Antiquity and the Meanings of Time

A Philosophy of Ancient and Modern Literature

Duncan F. Kennedy

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857733696
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Society and contemporary culture seem forever fascinated by the topic of time. In modern fiction, Ian McEwan (The Child in Time) and Martin Amis (Time's Arrow) have led the way in exploring the human condition in relation to past, present and future. In cinema, several cultural texts (Memento, Minority Report, The Hours) have similarly reflected a preoccupation with temporality and human experience. And in the sphere of politics, debates about the 'end of history', prompted by Francis Fukuyama, indicate that how we live is deeply determined by our relationship not only to place but also to the passing of time. But what did the ancients think about time? Is our interest in chronology a relatively recent phenomenon? Or does it go further back? In his major new work, Duncan Kennedy indicates that our own fascination with time-reckoning is by no means unique.
Discussing a number of key texts (such as Homer's Odyssey; Sophocles' Oedipus Rex; Virgil's Aeneid; and Ovid's Metamophoses) and imaginatively setting these side-by-side with modern works (such as Sterne's Tristram Shandy and Joyce's Ulysses), he shows that, from era to era, and in different ways, human beings have uniformly striven to understand the unfolding of history and their relationship to it. This sophisticated cross-disciplinary book will appeal not only to classicists, but also to scholars and students in the humanities more broadly, as well as beyond.

1

DOES AUGUSTINE PUT HIS FINGER ON TIME?

In Time and Narrative, Ricoeur’s recourse to Augustine’s Confessions is primarily as a philosophy of time, and it is remarkable, given his theme of time and narrative, how little attention he devotes to Augustine the narrator. I want to shift the perspective by considering Augustine in the first place as the narrator of his restless search for knowledge of God and of his own self from which his reflections on time emerge – reflections that focus on himself as author, reader and interpreter of texts. Why do issues of textuality – acts of reading, of writing, of language use and interpretation – loom so large in considerations of the human experience of time, and not only in Ricoeur? In the first section of the chapter, I explore the temporal dynamics involved in the narrative of the famous scene of the ‘conversion’ in the garden at Milan, and in particular the moment when Augustine responds to the prompt to ‘pick up and read’ the codex containing the writings of Paul. In the second section, I seek to relate Augustine’s narrative and the temporalities it constructs to his philosophy of time, with particular attention to the way he manipulates tenses and the trope of apostrophe to construct a distinction between the flux of experiential time and a discursive time which seeks to look beyond that flux. The figures of the author and the reader are central to Augustine’s thinking, and in the final section I explore how the Confessions can help us to think about how the temporal aspects of authorship and authorial intention, and how the interpretation of texts in and over time have been bound up with theological thinking – though not always in ways Augustine himself may have intended. The title of the chapter may sound flippant, but I trust the point of it will emerge in due course.

PICKING UP AND READING

Augustine’s Confessions pose a considerable challenge to the modern reader. Often treated nowadays as autobiography (the first nine books draw on some events in his life, and in chronological order), the work does not sit comfortably in that category,¹ especially when it turns to reflect on memory in Book 10 and then to interpret the opening of Genesis in Books 11–13. Shortly before narrating his conversion, he addresses his ‘Lord, my helper and redeemer’ and says (8.6.13): ‘I will now tell the story, and confess to your name [narrabo et confitebor nomini tuo] of the way in which you delivered me from the chain of sexual desire, by which I was tightly bound, and from the slavery of worldly affairs.’² However, although confession and narration are linked here, they are not identical. The act of narration is not addressed to God, who is all-knowing. When Augustine turns from the books he has written on himself and on the subject of memory (1–10), he addresses God and says (11.1.1): ‘Lord, eternity is yours, so you cannot be ignorant of what I tell you. Your vision of occurrences in time is not temporally conditioned. Why then do I set before you an ordered account of so many things [cur ergo tibi tot rerum narrationes digero]?’ Augustine’s God isn’t a reader and doesn’t narrate – existing outside time, he doesn’t need to.³ A few lines later he draws attention to the limitations of human narration: ‘See, the long story I have told to the best of my ability [ecce narravi tibi multa, quae potui].’ Augustine exists in time, but is trying to make sense of a relationship with a being who exists outside time, and to understand himself in a way that, he believes, that being knows him. ‘May I know you, who know me. May I “know as also I am known” (1 Cor. 13: 12)’ are the words with which he introduces Book 10, in which he turns from the narration of the events of his life to explore the theme of memory, a key concern of any narration of the self. As Garry Wills puts it,

