Time and Narrative, Volume 2

Paul Ricoeur, Kathleen McLaughlin,David Pellauer

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780226713526
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

In volume 1 of this three-volume work, Paul Ricoeur examined the relations between time and narrative in historical writing. Now, in volume 2, he examines these relations in fiction and theories of literature.Ricoeur treats the question of just how far the Aristotelian concept of "plot" in narrative fiction can be expanded and whether there is a point at which narrative fiction as a literary form not only blurs at the edges but ceases to exist at all. Though some semiotic theorists have proposed all fiction can be reduced to an atemporal structure, Ricoeur argues that fiction depends on the reader's understanding of narrative traditions, which do evolve but necessarily include a temporal dimension. He looks at how time is actually expressed in narrative fiction, particularly through use of tenses, point of view, and voice. He applies this approach to three books that are, in a sense, tales about time: Virgina Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway; Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain; and Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past."Ricoeur writes the best kind of philosophy—critical, economical, and clear."—Eugen Weber, New York Times Book Review "A major work of literary theory and criticism under the aegis of philosophical hermenutics. I believe that... it will come to have an impact greater than that of Gadamer's Truth and Method—a work it both supplements and transcends in its contribution to our understanding of the meaning of texts and their relationship to the world."—Robert Detweiler, Religion and Literature "One cannot fail to be impressed by Ricoeur's encyclopedic knowledge of the subject under consideration.... To students of rhetoric, the importance of Time and Narrative... is all too evident to require extensive elaboration."—Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, Quarterly Journal of Speech

Part III

The Configuration of Time in Fictional Narrative

In this third part of Time and Narrative the narrative model I am considering under the title mimēsis₂ is applied to a new region of the narrative field which, to distinguish it from the region of historical narrative, I am designating as fictional narrative.¹ This large subset of the field of narrative includes everything the theory of literary genres puts under the rubrics of folktale, epic, tragedy, comedy, and the novel. This list is only meant to be indicative of the kind of text whose temporal structure will be considered. Not only is this list of genres not a closed one, their provisional titles do not bind me in advance to any required classification of literary genres. This is important because my specific concerns do not require me to take a stand concerning the problems relative to the classification and the history of such genres.² So I shall adopt the most commonly accepted nomenclature as often as the status of my problem allows. In return, I am obligated from this point on to account for the characterization of this narrative subset as “fictional narrative.” Remaining faithful to the convention concerning vocabulary I adopted in my first volume, I am giving the term “fiction” a narrower extension than that adopted by the many authors who take it to be synonymous with “narrative configuration.”³ This equating of narrative configuration and fiction, of course, has some justification inasmuch as the configurating act is, as I myself have maintained, an operation of the productive imagination, in the Kantian sense of this term. Nevertheless I am reserving the term “fiction” for those literary creations that do not have historical narrative’s ambition to constitute a true narrative. If we take “configuration” and “fiction” as synonyms we no longer have a term available to account for the different relation of each of these two narrative modes to the question of truth. What historical narrative and fictional narrative do have in common is that they both stem from the same configurating operations I put under the title mimesis₂. On the the hand, what opposes them to each other does not have to do with the structuring activity invested in their narrative structures as such, rather it has to do with the “truth-claim” that defines the third mimetic relation.

It will be useful to linger awhile on the level of this second mimetic relation between action and narrative. Unexpected convergences and divergences will then have an opportunity to take shape concerning the fate of narrative configuration in the areas of historical narrative and fictional narrative.

The four chapters of which Part III is composed themselves constitute stages along a single itinerary: by broadening, radicalizing, enriching, and opening up to the outside the notion of emplotment, handed down by the Aristotelian tradition, I shall attempt correlatively to deepen the notion of temporality handed down by the Augustinian tradition, without at the same time moving outside the framework provided by the notion of narrative configuration, hence without crossing over the boundaries of mimesis₂.

1. To broaden the notion of emplotment is first of all to attest to the fact that the Aristotelian muthos has the capacity to be transformed without thereby losing its identity. The breadth of narrative understanding is measured by this mutability of emplotment. Several questions are implied by this: (a) Does a narrative genre as new as the modern novel, for example, maintain a tie with the tragic muthos, synonymous with emplotment for the Greeks, so that it can still be placed under the formal principle of concordant discordance by which I defined narrative configuration? (b) Does emplotment, through all these mutations, offer a stability that would allow it to be situated in terms of the paradigms that preserve the style of traditionality characteristic of the narrative function, at least in the cultural sphere of the Western world? (c) What is the critical threshold beyond which the most extreme deviations from this style of traditionality force upon us the hypothesis not only of a schism in relation to the narrative tradition but the death of the narrative function itself?

In this initial inquiry the question of time is dealt with only marginally, through the intervention of concepts such as “novelty,” “stability,” and “decline,” by which I shall attempt to characterize the identity of the narrative function without giving in to any sort of essentialism.

