Splintered Temporalities: On Cindy Weinstein’s “A Question of Time”

SO WHAT DAY is it? Still Blursday? Today, we find ourselves in one of the temporally strangest moments in recent history: “Coronatime,” “the COVID-19 time warp,” the experience of time slowed to a standstill, or eerily sped up, depending upon one’s circumstances. March crept along, then April and May vanished. Coronatime feels distorted, stretched out, with neither endpoint nor scale. Yet for those confronting the pandemic head-on — medical professionals, caregivers, food providers, and the sick and dying (who are disproportionately people of color) — time is thickened, punctuated by daily crisis.

If that weren’t enough, the overwhelming evidence of police violence against Black and brown people only further exposes how for some, the time of the everyday and of the emergency, what Ben Anderson calls the “interval,” have never been separate. Public reactions to this violence also show temporal disparities: the outcry is timely yet overdue, recursive, reminiscent. As actor Natasha Rothwell tweets, “If you’re pissed that quarantine is still a thing, imagine waiting 400 years for something to be over and there’s still no end in sight.” As we confront a global pandemic, intersected with our nation’s deep-seated, historical white supremacy, we are at a temporal crossroads, a time of reckoning. Perhaps, then, it is the right time to read editor Cindy Weinstein’s recently published collection of essays on representations of time in literature, A Question of Time. The book foregrounds the fundamental heterogeneity of temporal experience within a long history of American literature from the colonial era to the present. 

A Question of Time covers a wide range of texts, genres, and periods, from Salem witch trial records to 19th-century fiction and sketches, to 20th-century lyrical poetry and 21st-century graphic narrative. The volume contributes to the “temporal turn” in literary studies. This turn, led by scholars like Wai Chee Dimock, Dana Luciano, Thomas M. Allen, Elizabeth Freeman, and Lloyd Pratt, combines a number of methodological approaches: narratology, philosophy, material culture, queer theory, neuroscience, aesthetics, and performance studies. The various essays in this latest collection highlight temporality as a theme and a process, and are organized into four sections: “Materializing Time,” “Performing Time,” “Timing Time,” and “Theorizing Time.”

In “Materializing Time,” three historical-formalist pieces anchored in the 19th century explore texts that anticipate or reckon with the Civil War as a pivotal historical crisis. The four essays in “Performing Time” focus on particular spaces, such as the courtroom or that of the Euro-American–Native “encounter,” and the embodied temporalities of theater and dance. The four essays in “Timing Time” comprise formalist analyses of multiple genres, whether “cosmological temporality” in the short story, the narrative “deceleration” of novelistic time, or the collapse of historical time in the graphic novel. “Theorizing Time,” finally, presents essays exploring literary time as such, through such theoretical lenses as Jamesian psychology, transnational theory, and narratology. Ultimately the book shows us that time has never been experienced one way, but rather differently by different people, in relation to their power, status, and mental and physical health and safety, and that literature offers labile ways of expressing time’s multiplicity.

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The essays in the first section, “Materializing Time,” seem especially pertinent now, as any sense we have of “empty, homogeneous time” (in Walter Benjamin’s famous formulation) is being cracked open to history, shot through with future meaning for those who will later look back on 2020 as a pivotal year. Derrick Spires’s essay, in particular, seems essential in our current moment. His examination of William J. Wilson’s and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s sketches in Thomas Hamilton’s Anglo-African Magazine (1859–’60) shows how the serial sketch genre was suited to articulating “the contingencies of black life on the verge of enslavement and freedom in the late 1850s.” This period of “existential threat,” defined by the Fugitive Slave Act (1850), the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) and the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision (1857), underscored the fragility of newfound freedom for the previously enslaved.

The literary sketch, with its formal fluidity, succeeds in representing the precarious temporalities of Black freedom, Spires argues, allowing writers to explore “history and time as cyclical, nonlinear, overlapping, or even regressive.” The sketch, coupled with serialization’s “projection of ongoing storytelling,” creates a “proleptic narrative style” that gestures toward a future “open for critique and revision.” Free from the serial novel’s promise of narrative closure, Spires claims, serial sketches formally replicate the unique “postslavery, prefreedom temporality” of constant threat, the in-between time that “replicates the conditions of marronage.” “Maroon” communities, who “banded together under conditions of enslavement and oppression,” carved out independent spaces that were relatively autonomous and thus “threatening to systems of enslavement and white supremacy.” Just as these spaces of Black collectivity and intellectual activity — rustic, urban, domestic — presented an alternate temporality of hope, Black sketch writers created alternate literary spaces that “cultivated black subjectivity and a discourse of spectatorship in a print landscape that often made black people objects and spectacles,” writes Spires. Based on this analysis, he convincingly claims that the Black serial sketch is prototypical, deserving of a more central place in US literary history and in narratives about the rise of the Black novel, than, for example, the slave narrative.