More than any other writer – more than Bergson, even, or Proust – memory is the key to Augustine’s thinking because he thought it the key to his identity. He knows who he is only because memory connects events in his life over time. Without memory he is a series of disjunct happenings – like an amnesiac he has no name, no connections with other human beings, and no clues to the existence and action of God. Memory creates the self.⁴

The Confessions reflect Augustine’s ‘inward turn’ in search of the truth.⁵ For whom, then, does he narrate? This is the question he posed to himself in 2.3.5 (cui narro haec?): ‘Not to you, my God. But before you I declare this to my race, to the human race, though only a tiny part can light on this composition of mine.’ If narrative is a constative act, to use the terminology associated with J.L. Austin’s speech act theory,⁶ designed to set out a state of affairs for Augustine and his human audience to the best of his ability, confession is a performative one, that seeks to bring about a state of affairs, his relationship to God. Each of these modes manipulates grammatical tense in distinctive ways, and that will be one of our concerns in what follows.

First, the role of narrative. If God is all-knowing, and thus only God’s ‘version’ of Augustine’s life could be the definitive one,⁷ the readers of Augustine’s text are beings in time and differ in what they regard as the climax of that narrative. In the words of Augustine’s commentator, James O’Donnell, ‘Bks 7, 8, and 9 each present crucial and essential scenes.’⁸ Thus for Henry Chadwick, Augustine’s encounter with Platonism and his attempts to achieve a union with God in Book 7 are a mystical experience ‘through which he was confronted by the antithesis between his own impermanence and the eternal changelessness of the God who is’;⁹ but it is also the case for Chadwick that ‘the vision of Ostia and the last hours of Monica form a climax in emotional intensity, and Book 9 is a turning point in the Confessions.’¹⁰ However, Augustine’s narration of his ‘conversion’ in the garden in Milan with which Book 8 concludes marks a pivotal distinction in this first-person narrative between a past and a present self, for this is a structuring division which the Confessions seeks to move beyond.¹¹ ‘Conversion’ has recently been seen as something of a misnomer, though it has become so deeply embedded in discourse about the Confessions that it is now difficult to uproot – though, as we shall see, the temporal perspective of the Confessions also gives it some rationale. Augustine did not ‘convert’ to Christianity in the garden (his encounter with the Neoplatonists of Milan had dissolved his intellectual objections to Christianity); rather he made the resolve to give up sex and to be baptised.¹²

The garden scene is actually the third of three interrelated stories of renunciation of the world in Book 8 of the Confessions. Earlier, his Neoplatonist confidant Simplicianus had recounted to Augustine the story of his friend Marius Victorinus, who, though a Christian believer in private, was reluctant to be baptised for fear that his pagan admirers would turn against him. Then Augustine’s fellow-countryman Ponticianus tells him and his friend Alypius the story of two imperial agents who gave up their positions to become hermits after coming upon Athanasius’s Life of the hermit Antony (8.6.14–15).¹³ Scholarship dates the scene in the garden in Milan to 386AD, and Augustine’s account in the Confessions to about 397 or shortly thereafter, though notably Augustine himself does not use the public chronologies that were available to him. The Confessions is only incidentally an account of his ‘public’ life and does not seek to be interpreted in accordance with the limits such modes of ordering bring with them. As Donald J. Wilcox has put it, ‘Writing of his private life, Augustine chose the dating system most appropriate to that subject: his own age. Furthermore he used his age to direct the reader away from a simple numerical chronology and towards the deeper realities Augustine saw in time.’¹⁴ Or, as that other great North African philosopher of texts, meaning and time, Jacques Derrida, would put it: dates, timetables, property registers, place names are all ‘codes that we cast like nets over time and space – in order to reduce or master differences, to arrest them, determine them.’¹⁵

An important aspect of those ‘deeper realities’ Wilcox refers to lies in the narrative form Augustine has adopted. From a narratological perspective, first-person narratives characteristically have what is termed a deictic past tense in relation to the moment of utterance or writing of the first-person narrator which constitutes the present of the teller of the story: the narrator ‘points to’ a moment in the experience of his or her earlier self (‘deictic’ is derived from the Greek verb deiknumi, ‘to show’). Some recent experiments in first-person narrative, particularly in fiction, have sought to manipulate or even suppress aspects of this teller function, such as a determinable teller figure or moment of speaking, adopting what has been called the ‘reflector’ mode. This focuses on the experiences of the ‘I’ figure ‘without evaluating them from the perspective of a teller who retrospectively views his or her former life and ensures narrative closure.’¹⁶ The first nine books of the Confessions emphatically adopt the ‘teller’ mode, and in a manner that makes great demands upon the reader. James O’Donnell remarks,

