Time in Rasselas: Johnson's Use of Locke's Concept

Time inzyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Rasselas: Johnson's Use of Locke's Concept REGINA HEWITT From specific calculations of months and years through general observations about age to indefinite beginnings on “one day,” references to time appear insistently in Rasselas.{ Despite more than four hundred allusions to moments, hours, days, weeks, months, years, seasons, cycles, intervals, and frequency of occurrences, the narrative offers little quantifiable information about its events. One can ascertain that approx­ imately four years elapse between the prince’s awakening to his discon­ tent and escaping from the Happy Valley: he realizes that he is unhappy one day when he is twenty-six years old, spends the next twenty months considering the prospect of escape, four more months resolving to use future time more productively, ten months searching for a way out, and one year waiting for the artist to be ready for flight. But he conspires with Imlac during an unspecifiedly long rainy season, which interferes with further calculations.2 Similarly, indefinite references prevent the calculation of how much time the characters spend in the world between escaping and deciding to return to Abissinia. Johnson’s references seem pointedly unconcerned with fixed and mea­ sured time, except as it affects his characters whose awareness of time the references convey? In effect, Johnson displays in his narrative what Locke describes as the perception of time. Fundamental to Locke’s idea of time is the idea of duration, which consists of “the distance between 267 2 6 8 / H E W I T T zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA . . . the appearance of any two Ideas in our Minds” (2.14.3).4 Actual duration, “go[es] on in one constant, equal, uniform Course,” and time provides hypothetically constant, equal, uniform measures for manage­ able portions of duration (2.14.21). But no one perceives duration in itself. One perceives only one’s own “train of thought,” the succession of one’s ideas (2.14.4). The nature and variety of one’s ideas, together with emotional and other factors, affect the seeming rapidity of the passage. Johnson’s narrative privileging of perceived time over measured time suggests that his use of Locke goes beyond assimilation or dissemination of Locke’s view on this subject. Johnson seems to use Locke’s account of time metonymically to represent the proper place of philosophy in the intellectual universe. Johnson posits the concept as a function, not a value: philosophy serves as a discipline to describe phenomena that obtain, not a system to be idealized in its own right. The functional view of philosophy contrasts with and eventually overrides the episodic intru­ sions of autonomous philosophies that issue in the Happy Valley and that trouble the characters’ “choice of life.” In this paper, I wish to call attention to Johnson’s use of time in fedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Rasselas to establish the ascendency of philosophy over philosophizing. ' Repeatedly, Johnson illustrates the trains of thought passing through his characters’ minds. First, Rasselas entertains the idea of escaping; next, he confronts the idea of an obstacle to escape; then, he becomes obsessed with the idea of specifically how much time has elapsed between his resolve to escape and his consequent failure (4). While Rasselas enter­ tains his first idea, he rests content with it. Consumed in the “visionary bustle” of his single idea, he does not notice the passing of twenty months, a period of time first made known to the reader by the narrator. Rasselas does not entertain the second idea until he enacts a visionary chase and bumps into a mountain. Then the idea of an obstacle succeeds the idea of escape, creating a distance between his two thoughts and allowing him to become aware of duration. Rasselas then makes elabo­ rate calculations backwards to arrive at the figure of twenty months and reevaluate as lost or wasted that period which was to him otherwise happy. Rasselas has not even an indefinite expression of time for this period prior to his calculations. The omission and the elapsing of twenty months, a remarkably long time to pass without the intrusion of a second idea, mark the sequence as Johnson’s most exaggerated example of such mental processes. Sometimes Johnson narrates this pattern...