useful concept. For sensibility’s alignment of broad epistemological and moral concerns turned it into an encompassing worldview, a thoroughgoing culture that could house under the same title such varying manifestations as Richardson’s didacticism and Sterne’s irony, and whose precepts could extend beyond its orthodox proponents as well as beyond its heyday in the mid-eighteenth century.12 Moreover, as Jane Austen makes clear through her compelling characterization of a Marianne Dashwood, sensibility’s capaciousness enables it to stand for a wide spectrum of feelings—intuitive yet also reflective, strong yet also capable of composure, erroneous yet also thoroughly ethical, dynamic and varied yet also self-identical.13 And sensibility’s nuanced yet comprehensive approach to emotion well captures the range of feelings that Feeling Time discovers in eighteenth-century discussions of durational experience.
Underlying what I’m calling the “sensibility chronotope” is Mikhail Bakhtin’s use of the term “chronotope” as a conjoining of culturally specific conceptions of time with their epistemological and moral underpinnings, as well as with their conventional forms of representation. If, as Giorgio Agamben claims, “Every culture is first and foremost a particular experience of time,” then, according to Bakhtin, at stake is a complex feedback loop by which cultures, in their favoring of specific compositional forms over others, mediate temporality no less than they are constituted by it.14 I should acknowledge, however, that the “chronotope” denotes spatiotemporal connectedness, and Bakhtin in the concluding remarks to his “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” stresses the inseparability of time and space. But throughout his influential study, Bakhtin treats time as “the dominant principle in the chronotope” (86)—a privileging already announced in the essay’s title, with its double iteration of the temporal dimension.15 In this study I follow Bakhtin’s lead and focus on the temporal dimensions of the sensibility chronotope and do so for two reasons. First, we are still missing an extensive examination of sensibility’s temporal underpinnings. Second, under the horizon of a modern chronometric consciousness, the connectedness of time and space has done much to obscure the rich and various dimensions of durational feelings.
James Chandler argues that at stake in sentimental representations is a logic of spatial, rather than temporal, transport that constitutes what he calls “sentimental probability.”16 Sentimental literature worries less about effects distant in time—the panning out of actions into their consequences—than about effects distant in space—how the conditions of any given moment are imagined to affect people occupying varying positions, not just characters, but also readers of novels and audiences of plays. Chandler demonstrates how from Shaftesbury’s use of visual metaphors to underscore the reflective dimensions of soliloquy to Sterne’s spatial and ocular descriptions of processes by which a spectator becomes spectacle, sentimentalists develop a unique logic of probability that relies on imagined swapping of positions located in space. This concern determines, in turn, a privileging of probable reflective and identificatory situations over probable plots. Chandler’s privileging of the spatial over the temporal implicitly presumes a long tradition of scholarship that has focused on the eighteenth century’s development of chronometry and chronology—an approach to time that, as Bergson recognized, spatializes duration and has only limited resources for recognizing varieties of temporal feelings. Bakhtin also contributes to such spatialization of time, albeit indirectly. When in his wide survey of chronotopes Bakhtin arrives at the eighteenth century, he identifies a form whose spatial components are key and whose temporal components are especially ghostly. Bakhtin claims that “a new feeling for time was beginning to awake” (228) in the eighteenth century, one that he calls nostalgia for the idyll. Nostalgia for the idyll associates emotion with recollection and pastness, sometimes also with hopefulness for future recuperation, but not with present experience. It is also a chronotope that strongly attaches feeling to a starkly differentiated spatial locale—to rural settings or to an insulated domestic sphere.17 Bakhtin’s discussion indicates that if in the eighteenth century a rising chronometric culture comes to pervade public life as well as private experience, then nostalgia for the idyll offers an alternative, but only in transport to a different time—past or future—or place—remote peripheries or enclosures. Nostalgia for the idyll thus highlights a compensatory imagination that coheres well with an understanding of the eighteenth century as the moment when temporal consciousness becomes impoverished by the rising power of an alienating rationalized approach. To feel the richness of idyllic time, one must be necessarily less than satisfied with one’s present and imagine oneself elsewhere.
The “new feeling for time” that Bakhtin identifies in the eighteenth century, then, amounts to something like a negativity—a hollowing out of present temporal experience, compensated by imaginative transport along historical and geographical axes. But Stuart Sherman more recently demonstrates that chronometric consciousness need not be understood as a negativity. Sherman examines diurnal form as the textual counterpart of the invention of the minute and second hands on clocks and of the ratification of Greenwich Mean Time and longitude lines. By his analysis, these representational techniques enable precision and regularization while also securing opportunities for individualized content. “The particular forms of time proffered by the clocks, watches, and memorandum books so new and conspicuous in the period,” he explains, “seemed to many serial autobiographers to limn a new temporality—of durations closely calibrated, newly and increasingly synchronized, and systematically numbered—durations that might serve as ‘blanks’ in which each person might inscribe a sequence of individual actions in an individual style” (18).18 And yet even as chronometric notation increases opportunities for individualization, the timekeepers’ paradigm gauges temporal experience by way of numbered measure and conceives of collective consciousness by way of abstractions. Thus there is little qualitative variation to an account of the duration of a walk that only imparts its length, to recall Sherman’s evocative discussion of “minutes” in Pepys’s diary (89), or to an account of the duration of work that only refigures task time as tasks timed” (229), to recall his interpretation of Robinson Crusoe. Likewise, there is little social bonding through concurrent participation in abstract grids; in the final analysis, Sherman explains, such abstractions encourage an “obsessively cultivated privacy” (114) and promote “a larger program of textual isolation” (245).19 And finally, conceiving of eighteenth-century temporal conceptions solely in terms of chronometric consciousness renders continuous the private and the public spheres, leisure and work time, subsuming all under the logic of utilitarian efficiency and abstract commensurability.
Addressing these concerns, Deidre Lynch considers the many ways in which eighteenth-century practices of leisure reading emphasized familial rituals of communal activity whose express purpose was to generate affective durations. Underwriting the valuation of these rituals was an associationist psychology that “identified the essence of feeling with its reiterative practice” (171), as Lynch puts it, and that operated on the primary levels of perceptual processes shared by all humans, as well as on the secondary processes of consciousness that constitute the cultural bonds of more specific communities. Nonetheless, Lynch assimilates this rich experience of leisure time to the chronometric logic that increasingly came to govern work and discipline. Building on Sherman’s study, she presents literature’s contribution to what she calls “quality time” as arising from the shift into a temporality of measure, and she highlights sensibility’s steadying of emotion through practices that make reading seem like clockwork, emphasizing the extent to which these habits were supported by and promoted rigid schedules and diurnal form.20
Sherman and Lynch make nuanced cases for literature’s participation in a chronometric culture, and they conceive of chronometric culture as complexly integrating feeling and individuation into the predominance of measure and standardization.21 But while these studies have done much to complicate our understanding of what we might call a chronometric chronotope, in Feeling Time I delineate a sensibility chronotope that cannot be fully understood—or even perceived—from a perspective that presumes the primacy of chronometry and chronology. Alongside diurnal form and the persistence of idyll in the face of chronometry’s ascendancy, we find in eighteenth-century literature a sensibility chronotope that, I will soon argue,
