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A Natural History of Disturbance: Time and the Solar Eclipse

2015; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 23; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/con.2015.0016

1080-6520

Jocelyn Holland,

Historical and Literary Studies

Drawing on accounts of two total solar eclipses from 1842 and 1851, this essay reads the visual phenomena associated with them—the effects of light and darkness—in terms of narrated time. Whereas the first part of the essay investigates the time of the eclipse as it is integrated into a framework of prediction and anticipation, the second part is more concerned with how the experience of the eclipse’s duration is recorded. The final section then considers the problem of the eclipse’s darkness as a signifier that refuses comparison to prior experiences of time. Even though the eclipse presents an epistemological problem of how to integrate the newness of rare phenomena into familiar frameworks, it also creates an aesthetic one: namely, how to put sensory impressions into language. The essay shows how the darkness of an eclipse is linked to an experience of time defined by discontinuity, raising the question what aesthetic principles can account for or respond to such an experience. To that end, the essay will conclude by examining a peculiar proposal made by Adalbert Stifter, for whom the sense-driven aesthetics of the eclipse is also, ultimately, a problem of artistic media.