Time and Ways of Knowing Under Louis XIV (review)

Roland Racevskis's recent study sets out to examine both chronometry and the epistemology of time in late seventeenth-century France, the latter especially as it is gleaned from works by Molière, Sévigné and Lafayette. These works and writers are chosen, admittedly, from among many possible, but within the scope of the book, they illustrate the point adequately. Throughout, Racevskis keeps the topic of time and the effects of time-consciousness before the reader who should be grateful for the book's concision and focus.

One of the pleasures of the reviewer's craft is to write about the links between good scholarship and good literature. Interestingly for this reviewer, there is a tacit bond here with Umberto Eco's novel, The Island of the Day Before, set as it is in the mid-seventeenth century and involving the politics of the French court, but whose action revolves around the quest for the international date line. This quest is prosecuted under the assumption that to control the meridian would be to control time. Time and Ways of Knowing Under Louis XIV investigates a very similar interest in the control of time. Racevskis avoids the temptation to refer to the Eco novel, but its thematics are very much related to his study, and one might think of these two books as one another's companions, if only for their mutual fascination with the metaphysics of time and their shared setting in the seventeenth century.

Racevskis begins appropriately with Augustine's puzzlement over a definition of time, reminding the reader vividly of the complexity of his propos. The theoretical premise of the study stands on Stuart Sherman's previous research of chronometry, but also rests on Foucault's idea of chronometry used as a means of control. The work's aim is clearly enunciated: "... to provide an account of the ways in which one particular era in our civilization established a conceptual framework for understanding time" (22 ).

The first chapter, entitled "Watches, Culture and Society in Seventeenth-Century France," is an engaging survey of the history of modern watches which are taken as a first appropriation by individuals of the passage of time. Racevskis evokes Eco's novel most closely when he charts Louis XIV's effort to gain a political upper hand over the Dutch and the English with his search for accuracy in cartography and accuracy in time measurement on the sea (29 ff.) and Foucault is certainly not far removed from the political side of this history.

Chapter 2 , "Time Structures in 'Les plaisirs de l'île enchantée' and Le Tartuffe," sets out to describe the importance of time structures in conceptualizations of temporality in the early years of Louis's reign. It examines the intricately organized social rites at Versailles, specifically at the grand gala of "Plaisirs de l'île enchantée," and the significance of time economy in Molière's Tartuffe. The chapter outlines the rhetorical use of time in the anticipation of both a new personal reign of the young king and the completion of the Versailles palace, and then turns to a close study of time structures in Molière's comedy, finding it to be "a kind of substance for strategic manipulation and as a structural marker for dramatic action" (87 ).

The following chapter, "Time, Postal Practices and Daily Life in Mme de Sévigné's Letters," opens with an interesting history of the development of the postal system in France during the early years of Louis's reign, and then relates this to the thematics of Sévigné's letters and her interest in events and their time. The chapter concludes that Sévigné, through her consciousness of time, created stylistically new forms of temporal subjectivity.

The final chapter deals with La Princesse de Clèves, first with the pre-publication interest that was generated in the novel, and then with a close reading of some of its key episodes. The same sort of anticipation...