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 with which they are wont to fill them, Richardson’s books must seem long…. You hardly ever go to see more than the last act of a tragedy. Skip to the last twenty pages of Clarissa” (86), he remarks sarcastically. An incredibly productive entertainment industry, rather than oversaturating the market, successfully adapts consumers to its needs by limiting their capacities for absorption. Here we have a synchronic jostling between a modern incarnation of the romance chronotope and its refiguration in sensibility. The entertainment industry—with its “thousand distractions” deliberately connoting romance and fabled incredulity—has turned consumers’ lives into loosely connected episodes of leisure, making the lengths of their endurance nothing but a series of distractions. Richardson’s novels, by contrast, restore us to an inabstractable duration—you must twine your duration with them, for a summary would just miss the point. The durations these novels take are constitutive of their meaningfulness, and if you fully grant them their time they will reward you by restoring thick qualities to your own temporal experience.25 Reading novels like Richardson’s—novels of sensibility—fashions subjectivities alert to duration as a continuous whole saturated with a variety of feelings; in contrast, the entertainment industry fashions distracted subjectivities, whose sense of time is fragmented into discrete moments that come in no necessary order. Fragmented form makes such time easily alienable and more akin to other commodities in the market that engenders it—a moment at the theater swappable with a moment at a pleasure garden, again swappable with reading the first few pages of a novel. In Diderot’s account, absorption in Richardson’s novels ameliorates this condition by restoring to actions their durations, thus making any moment tied more strongly to the full process of which it partakes.
For Diderot, Richardson’s novels are a palliative not only for fragmentable, alienable time, but also more generally for the alienated individualism that Diderot seems to suppose—like more recent critics of modernity—as the condition of his world. For Richardson’s novels, Diderot argues, are his companions, and their companionship is peculiarly durational: “I still remember the first time I came across Richardson’s work: I was in the country. How delightfully moved I was by them! With every moment I saw my time of happiness growing a page shorter. Soon I had the same feeling as is experienced by men who get on extremely well together and, having been together for a long time, are about to separate” (84). Diderot characterizes his “first time” with Richardson by his being “delightfully moved”; his happiness glossed as a dreading of time running out; his attachment identified as a long-forged familiarity soon destined to end. But even more interestingly, Diderot describes the friendship of novels as the pleasure we derive from conversing with friends. Recall that he concludes his praise by exclaiming 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). Richardson’s novels divert Diderot from the pursuit of worldly achievements, but they reward him not only with a high quality and inalienable durational experience but also with companions to converse with. Novels provide Diderot with friends, and friendship is specified as the uniquely emotional duration of intimate conversation.
In Spectator 225 (17 November 1711) Addison comments that “the Talking with a Friend is nothing else but thinking aloud” (2:375). And thinking aloud, like writing essays, benefits from selection and composition, as Addison’s defense of discretion throughout this essay suggests. Thus we might conclude that companionate conversation amounts to the succession of ideas in common—the primary experience of duration as it is shaped not just by compositional forms, but also more specifically by discursive forms that are inherently social. For both Addison and Diderot, at stake in compositional forms is communication—the succession of ideas not in solipsistic privacy but in social circumstances, whether in intimate conversation or in print. This social dimension of human durational experience is harder to gauge when examining Locke’s and Hume’s philosophies of time; however, insofar as Hume approaches duration as aesthetic form—a logic of composition that must be sensibly apprehended—he underlines the constitutive communicability of qualitative duration. For a logic of composition—a pattern—is what makes something iterable—recognizable to another person and, thus, potentially shared.26
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