2. To deepen the notion of emplotment I shall confront narrative understanding, forged by our familiarity with the narratives transmitted by our culture, with the rationality employed nowadays by narratology, and in particular by the narrative semiology characteristic of the structural approach.⁴ The quarrel over priority that divides narrative understanding and semiotic rationality—a dispute we shall have to arbitrate—offers an obvious parallel with the discussion that arose in Part II concerning the epistemology of contemporary historiography and philosophy of history. We may, in fact, place on the same level of rationality both nomological explanation, which some theorists of history have claimed to substitute for the naive art of narrating, and the apprehension of the deep structures of a narrative in narrative semiotics, with respect to which the rules of emplotment are considered mere surface structures. The question arises whether we can provide the same response to this conflict over priority that we gave in the similar debate concerning history, namely, that to explain more is to understand better.

The question of time thus comes up again, but in a less peripheral manner than above. To the extent that narrative semiotics does succeed in conferring an achronic status on the deep structures of a narrative, the question arises whether its change of strategic level allows it to do justice to the most original features of narrative temporality, those I characterized in Part I as discordant concordance, by combining Augustine’s analyses of time with Aristotle’s analysis of muthos. The fate of diachrony in narratology will help us to uncover the difficulties resulting from this second cycle of questions.

3. To enrich the notion of emplotment, along with the notion of time that is related to it, is still to explore the resources of narrative configuration that seem peculiar to fictional narrative. The reasons for according this privilege to fictional narrative will appear only later, when we shall be in a position to carry through the contrast between the time of history and the time of fiction on the basis of a phenomenology of time-consciousness broader than that of Augustine.

Anticipating this great three-way debate between lived experience, historical time, and fictional time, I shall base my remarks on a noteworthy property of narrative “utterance”: its ability to present, within discourse itself, specific marks that distinguish it from the “statement” of the things narrated. The result of this, for time, is a parallel capacity of being divided into the time of the act of narrating and the time of the things narrated. The discordances between these two temporal modalities do not stem from the alternative of either achronic logic or chronological development, the two branches to which our earlier discussion was in danger of limiting itself. These discordances in fact present nonchronometric aspects which invite us to decipher in them an original—even a reflective—dimension of the distension of Augustinian time, one the division into utterance and statement is best suited to throw into relief in fictional narrative.

4. To open up the notion of emplotment—and the notion of time that corresponds to it—to the outside is to follow the movement of transcendence by which every work of fiction, whether verbal or plastic, narrative or lyric, projects a world outside of itself, one that can be called the “world of the work.” In this way, epics, dramas, and novels project, in the mode of fiction, ways of inhabiting the world that lie waiting to be taken up by reading, which in turn is capable of providing a space for a confrontation between the world of the text and the world of the reader. The problems of refiguration, belonging to the level of mimesis₃, begin, strictly speaking, only in and through this confrontation. This is why the notion of the world of the text seems to me still to be part of the problem of narrative configuration, although it paves the way for the transition from mimesis₂ to mimesis₃.

A new relation between time and fiction corresponds to this notion of the world of the text. And it is, to my mind, the most decisive one. I shall not hesitate to speak here, despite the obvious paradox of the expression, of the “fictive experience of time” in order to express the properly temporal aspects of the world of the text and the ways of inhabiting the world that the text projects outside of itself.⁵ The status of the expression “fictive experience” is most precarious. On the one hand, in effect, our temporal ways of inhabiting the world remain imaginary to the extent that they exist only in and through the text. On the other hand, they constitute a sort of transcendence within immanence that is precisely what allows for the confrontation with the world of the reader.⁶

1

The Metamorphoses of the Plot

The precedence of our narrative understanding in the epistemological order, as it will be defended in the following chapter in light of the rationalizing ambitions of narratology, can only be attested to and maintained if we initially give this narrative understanding a scope such that it may be taken as the original which narratology strives to copy. It follows that my task is not an easy one. The Aristotelian theory of plot was conceived during an age when only tragedy, comedy, and epic were recognized as “genres” worthy of philosophical reflection. But new types have appeared even within the tragic, comic, and epic genres, types that may make us doubt whether a theory of plot appropriate for the poetic practice of ancient writers still works for such new works as Don Quixote or Hamlet. What is more, new genres have appeared, in particular the novel, that have turned literature into an immense laboratory for experiments in which, sooner or later, every received convention has been set aside. We might ask, therefore, whether “plot” has not become a category of such limited extension, and such an out-of-date reputation, as has the novel in which the plot predominates. Furthermore, the evolution of literature has not been confined to producing new types in old genres or even new genres within the constellation of literary forms. Its adventure seems to have brought it to blur the limits between genres, and to contest the very principle of order that is the root of the idea of plot. What is in question today is the very idea of a relationship between an individual work and every received paradigm.¹ Is it not true that plot is disappearing from the horizon of literature inasmuch as the very contours of the most basic distinction among the modes of composition, the one having to do with mimetic composition, are being wiped out?

