Loss, Revelry, and the Temporal Measures of "Silas Marner": Performance, Regret, Recollection

Abstract

This essay takes its start from two kinds of concerns.1 First are the narrative peculiarities of Silas Marner, which can be summarized as a set of questions: Whygiven the length of George Eliot's other novels-is Silas Marner so short? Why does it cover so extended a period of time (thirty years in a single volume) only to absent what would seem to be the novel's moral center, the sixteen years of Eppie's childhood? Why does Eliot anchor a fairy-tale plot in the specific historical period of the Napoleonic Wars, when we cannot finally correlate historical with narrative events?2 Second are the theoretical questions that, I want to claim, are elicited by these narrative gaps and peculiarities: How can time be made to feel present? And, conversely, how can we feel ourselves to be present in time? These latter questions, which are perhaps sufficiently intriguing as a matter of theory, accrue a curious urgency in the context of Silas Marner, for the novel insistently maintains that moral action depends on answering them properly-that morality is, in fact, a function of temporality, defined as a disposition toward and experience of time, a characteristic tense. Perhaps not surprisingly, Silas Marner associates the capacity for moral action with a disposition toward the present tense, as the only tense in which action of any kind can take place. This is also, as I will show, to make a claim for the body as the ground of meaning and therefore also of morality. At the same time, however, and with equal insistence, the novel's narrative strategies portray such a disposition as no longer available. Instead, Silas Marner depicts a disintegration of the present-an experience, as Stuart Sherman puts it, of time's practical, familiar presence (44)-into the sheerly diurnal, on the one hand, and the uninternalizable movement of history, on the other-into the continuous, unassimilable flow of daily events, that is to say, and