Spires’s provocative piece raises the question: what are the spaces of “marronage” today, both literary and real? Are we not witnessing in ongoing police killings of innocent Black people in the streets and in their homes — now caught on video — the repetition of history and persistent precarity of Black freedom in America? Aren’t we seeing the “chronotopes […] traditionally associated with freedom, modernity, and movement” — streets, parlors, galleries, thresholds — being renegotiated once again? If the serial sketch’s form mirrors the “temporal orientation between former enslavement and a freedom-to-come,” such texts are all the more relevant today for formally manifesting a temporal condition still with us, reminding us of history’s repetitive circularity when it comes to racial injustice in the United States.

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If Part I helps us see how various texts open up figurative spaces for negotiating the temporality of historical crises, the essays in Part II, “Performing Time,” address spaces of theatricality and temporal embodiment. In her essay, for example, Angela Calcaterra analyzes the “transnational relations” between Native and Euro-American leaders as recorded in literatures of “encounter.” Specifically, Calcaterra points to how verbal timing and stylistic conventions like the “patient expression” shaped relations, so that the timing of these “brief, seemingly insignificant moments in literary texts,” such as James Fenimore Cooper’s Wyandotté (1843), point not to problems of narrative pacing, but to the influence of Native pacing on literature. As such, these small moments “reach out to the deep histories that converged to create them.” Jonathan Elmer also examines Cooper, specifically the “de-territorializing theatricality” of Cooper’s Revolutionary War novel The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground (1821), arguing that its “unstable and obscure political theater” disrupts our sense of the Revolution’s clear historical timeline.

Of particular note in this section is Elizabeth Freeman’s brilliant analysis of the temporalities of rhythm in Shaker dance practices. Through the story of Shaker dance, she shows how “nondominant rhythms have been a resource for minoritized and otherwise oppressed groups both to feel a sense of solidarity and to bring others into the fold.” Viewing rhythm as an embodied mode of radical critique — in John Protevi’s words, a “physiopolitics” — Freeman looks at how rhythm “recruits,” how it is “infectious,” “contagious,” joining people in ways that violate “the social boundaries that otherwise keep people apart.” Here I’m reminded of New York Times culture writer Jenna Wortham describing an early quarantine moment when she reluctantly joins a private Zoom dance party while making dinner. Seeing others dance in those little video windows, isolated in their own private spaces, she describes how with the music, she overcame all the social prohibitions of the moment and found herself immediately “at home.” She threw herself into the dance: “It was a moment of connection I didn’t know I needed. […] This is what community looks like right now.”

For the Shakers, irregular rhythms unified yet also stigmatized the group, often in racialized terms. Freeman claims the spontaneous irregularity of Shaker rhythms mirrored their sexual practices of celibacy, which were viewed by Anglo-American Protestants as “sexually aberrant.” When the Shakers later responded by introducing rhythmic regularity and order to their dance, anti-Shaker literature critiqued the “tedious uniformity of their culture,” comparing their dance to that of the “living dead.” They couldn’t win. Freeman’s point, evident in a striking 1831 lithograph, is how Shakers were derided not just for their “gender-nonnormative and sexually aberrant refusal to reproduce,” but also for the “rage for order” in their dance, which Freeman links to the “status of social death accorded to slaves and by extension to Native and African American people” along the US Eastern seaboard. The Shakers were “literally out of step with America” and, akin to those caught in the “interval” mentioned above, although to a far lesser degree, “outside of time.”

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The essays in Part III, “Timing Time,” continue the momentum of the first half of the volume. Reading it now, Mark Goble’s description of the slowed-down cinematic temporality of traffic in Don DeLillo’s novel Cosmopolis (2003) as antidote to a “contemporary culture of speed” might at first seem nostalgic, given the onslaught of COVID-19 slowness we are living. The novel unfolds in one Joycean day, the time it takes DeLillo’s protagonist — multi-billion-dollar currency trader Eric Packer — to complete a mere three-mile chauffeured drive across a traffic-clogged Manhattan to get a haircut. The novel’s “setting and sense of temporality,” Goble writes, are thus “structured everywhere on a logic of deceleration,” a slowness that works in tension with the movement of modern global capital and the speed at which Packer purchases enough Japanese yen to destabilize their value over the course of the ride. While the capitalist bubble of his tricked-out stretch limo makes its “inchworm creep” across Manhattan, Goble notes, Packer’s money “is operating on other scales entirely.” On one level, Packer’s life speeds along at the meteoric pace of global economic flow — in and out of his car arrive his head of finance, a currency analyst, his bodyguard, and his doctor. Even he himself steps in and out to eat with his wife and have sex with other women. But externally, the plot’s motion is stagnated by paralyzing Manhattan traffic, caused by a funeral procession and, ironically, an anti-capitalist riot. The novel ends with Packer’s self-destruction; he loses everything — his wealth, his marriage, even his life. We don’t particularly care about Packer, and readers have criticized the novel’s lack of narrative momentum, but Goble values DeLillo’s use of slow-motion language “to think about the present” with its “peculiar mix of frenzy and inertia,” a temporality that marks all of DeLillo’s late fiction.