We are presented throughout the text with a character we want to call ‘Augustine’, but we are at the same time in the presence of an author (whom we want to call ‘Augustine’) who tells us repeatedly that his own view of his own past is only valid if another authority, his God, intervenes to guarantee the truth of what he says.¹⁷

In what follows, I shall jettison the ambiguous ‘Augustine’ in favour of a useful, if cumbersomely expressed, distinction between the narrated self and the narrating self who looks back on the narrated self. Each has his own temporality, his own experience of past, present and future. This junction of temporalities, which can be felt throughout the narrative portion of the Confessions, comes to dominate the narration in Book 8, and provides the framework for Augustine’s subsequent meditations on time in Book 11. The narrating self, in the light of subsequent events, discovers significance in details and actions that have limited or no significance at the time for the narrated self; that significance was in some sense already there, had his earlier self but known it. Thus at the very beginning of Book 8, the narrating self addresses God and says, ‘You put into my heart, and it seemed good in my sight that I should visit Simplicianus’ (8.1.1), who tells him the story of the conversion of Victorinus. The narrating self, with the benefit of hindsight in the aftermath of conversion, sees God’s providence (etymologically ‘foresight’) in what his narrated self experiences largely as a personal impulse.¹⁸ The temporality of the narrated self’s point of view is richly contextualised, and in this instance given a strong orientation towards a desired future that for the narrating self is now an achieved state: ‘As soon as your servant Simplicianus told me this story about Victorinus, I was ardent to follow his example. He had indeed told it to me with this object in view’ (8.5.10). The narrative weaves together these temporal contextualisations and re-contextualisations.

The disjunction between narrating and narrated self and the associated contrasts of perceived significance are particularly emphatic in the introduction to the second story of conversion in Confessions 8, that of the imperial agents, which Ponticianus will go on to relate (8.6.14):

One day when Nebridius was absent for a reason I cannot recall, Alypius and I received a surprise visit at home from a man named Ponticianus, a compatriot in that he was an African, holding high office at the court. He wanted something or other from us. By chance he noticed a book on top of a gaming table which lay before us. He picked it up, opened it, and discovered, much to his astonishment, that it was the apostle Paul. He had expected it to be one of the books used for the profession [that of teacher of rhetoric] which was wearing me out. But then he smiled and looked at me in a spirit of congratulation. He was amazed that he had discovered this book and this book alone open before my eyes. He was a Christian and a baptized believer.

Some elements here (‘a reason I cannot recall’; ‘he wanted something or other from us’) clearly mark out the temporality of the narrating self. In that retrospective view, details that may at the time have been important for the narrated self and for Alypius and have motivated their behaviour at that point fade into insignificance in contrast with others that have, in terms of what eventuated, come to take on a significance that they did not at the time have for his narrated self. For that earlier self, the visit of Ponticianus is a ‘surprise’ (the Latin uses the demonstrative ecce plus the present tense venit – ‘look, Ponticianus arrives’ – thus drawing the reader into the point of view of the narrated self); Ponticianus noticed the book of the apostle Paul ‘by chance’. Its position on the gaming table may even serve symbolically to heighten the sense of the contingency of these events for the actors within the narrative, while from the narrator’s perspective providing (i.e. ‘looking forward to’) a piquant juxtaposition of the narrated self’s gaming past and his Pauline future.¹⁹ Ponticianus’s action of picking up the book and opening it – the very same codex that will play such a climactic role in the garden at Milan – foreshadows (for the narrating self and for readers already familiar with the outcome) what the narrated self will do with the book there. Ponticianus acts as a half-way house between the narrated and the narrating selves. While his astonishment and amazement signals that he shares the narrated self’s sense of the surprise at seemingly ‘chance’ events, his smile suggests that he, a baptised Christian, shares some of the narrating self’s sense that these are part of a pattern – a story – in which their causation will eventually (i.e. ‘in the outcome’) become clear.

As readers of Augustine’s account of his conversion, we are drawn into the complex of temporalities the narrative constructs. The point of view of the narrated self is past in relation to the point of view of the narrating self. From the reader’s perspective, the present time is taken to be that of the narrating self’s utterance – and the narrating self’s utterance is always the text’s ‘present’ (no matter when, chronologically, the moment of reading takes place, late antiquity or the twenty-first century). Recall how O’Donnell remarked that ‘We are presented with a character...but we are at the same time in the presence of an author...’ Thus, in representing (making prese...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title page
• Dedication page
• NEW DIRECTIONS IN CLASSICS
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Does Augustine Put His Finger on Time?
• 2 Time for History
• 3 Determination
• 4 Self-Determination
• 5 Time, Knowledge and Truth
• Notes
• Bibliography