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Narrative Time
Paul Ricoeur
1. Presuppositions
My first working hypothesis is that narrativity and temporality are
closely related-as closely as, in Wittgenstein's terms, a language game
and a form of life. Indeed, I take temporality to be that structure of
existence that reaches language in narrativity and narrativity to be the
language structure that has temporality as its ultimate referent. Their
relationship is therefore reciprocal.
This structural reciprocity of temporality and narrativity is usually
overlooked because, on the one hand, the epistemology of history and
the literary criticism of fictional narratives take for granted that every
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several ways: first, the "then" and "and then" structure that provides an
answer to the question "What next?" suggests a relation of exteriority
between the phases of the action; second, the episodes constitute an
open-ended series of events that allows one to add to the "then" an "and
then" and an "and so on"; and finally, the episodes follow one another in
accordance with the irreversible order of time common to human and
physical events.
The configurational dimension, in turn, displays temporal features
that may be opposed to these "features" of episodic time. The configurational arrangement makes the succession of events into significant
wholes that are the correlate of the act of grouping together. Thanks to
this reflective act-in the sense of Kant's Critiqueof Judgment-the whole
plot may be translated into one "thought." "Thought," in this narrative
context, may assume various meanings. It may characterize, for instance,
following Aristotle's Poetics, the "theme" (dianoia) that accompanies the
"fable" or "plot" (mythos)of a tragedy.8 "Thought" may also designate the
"point" of the Hebraic maschal or of the biblical parable, concerning
which Jeremias observes that the point of the parable is what allows us to
translate it into a proverb or an aphorism. The term "thought" may also
apply to the "colligatory terms" used in history writing, such terms as
"the Renaissance," "the Industrial Revolution," and so on, which, according to Walsh and Dray, allow us to apprehend a set of historical
events under a common denominator. (Here "colligatory terms" correspond to the kind of explanation that Dray puts under the heading of
"explaining what.") In a word, the correlation between thought and plot
supersedes the "then" and "and then" of mere succession. But it would
be a complete mistake to consider "thought" as a-chronological. "Fable"
and "theme" are as closely tied together as episode and configuration.
The time of fable-and-theme, if we may make of this a hyphenated
expression, is more deeply temporal than the time of merely episodic
narratives.
The plot's configuration also superimposes "the sense of an
use Kermode's expression-on
the open-endedness of
ending"-to
mere succession. As soon as a story is well known-and such is the case
with most traditional and popular narratives as well as with the national
chronicles of the founding events of a given community-retelling takes
the place of telling. Then following the story is less important than
apprehending the well-known end as implied in the beginning and the
well-known episodes as leading to this end. Here again, time is not
abolished by the teleological structure of the judgment which grasps
together the events under the heading of "the end." This strategy of
8. It may be noted in passing that this correlation between "theme" and "plot" is also
the basis of Northrop Frye's "archetypal" criticism.
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3. Historicalityand Repetition
I have shown how my analysis of narrative structure confirms the
Heideggerian existential analysis of time. My purpose now is to show
that the analysis of narrativity also affects and corrects Heidegger's corresponding analysis of historicality on one decisive topic.
Heidegger emphasizes three main traits as the criteria of historicality: first, time appears at this level as "extended" between birth and
death. In a sense, we are already acquainted with this aspect of time
thanks to the analysis of within-time-ness. This concept is one interpretation of the "extension" of time in terms of the "mundane" clues to
which our preoccupation is submitted in the inauthentic realm of everyday life. The problem now is to disentangle the authentic meaning of
this extension. Following an order of derivation that proceeds from the
deep structure to our scattered interests, Heidegger must confront the
concept of extension as a challenge, to the extent that temporality consists in the deep unity of future, past, and present-or, rather, of coming
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forth, having been, and making present. Augustine had already faced
this paradox in the eleventh book of his Confessions. Starting from the
key experience of the unity of expectation, memory, and attention, he
had to ascribe to the soul a specific extension, which he called distentio
animi, as a sign of finitude and fallenness. Heidegger is confronted with a
similar enigma, that is, the transition from the deep unity of the three
dimensions of time to the dispersion of time in the realm of inauthenticity. Extension, at the intermediate level, is thus both cohesion
and change. This double meaning is preserved in the term Geschehen,
which usually means "becoming," but which Heidegger brings back to
some of its archaic implications, such as mobility, extending, and being
extended. Furthermore, he chooses this idiom by reason of its kinship
with Geschichte("history").9What is ultimately at stake is the possibility of
grounding the possibility of history as a science in the existential structure of time. Geschehenis the mediating structure between temporality (as
the unity of coming-forth, having-been, and making-present) and
within-time-ness.
This leads to a second trait of historicality: the priority given to the
past in the structure of care that underlies the unity of the three dimensions of time. This trait may no longer be taken for granted in an
analysis that proceeds from top to bottom; it must even appear as a
perplexing paradox. Indeed, according to Heidegger's analysis of the
unified experience of temporality, the past is not the primary direction
of care, nor is the present, as in Augustine, since the present is the
making-present of preoccupation which prevails only in the experience
of within-time-ness from which we started in our earlier move from
bottom to top. The primary directionof care is toward thefuture. Through
care, we are always already "ahead of" ourselves. Of course the shift
from future to past is understandable to the extent that any project
implies memory and that no authentic anticipation of what we may "have
to be" is possible without borrowing from the resources of what we
already "have been." Nevertheless, the exclusive concern for the past,
which generates history, must appear as an intriguing enigma when put
against the background of the existential analysis of care and its primary
orientation toward the future.