Under COVID-19, this dichotomous mix of frenzy and inertia seems more with us than ever. Until recently, “slow cinema,” the “slow food” movement, and “slow travel” have emerged as “therapeutic” responses to a contemporary culture of speed in which we have “lost touch with the more basic, natural temporalities of primordial activities like eating food or having sex.” For Goble, DeLillo’s fiction offers “analogues” to these “slow” forms. But now that we have a global pandemic to slow us down, do the “redemptive powers of slowness” in DeLillo’s novel still pertain? After all, New York City’s streets have been relatively empty these past three months, only just beginning to approximate the level of traffic structuring DeLillo’s text. COVID-19 has slowed down people and markets alike, perhaps temporarily, but maybe with more lasting effects, altering how we may characterize “modernity” in the post-COVID-19 era. If and when we get there, will we still rely upon the “familiar narratives of modernity” shaped by capitalism, with its “network of ideologies and technologies” that Marxist economists regard as “perpetually productive and progressively accelerating”? Goble’s provocative analysis reminds us that DeLillo’s post-9/11 fiction, with its narrative “deceleration,” will remain uncannily instructive for negotiating a future of empty skies and streets but heavily trafficked virtual highways.

Whereas the previous authors bring theoretical concepts of time to bear on formalist and historical analyses of literature, the authors in Part IV, “Theorizing Time,” are each guided by a key theoretical methodology. Jesse Matz reads Henry James’s intriguing story “The Tone of Time” (1900) through the lens of psychology, specifically Henry’s brother William James’s pragmatist concept of the “specious present” of the same era. The “specious present” refers not to the time that cuts between past and future, but rather to the present “broadly conceived,” as in “these days” or “these years.” It is “specious” because “it is not in fact the present but a longer moment fringed by the senses of past and future.” Matz shows how contemporary cognitive psychologists have revived William’s concept in order to debate the extent to which new technologies — specifically, digital network cultures — are reshaping, endangering, and possibly enriching our experience of time. Matz, however, claims that Henry’s “late style” sentences — long yet accretive in meaning — are themselves a “temporally constructive technology,” a model for the specious present.

Finally, Susan Gillman explores race, racism, and resistance in Caribbean literature of the 1930s and 1940s though postcolonial theories of “transnational time.” Just as activists are rightly pushing us to rethink historical symbols of systemic racism in the United States — statues, monuments, national holidays — Gillman’s argument resonates. She traces the concept of the Caribbean as the “American Mediterranean” back to Alexander von Humboldt’s 1799–1804 scientific expedition and up through the 1930s and 1940s, when the region yielded a wealth of experimental literature. Most importantly, she notes how the “racial thinking, terms, and concepts” made evident by the regional comparison help us rethink “Southern literature” and the place of the modernist South within a broader, multilingual, transnational region called the “Gulf-Caribbean.” The literary timeline of this broader geography would lengthen to include lesser-known writers like W. Adolphe Roberts and James Street alongside W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, William Faulkner, and others.

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Overall these essays — and the many other great pieces in this collection — help us to think about the great rifts and divides across race, gender, class, and other boundaries, both real and imposed, that splinter our sense of shared time. They also show us the central role literature has played in the exploration, mediation, and even creation of time. In short, they allow us to ask: For all the forms of its standardization, has time ever been unified? Or unifying?

But it is another question, posed by Robert S. Levine in his afterword, with which I’d like to conclude: would it be useful “if temporality studies took an autobiographical turn”? For example, if the authors reflected on “how these essays […] emerged within academic-calendar time” amid the many other obligations we negotiate. I’ve thought about what it has meant to read this book and write this review during quarantine, with all that is simultaneously happening around me. The short answer: It’s been hard. Between academic commitments and Zoom meetings, homeschooling and mundane tasks of cooking and cleaning (endless sterilizing!), it has meant working incrementally, with as many delayed deadlines as daily interruptions. Time is both taken from me, no longer my own, and yet abundant. Readers, writers, scholars, do we slow down our intellectual work to engage immediate, daily, practical, or political concerns — protesting racial violence, calling representative leaders? Do we dig more deeply into long-term endeavors — doing academic research and teaching about systemic racism and injustice as forms of resistance? This book raises such fruitful concerns, bringing multiple new perspectives to a rich field and reminding us how there have always been many questions of time.

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Sharon B. Oster is professor of English at the University of Redlands. She is author of No Place in Time: The Hebraic Myth in Late-Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Wayne State University Press, 2018).