chronometric construction of eighteenth-century time-experience but also to the kind of reading history that focuses more on readers’ responses to particular texts – as embodied, for example in handwritten marginalia – than on the life-spanning, often variable tempi and rhythms of their reading. Those marginalia tend to record reactions triggered by the text’s content, but leave invisible the local timings of the reader’s engagement with the text. To ‘push past that question of content’, Lupton demonstrates, is to enrich the history of reading by revealing ‘the way time given to books was felt as something deliberate and distinct from daily routine’ (p. 63). ‘Good reading’, she shows, ‘was like going to church or the gallery, visiting in loops of return and in a certain mood a site that was always there, but could not always command devoted attention. In return, what one got from it was the protection of temporal variation’ (p. 63) – an insurance against the monotony which (as E. P. Thompson argued in an 1967 essay) threatened to co-opt lives largely governed by capital-driven chronometrics. To seek the history of reading mainly inside the texts read is to miss the textures of lived time that books could generate in readers’ lives.
The book’s argument draws conviction and energy from its sprezzatura; Lupton executes intricate manoeuvres with seeming ease and grace. The many historians and theorists with whom she sustains a running debate re-enter and re-depart the text to produce maximum torque in minimal space; her recurrent attention to questions of reading, class and gender weaves easily in and out of a discourse in which they are prominent but not exclusive considerations; and her style compasses subtle ideas in simple prose. The book is most supple where it is also most resonant: in its running comparisons of eighteenth-century reading practices with ours, and more specifically with the rhythms of Lupton’s own reading, for work and for pleasure, at various points throughout her life. Both these moves entail risk. For eighteenth-centurists, comparison between the temporal impact of new media in the print-inundated ‘then’ and the digital now can tempt scholars toward a flood of complacent parallels, untampered by differentiation. And autobiography can prove a slippery move in scholarly monographs. Lupton dodges both pitfalls with dexterity. Her sensitive audits of new-media impact then and now teem with telling echoes, but abound in distinctions deftly drawn. Her recollections of her own reading become almost a structural feature of her argument. Compact, compelling and strategically placed at the starts and endpoints of many sections, they bear directly on the book’s historical claims, while widening its scope so that it comes to encompass the ways we read now, both as ardent book-consumers and multi-tasking academics. In her epilogue, Lupton persuasively parlays her core argument, ‘that book reading should be understood in time, and as a quality of time use’, into a reckoning of reading-time as a key to social justice (p. 156). As a ‘mode of experience’ (to echo Samuel Johnson), time in human life is never wholly homogenous or empty; it varies, from day to day, phase to phase, epoch to epoch, time to time. For cultural historians, then, the study of temporalities, emphatically plural, is scholarship’s proper vector.