Folding Time: On the Long Eighteenth Century’s Material Temporalities

Abstract

C to the materialist-temporal turn in scholarship,1 Marcus Tomalin’s Telling the Time in British Literature, 16751830. Hours of Folly (2020) imaginatively reappraises the polymorphic understandings of time conveyed by different horological tropes in the literature of the long eighteenth century. It aligns itself with other recent endeavours to reconfigure the timescapes of modern literature2 and engages a massive corpus of time-related writings, seeking to show “how various essayists, poets, playwrights, and novelists meditated deeply upon the physical form, social functions, and philosophical implications of particular objects used to measure time.”3 In this review, I read Tomalin’s vast survey of literary renditions of prototypal time-measuring devices in the light of Michel Serres’s thoughts on time topologies. I take into account the two thinkers’ shared distrust of hegemonic accounts of time, their belief in the importance of balancing out, rather than sieving through, the multivalent temporal dimensions articulated by the (im)materiality of objects, as well as their endorsement of an ecological milieu within which different philosophies of time may be folded together or interlinked to generate, in the words of Tomalin, an accommodating view of the “pervasive pluralism” of time-determining methods, ranging from the most sophisticated mechanistic devices to the non-artificial bioand astro-rhythms of the natural and cosmological spheres.4 In his influential reflections on the “polychronic” and “multitemporal” nature of objects, Michel Serres notes that rather than conforming to the trajectory of an Carmen Borbély