The Ethics of Temporality: Introduction

In the last decade, discussions of temporality in literature have emphasized sequence and open movement as key positive values. Gary Saul Morson, for example, celebrates what he calls “processual works” (277) — novels that, instead of being tightly emplotted, open to contingencies and hence seem potentially endless. And Peter Brooks, though taking a very different approach, argues that in reading literature we derive much of our pleasure from its constitutive “clock-teasing” (34) — its many techniques for suspending, slowing, even reversing (that is, extending in surprising different directions) readers’ movement forward towards closure. But if such privileging of process has become almost synonymous with an “ethics of temporality” in literature, the essays collected in this Forum highlight productive tensions between synchrony and diachrony, explore ways in which the two co-inform ethical conceptions, and recover conditions under which the synchronic perspective yields significant possibilities for judgment and justice. In the following essays both sequence and simultaneity underwrite an ethics of temporality, along with various juxtapositions of these two schematic possibilities.

This Forum is able to present such varied schemes by virtue of probing numerous specific historical conditions. For us “the ethics of temporality” is constituted by chronotopes in Bakhtin’s sense — constructs both underwritten by and manifesting the values of a particular society located in a particular time and place. It is not the aim of this collection to privilege any choice value; rather, the essays highlight several possible analytical shapes of temporality as these are underwritten by specific cultural and political circumstances and rendered palpable by literature.

Frances Ferguson opens the Forum by exploring the notion of the “generation” that rises to social and moral significance in the Romantic period. In the early nineteenth century, Ferguson contends, contemporaneity becomes a key tool for assessing individual preferences and framing public values. Such a privileging of synchrony as the condition of judgment, she explains, results from the development of a new — and for many in the Romantic period exciting — pedagogy, which grouped school children into classes of roughly similar age and structured learning by way of competition among all class members, competition whose outcomes were instantaneous and fully visible to all. Ferguson continues her discussion with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, noting that while this novel’s frame-story highlights Victor’s keen sense of membership in his generation, the monster whom he produces suffers from having been deprived of the possibility of positioning himself among peers: “Produced rather than generated, Frankenstein’s creature is generation-less, deprived of a cohort and the kinds of things it might enable him to come to know about himself in the process of working with and through its other members.”

Whereas Ferguson focuses on synchrony as a framework of judgment at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the next two contributors to the Forum — Garrett Stewart and Irene Tucker — consider complications of and alternatives to such framing in works of the Victorian period. Garrett Stewart conducts his exploration on the minute level of syntax: Charles Dickens’s use of syllepsis. Not exactly a trope, Stewart explains, because it does not wholly “‘turn aside’. . . from the literal to the figurative,” but rather “turns aside from itself in progress, and leaves visible the trace of its veer,” syllepsis makes the case for the simultaneity of commonly incompatible elements — body and mind, matter and spirit. In its syntactic form syllepsis uses miniature (“narratographic”) diachrony to “install a program of openness” — a pause at the moment when difference is already recognized, but exclusion or choice are not yet asserted.

For Stewart, then, suspension of choice and hierarchy are positive ethical epiphenomena of the temporal framing of near-simultaneity. For Ferguson, by contrast, it is precisely the quick and easy hierarchies, reconfigured in midstream, that count as the virtues of the generational perspective. But even as the first two contributors to the Forum delineate opposing ethical tendencies, they both suggest the importance of the sense of simultaneity to valuations in nineteenth-century England. They thus expose new and surprisingly concrete manifestations of the privileged synchrony that Benedict Anderson has identified as underwriting modernity in its most significant political organization — the nation...