It is a matter of some urgency therefore that we test the capacity of the plot to be transformed beyond its initial sphere of application in Aristotle’s Poetics, and that we identify the threshold beyond which this concept loses all its discriminating value.

This investigation of the boundaries within which the concept of plot remains valid finds a guide in the analysis of mimesis₂ that I proposed in Part 1 of this work.² That analysis contains rules for generalizing the concept of plot that now have to be made explicit.³

BEYOND THE TRAGIC MUTHOS

Plot was first defined, on the most formal level, as an integrating dynamism that draws a unified and complete story from a variety of incidents, in other words, that transforms this variety into a unified and complete story. This formal definition opens a field of rule-governed transformations worthy of being called plots so long as we can discern temporal wholes bringing about a synthesis of the heterogeneous between circumstances, goals, means, interactions, and intended or unintended results. This is why a historian such as Paul Veyne could assign to a considerably enlarged notion of plot the function of integrating components of social change as abstract as those brought to light by non-event-oriented history and even by serial history. Literature should be able to present expansions of the same scale. The space for this interplay is opened by the hierarchy of paradigms referred to above: types, genres, forms. We may formulate the hypothesis that these metamorphoses of the plot consist of new instantiations of the formal principle of temporal configuration in hitherto unknown genres, types, and individual works.

It is within the realm of the modern novel that the pertinence of the concept of emplotment seems to have been contested the most. The modern novel, indeed, has, since its creation, presented itself as the protean genre par excellence. Called upon to respond to a new and rapidly changing social situation, it soon escaped the paralyzing control of critics and censors.⁴ Indeed, it has constituted for at least three centuries now a prodigious workshop for experiments in the domains of composition and the expression of time.⁵

The major obstacle the novel had first to confront, then completely overcome, was a doubly erroneous conception of plot. It was erroneous first because it was simply transposed from two of the already constituted genres, epic and drama, then because classical art, especially in France, had imposed on these two genres a mutilated and dogmatic version of the rules from Aristotle’s Poetics. It will suffice here to recall, on the one hand, the limiting and constraining interpretation given the rule about the unity of time, as it was understood in chapter 7 of the Poetics, and, on the other hand, the strict requirement to begin in media res, as Homer did in the Odyssey, then to move backward to account for the present situation, so as to distinguish clearly the literary from the historical narrative, which was held to descend the course of time, leading its characters uninterruptedly from birth to death, filling all the intervals of its time span with narration.

Under the eye of these rules, frozen into a supercilious didacticism, plot could only be conceived of as an easily readable form, closed in on itself, symmetrically arranged in terms of an ending, and based on an easily identifiable causal connection between the initial complication and its denouement; in short, as a form where the episodes would clearly be held together by the configuration.

One important corollary of this overly narrow conception of plot especially contributed to the misunderstanding of the formal principle of emplotment. Whereas Aristotle had subordinated characters to plot, taken as the encompassing concept in relation to the incidents, characters, and thoughts, in the modern novel we see the notion of character overtake that of plot, becoming equal with it, then finally surpass it entirely.

This revolution in the history of genres came about for good reasons. Indeed, it is under the rubric of character that we may situate three noteworthy expansions within the genre of the novel.

First, exploiting the breakthrough that had occurred with the picaresque tale, the novel considerably extends the social sphere in which its action unfolds. It is no longer the great deeds or misdeeds of legendary or famous characters but the adventures of ordinary men and women that are to be recounted.

The English novel of the eighteenth century testifies to this invasion of literature by ordinary people. Furthermore, the story seems to have moved toward the episodic form through its emphasis on the interactions arising out of a much more differentiated social fabric, in particular through the innumerable imbrications of its dominant theme of love with money, reputation, and social and moral codes—in short, with an infinitely ramified praxis.⁶

The second expansion of character, at the expense of the plot, or so it seems, is illustrated by the Bildungsroman, which reached its high point with Schiller and Goethe and which continued into the opening third of the twentieth century.⁷ Everything seems to turn on the self-awakening of the central character. First, it is his gaining maturity that provides the narrative framework; then, more and more, his doubts, his confusion, his difficulty in finding himself and his place in the world govern the development of this type of story. However, throughout this development, what was essentially asked of the narrated story was that it knit together social and psychological complexity. This new enlargement proceeds directly from the preceding one. Narrative technique in the golden age of the novel in the nineteenth cenury, from Balzac to Tolstoy, had anticipated this by drawing on the resources of an old narrative formula which consisted of deepening a ch...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Part III: The Configuration of Time in Fictional Narrative
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index