Catching Time: Temporality, Interaction, and Cognition

Elusive, fleeting, intangible—these are some of the adjectives often applied to the concept of time in both popular and scientific discourses, and Isabelle Wentworth raises no objections in her new book Catching Time: Temporality, Interaction, and Cognition (2024). She does, however, produce a new study on the perception of time and its intersubjective aspects for readers who might have already intuited these dimensions in the works of writers as diverse as William Shakespeare, Dr. Seuss, and Don DeLillo, and philosophers such as Tomas Aquinas, Henri Bergson, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger, among others. Wentworth also actively engages with more recent cognitive approaches affiliated with neuroscience, and the result is a highly referential comparative text that boldly surveys literary theories, social and natural sciences, and original works of twenty-first-century fiction.The six chapters of the book have copious references, endnotes, and an extensive bibliography following each chapter, which, while helpful, makes for rather strenuous reading. Thus, patience—and time—are required to grasp the multidisciplinary viewpoint derived from the intersection of the natural sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences; but the reward is enormous, especially for dedicated readers who may need extra reference and explanations of complex concepts and theories. Catching Time is truly interdisciplinary and engaging in the way it moves smoothly between theoretical explications and literary texts without compromising scholarly rigor and depth.The enactive and embodied turn in the theory of time is the subject of Wentworth's book, and the introduction and chapter 2 lay the grounds for what is to follow with the reference to phenomenology: Bergson's la durée and Husserl's “immanent time,” but also Heidegger's “being in time” and Paul Ricoeur's “lived time”—undoubtedly, an apt start for a study that dwells on the concept of time. Her approach is appropriately panoramic, as these philosophers—not to mention others noted in her account such as Aristotle, Augustine, Locke, Hume—are subjects of extremely nuanced, specialized studies that dwell on the metaphysical and ontological aspects of time in their philosophical works but do not typically venture into the domain of fiction. Two of the best-known studies where the latter is not the case are Genevieve Lloyd's Being in Time: Selves and Narrators in Philosophy and Literature (1993) and Mark Currie's About Time: Narrative Fiction and the Philosophy of Time (2006): both studies approach time in literature through a dialogue with philosophy and narrative theory, respectively, yet Lloyd and Currie analyze the representation of time and are not as focused on the subjective perception of time and its intersubjective dimensions.As evident by its brief reference to the work of the physicists Newton and Einstein, Catching Time bridges the physical measurement of time and our perception of it on an everyday basis. Wentworth points out that “time, in the Western world, particularly since the development of Newtonian physics and the advent of industrialization, has often been used to divide, to segment our lives into useful units” (5). The search for that “usefulness” is what defines an effective, socially useful life, while boredom and inactivity stand for the waste of time, a major existential drawback in modernity. Such theories, however, fail to account for the variations in subjective experience of duration and time perception: for example, the perceptions arising from a never-ending business meeting with a boring presenter, or of being in love, or of traveling for fun, or of imminent danger. Hence the “enactive and embodied turn” in the understanding of time promoted by the early phenomenologists needs to bridge the gap between the individual mental apparatus and the material world we inhabit, thus acknowledging the embodied, reactive, and interactive dimensions of the mind. In other words, time perception is inextricable from subject formation, and subject formation is a complex biological and social process.Twentieth- and twenty-first-century theorists working in the natural sciences have contributed breakthrough findings to the work of phenomenologists. Examples include John Gibbon's scalar expectancy theory (1977), which promotes the pulse-accumulator model in which subjective time is measured by accumulated pulses; the theory of phase synchronization of neural assemblies, that is, “the large-scale integration problem” defined by Francisco Varela (1995, 2001); and Howard Eichenbaum's study of the so-called time cells in the brain's hippocampus (2014, 2017) in which the important connection between space representation and time experience is linked to the temporal organization of memories. Roughly, these diverse studies share an emphasis on the embodied and interactive character of time production. For many scholars in literature, these theories remain unknown or disconnected from the purely linguistic, aesthetic, and philosophical appreciations of literary texts; however, dramatic changes in the sciences have produced a new interdisciplinary approach, cognitive literary criticism, and Wentworth lays out the extremely thought-provoking and challenging vista of modern developments in this area, which have interesting repercussions in modern literary studies as well.Catching Time, however, moves a step further in its discussion of time in literature, aiming to analyze subjective time as lived by some memorable literary characters. Thus in chapter 3 Wentworth analyses Don DeLillo's novel The Body Artists (2001) as “a meditation on intimacy and intersubjectivity” (63). For Wentworth, the novel is a fine example of “body time,” or the lived and interactive subjective time whereby sharing a life with someone defines one's universe, or the Husserlian Lebenswelt, as the ground for knowledge and experience. Although literary scholars