Time and Narrative Volume 2(Time & Narrative)

214 Pages·1985·12.36 MB·English

by  Paul Ricoeur

TIMS A ND
NARRATIVE
?AUL BJCOSUIl
Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer
The University of Chicago Press • Chicago and London
PAUL RICOEUR has been the dean of the faculty of let­
ters and human sciences at the University of Paris X
(Nanterre) for many years and is currently the John Nu-
veen Professor Emeritus in the Divinity School, the
Department of Philosophy, and the Committee on So­
cial Thought at the University of Chicago.
Originally published as Temps et Recti, vol. 2,
© Editions du Seuil, 1984
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 1985 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 1985
Printed in the United States of America
94 93 92 91 90 89 88 87 86 85 1 2 3 4 5
Library of Congress Cataloging; in Publication Data
Ricoeur, Paul.
Time and narrative.
Translation of: Temps et recit.
Includes index.
1. Narration (Rhetoric) 2. Time in literature.
3. Mimesis in literature. 4. Plots (Drama, novel, etc.)
5. History—Philosophy. I. Title.
PN212.R5213 1984 809'.923 83-17995
ISBN 0-226-71331-8 (v. 1)
ISBN 0-226-71333-4 (v. 2)
Contents
Preface vii
PART III: THE CONFIGURATION OF TIME
IN FICTIONAL NARRATIVE 3
1. The Metamorphoses of the Plot 7
2. The Semiotic Constraints on Narrativity 29
3. Games with Time 61
4. The Fictive Experience of Time 100
Conclusion 153
Notes 161
Index 203

Preface
Volume 2 of Time and Narrative requires no special introduction. This vol­
ume contains Part III of the single work sketched out in the opening pages of
volume 1. Furthermore, the theme of Part III, the configuration of time by
fictional narrative, corresponds strictly to the theme of Part II in volume 1,
the configuration of time by historical narrative. Part IV, which will make up
my third and final volume, will bring together under the title Narrated Time
the threefold testimony that is provided by phenomenology, history, and fic­
tion concerning the power of narrative, taken in its indivisible wholeness, to
refigure time.
This brief preface allows me the opportunity to add to the acknowledg­
ments made at the beginning of Volume 1 of Time and Narrative an expression
of my gratitude to the directors of the National Humanities Center in North
Carolina. The exceptional conditions offered to the Fellows there, allowed
me, in large part, to carry out the research that led to this volume.
vii

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 mimesis is applied to a new region of the narrative field which,
2
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 every­
thing 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 prob­
lem 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 justi­
fication 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 nar­
rative do have in common is that they both stem from the same configurating
operations I put under the title mimesis. On the the hand, what opposes them
2
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.
3
Time in Fictional Narrative
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 config­
uration 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 Aris­
totelian tradition, I shall attempt correlatively to deepen the notion of tem­
porality handed down by the Augustinian tradition, without at the same time
moving outside the framework provided by the notion of narrative configura­
tion, hence without crossing over the boundaries of mimesis.
2
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 undei the formal principle of concordant discordance by which
I defined narrative configuration? (b) Does emplotment, through all these mu­
tations, offer a stability that would allow it to be situated in terms of the para­
digms 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 "de­
cline," 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 under­
standing, forged by our familiarity with the narratives transmitted by our cul­
ture, 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 ratio­
nality—a dispute we shall have to arbitrate—offers an obvious parallel with
the discussion that arose in Part II concerning the epistemology of contempo­
rary 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 struc­
tures. The question arises whether we can provide the same response to this
4