A third trait has still to be underlined: when we speak of becoming,
either in the field of nature or of history, we imply an indefinite extension of duration both backward and forward. The history of nature, like
that of mankind, knows no beginning and no end. But this vague notion
has no existential force. What first makes sense is the notion of an individual life extending between birth and death. This "in between" is the
appropriate temporal characteristic of the "extension" of life as
9. In order to preserve this kinship, the translators of Being and Time have translated
the German Geschehen as "historicizing."
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return to hearth and home. I think that the myth of Ulysses is very
important for us. We will all be a little like Ulysses, for in searching,
in hoping to arrive, and finally, without a doubt, in finding once
again the homeland, the hearth, we re-discover ourselves. But, as in
the Labyrinth, in every questionable turn, one risks "losing oneself." If one succeeds in getting out of the Labyrinth, in finding
one's home again, then one becomes a new being.12
The retardation that Eliade speaks of here is no longer a mere suspension in the epiphany of order; retardation now means growth.
The Odyssey, accordingly, could be seen as the form of transition
from one level of repetition to another, from a mere fantasy repetition
that is still the reverse side of the quest to a kind of repetition that would
generate the quest itself. With The Odyssey,the character of repetition is
still imprinted in time by the circular shape of the travel in space. The
temporal return of Odysseus to himself is supported by the geographical
return to his birthplace, Ithaca.
We come still closer to the kind of repetition suggested by Heidegger's analysis of historicality with stories in which the return to the origin
is not just a preparatory phase of the tale and no longer mediated by the
shape of the travel back to the birthplace. In these stories, repetition is
constitutive of the temporal form itself. The paradigmatic case of such
stories is Augustine's Confessions. Here the form of the travel is interiorized to such a degree that there is no longer any privileged place in
space to which to return. It is a travel "from the exterior to the interior,
and from the interior to the superior" (Ab exterioribusad interiora, ab
interioribusad superiora). The model created by Augustine is so powerful
and enduring that it has generated a whole set of narrative forms down
to Rousseau's Confessionsand Proust's Le Temps retrouve. If Augustine's
Confessionstells "how I became a Christian," Proust's narrative tells "how
Marcel became an artist." The quest has been absorbed into the movement by which the hero-if we may still call him by that name-becomes
who he is. Memory, therefore, is no longer the narrative of external
adventures stretching along episodic time. It is itself the spiral movement that, through anecdotes and episodes, brings us back to the almost
motionless constellation of potentialities that the narrative retrieves. The
end of the story is what equates the present with the past, the actual with
the potential. The hero is who he was. This highest form of narrative
repetition is the equivalent of what Heidegger calls fate (individual fate)
or destiny (communal destiny), that is, the complete retrieval in resoluteness of the inherited potentialities that Dasein is thrown into by
birth.
12. Mircea Eliade, L'Epreuvedu labryrinthe(Paris, 1978), p. 109; my translation.
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The objection could be made, at this point, that only fictional narrative, and not history, reaches this deep level of repetition. I do not think
this is the case. It is not possible to ascribe only to inquiry-as opposed to
traditional narrative-all the achievements of history in overcoming
legendary accounts, that is, the release from mere apologetic tasks related to the heroic figures of the past, the attempt to proceed from mere
narrative to truly explanatoty history, and, finally, the grasping of whole
periods under a leading idea. We may thus wonder whether the shift
from sequential history to explanatory history, described by Maurice
Mandelbaum in his Anatomy of Historical Knowledge, does not find its
complete meaning in the further shift from explanatory history to what
he calls interpretive history.
While an interpretive account is not usually confined to a single
cross section of time but spans a period . . . the emphasis in such
works is on the manner in which aspects of society or of the culture
of the period, or both, fit together in a pattern, defining a form of
life different from that which one finds at other times or in other
places.13
Are we stretching the notion of interpretation too far if we put it
in the Heideggerian terms of repetition? Mandelbaum may dislike
this unexpected proximity to Heideggerian ideas. I find, nevertheless, some confirmation and encouragement for taking this daring step
in the profound analysis of action that Hannah Arendt gives in her
brilliant work The Human Condition.14 Arendt distinguishes among labor,
work, and action. Labor, she says, aims merely at survival in the struggle
between man and nature. Work aims at leaving a mark on the course of
things. Action deserves its name when, beyond the concern for submitting nature to man or for leaving behind some monuments witnessing to
our activity, it aims only at being recollected in stories whose function it is
to provide an identity to the doer, an identity that is merely a narrative
identity. In this sense, history repeats action in the figure of the memorable.
Such is the way in which history itself-and not only fictionprovides an approximation of what a phenomenology of time experience may call repetition.
To end this inquiry, I would like to indicate in what sense this
mutual clarification of historicality and narrativity affects the
13. Maurice Mandelbaum, The Anatomyof Historical Knowledge (Baltimore, 1977), pp.
39 ft.
14. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, 1958).
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