such as Dorrit Cohn (1999) have argued that the fictional world is a self-contained system, others uphold the view that perception and representation are intimately connected and hence the fictional world is, nevertheless, a world. Wentworth carefully demonstrates how The Body Artists evades the typical sociopolitical reading of DeLillo's oeuvre in favor of a profoundly philosophical examination of embodied, “permeable” subjectivity “in process” through the pairing of the protagonists Lauren and Mr. Tuttle (78).Chapter 4 of Catching Time is dedicated to another fascinating work, the novella Agua (Water; 2021) by Argentinian writer Lía Chara. As suggested by the book's title, the text is a continuous engagement with the flow of time and its impact on individual subjectivity. Wentworth embraces this aspect of time perception and delves into an analysis of lived time through the parallel perceptions of the unnamed protagonist in the two “worlds”: the medical facility that she visits and where she experiences dislocation in time, and the swimming pool where she learns to swim and meets the character “Medusa,” a driving force in the narrator's reconfiguration of/in time. While it is tempting to interpret the title of the novella, the swimming pool, and the character Medusa in their symbolic roles, Wentworth analyzes how “queer temporalities produced by the radically intersubjective coupling between the narrators and their lovers” (84) actually configure the narrator's simultaneous reconnection with her own body and social position.Wentworth argues that subjective time as perceived in reality, and narrative time as depicted in fiction, need to be understood through the continuous process of interaction (5), an idea which, in some ways, resembles Bakhtinian concepts of chronotope and polyphony in the novel and their social dimensions. In chapter 5, Catching Time considers these two notions through an analysis of Lisa Gorton's The Life of Houses (2015) and the complex intersection of the embodied self, the subjective experience of time, and social interaction, all embedded in a material space. The nonhuman environment and its impact on time perception, memory formation, and the social dimensions of habitat become focal points that blend neuroscience with the studies of the “meaningful” space explored by Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau. The temporality of space, in Wentworth's view, is to be found at four critical scales—phylogenetic, ontogenetic, generational, and ecological—which account for changes in our evolutionary history, place of origin and their impact on our maturation, speed of modernity and sense of contemporaneity, and environmental changes which have significant effects on the individual (107). Our perception of time is marked, then, by the nonhuman world just as much as it is marked by the interaction with the others around us. Therefore, she concludes, “humans respond to both their social and material environments by mapping perceived movement and posture onto their own body” (108). Houses and homes, in all their varieties, have significant impact on the subjective perception of time and memory formation via perceptible material details and invisible emotional resonance in the mind and the psyche of the individual. Throughout the novel, Gorton's masterful creation of scenes which function as extended metaphors for human experience simultaneously capture time and its inextricable presence in spaces. The novel's title significantly envisions the visible and invisible dimensions of the “being” found in the nonhuman and, most importantly, the effects of such being on the protagonists Anna and her daughter, Kit, an impact especially crucial for the identity development of the young teenager.To further tackle important aspects of the embodied and interactive perception of time, Wentworth embarks on a very interesting quest which leads to a hypothetical or, perhaps, not so hypothetical question: “So what happens to subjective time when you try to write life without a body?” (138). In chapter 6 she discusses Martín Felipe Castagnet's novel Los cuerpos del verano (2012). Taking up a tradition in science fiction writing, the novelist imagines the existence of a disembodied psychic structure “uploadable” on a new body, in other words, as many literary critics see it, “a portrait of the inevitable triumph of information over matter” (138). Such a transhumanistic view of potential (limitless?) human enhancement through advances in science and technology clearly undermines the priority of embodied consciousness and, by extension, the very definition of “human.” Wentworth engages scholars like Stephen Kern and Manuel Castells who postulate that human experience of time and space have become connected to the human experience of technology and the resultant compression of space and acceleration of time. In Wentworth's view, Castagnet's novel dramatizes the “interpenetration” of human and technology, rather than taking the familiar path of creating a binary opposition between the two (155). The body in the technological environment or the body with technological enhancement still contributes to the subjective perception of time in the new techno medium.To conclude, Catching Time successfully achieves its aim to present “a methodology for the analysis of interactive narrative time and an array of new interpretations of contemporary works, demonstrating how individual novels shape our understanding of the wonderful ways time can work within stories” (165). Wentworth argues that fictional representations of subjective time can act, and can be explored, as subjective time perception in real life too. The argument is supported by the depth and eloquence of the study, which is well placed at the intersection of cognitive literary theory, neuroscience, and philosophy and informed by cross-cultural readings of significant literary texts, as well as the extended reference to our own subjective experiences of time in the twenty-first century.