Romantic Temporality, Contingency, and Mary Shelley
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How can we not feel that time percolates rather than flows? Far from flowing in laminar and continuous lines, like a well-behaved river under a bridge, upstream to downstream, time descends, turns back on itself, stops, starts, bifurcates ten times, divides, blends, caught up in whirlpools and counter-currents, hesitant, aleatory, uncertain and fluctuating, multiplied into a thousand beds like the yukon River. . . . Sudden explosions, quick crises, periods of stagnant boredom, burdensome or foolish regressions, and long blockages, but also rigorous linkages and suddenly accelerated progress, meet and blend in scientific time as in the intimacy of the soul, in meteorology as in river basins. Would we have understood such obvious facts without the theory of percolation? . . . [T]he word time [temps] goes back to the aleatory mixtures of the temperaments, of intemperate weather, of tempests and temperature. if the time of a planet and the time of a river can have such subtlety, what about historical time? We can say, at the very least, that history is chaotic, that it percolates. Simultaneously unpredictable and deterministic, its course blends all paces.
—Michel Serres, “Science and the Humanities: The case of Turner”1
I. Introduction
In this essay I imagine how Michael Serres’s geological figure for historical time might be used to convey the role of time in romanticism as eddying, feathering out, percolating within an uneven substrate rather than productive of a linear chronological development. I do so by pursuing the conceptual and historical filiations between two topics: contingency in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century thought and fictional contingency in Mary Shelley’s historical novel Valperga. My argument responds to these related questions: what would happen to our sense of romantic history and chronology if we were to think of both as inhabiting uneven temporalities akin to those uneven strata of events through which time flows like water? How might we understand romanticism as marked by contingency rather than philosophical or [End Page 625] historical necessity, even within the philosophical frame of G. W. F. Hegel’s desire to ward off contingency as a threat to the restlessness of a truly dialectical spirit?2
The first section of the essay assesses the role of contingency in early modern and romantic arguments about probability, history, and temporality and, particularly for Hegel, the problem of contingency as a barrier to the development of spirit or mind. Ian Hacking and Reinhart Koselleck provide distinctive itineraries for romantic thought about chance and probability. For Hacking, the mathematical transformation of chance into the logic of probability signals a profound desire to tame the unexpected. For Koselleck, the French Revolution is the modern watershed for inserting chance and the unexpected into the very notion of historical time. Both views recognize a gradual, often unwilling divergence from what Walter Benjamin called “homogeneous, empty time,” that view of history which assumed that it was always the same everywhere, embedded in a chain of continuities that secured our sense of who we were (as long as “we” were only Europeans) and where we belonged.3
Contingency names what happens when chance, rather than a prescribed order or continuity, is recognized as having a role in the course of events. Because it interrupts an expected sequence, troubling notions of causality and even the very idea of the event as something with a before and after, contingency perplexes efforts to write history or write about it.4 Alain Badiou’s considerations of being and event turn on the perplexity of thinking about events via instances in modernity that effectively unseat expectations about the sequence of events. One such event for Badiou, as for Koselleck, is the French Revolution because it opens up a space in time that was not anticipated and that was marked in turn by other, contingent eruptions, among them the Terror.5 In spite of William Blake’s hope in his poem Milton for a moment that Satan cannot find, such moments either affront or gesture toward the ethics of the future that Percy and Mary Shelley imagine in works they wrote in Italy between 1819 and 1822.6
The second section of the essay presents...
