Chapter 8: Tense Times
The argument about the relationship between time and narrative is now coming into focus. It begins in the Kantian notion that we have no access to things in themselves, but only, as phenomenology holds, to things as they are experienced, apprehended in consciousness, thought about, or understood. But the concept of consciousness cannot be taken for granted. Philosophy in general, both in the phenomenological and in the Anglo-American analytical traditions, has turned to language in order to investigate the realms of experience, perception, thought and understanding. If consciousness is fundamentallylinguistic
, it follows that we ought to be able to study what we think of as phenomena, or the only reality to which we have access, through linguistic forms. There are philosophers and linguists who have taken this approach to the relationship between linguistic forms and metaphysics: that some understanding of reality can be reached through the analysis of linguistic forms, and even that some understanding of what time is can be reached through an analysis of temporal reference in language, and particularly through the understanding of tense. What has not really been done is to apply this argument specifically to narrative, and therefore to move not only between linguistics and metaphysics, but to infer from the tense structure of narrativea metaphysics
of time.
We have, in the terminology supplied to us by Genette, a basic framework for the description of tense in narrative, but there is much more work to be done on the relevance of tense in narratology, and particularly so because the study of tense in relation to linguistic and logical structure has been a fertile area of philosophy over the last few decades.
Here we find ourselves switching between what are often, and misleadingly,
called the Continental and Anglo-American traditions of philosophy. While many of the perspectives explored so far in this study have their roots in the structuralist and phenomenological traditions of European thought, the major contributions to an understanding of tense have evolved in British and American philosophy. It is one of the aims of this concluding chapter to bring these discourses into conversation, but it is also reasonable to claim that this is one of the areas in which these apparently separate traditions of philosophy have encountered and used each other’s insights. It might also not be too much of an exaggeration to assert that this is also the domain in which the philosophy of time comes into closest contact with the approaches to time in the physical sciences. It is therefore the aim of this chapter to identify and analyse the ways in which the study of narrative can learn from the philosophy of tense, and the ways in which this relationship between narrative and tense map onto the debates surrounding time in the physical sciences. As before, the direction of teaching is not one-directional, from philosophy to literature. It will also be suggested here that an understanding of the temporal structure of fictional narrative, and of narrative in general, offers a kind of access, perhaps the only access we have, to what might be called the ‘reality’ of time.
The relationship between narrative time and tense can be approached through the slightly, but only slightly, less complex question of the tense structure of the English verb. David Crystal argues that we are all misled into a simplified understanding of tense by the schoolroom notion that there are fundamentally three tenses which correspond to the three logical time zones of past, present and future, a conception of tense which derives from the ending-based tense structure of Latin. Crystal has some fun with this idea, demonstrating that the present tense alone can be used to refer to the present, the past and the future in an indefinite number of permutations. The form of the present tense in the English verb, in other words, does not guarantee that the time reference will be to the present. Hence, the newspaper headline which declares ‘Jim Smith Dies’ uses the present to refer to the past, and the utterance ‘I hear you’ve found a new flat’ refers to an act of hearing which may have happened some time ago. This recognition about tense, Crystal argues, is one of the major contributions of linguistic accounts of English grammar in the past century, namely that there is ‘no straightforward correlation between the use of a present-tense form and the reference to present time’, that ‘one linguistic form can have several time references’ and that ‘one time reference can be expressed by several different forms’ (Crystal 2002: 112).
This might be thought a bad sign for the analytical purchase of tense on time reference, but it is easy to jump to the wrong conclusion here. The fact that the tense form of the verb does not correspond to a particular time reference is by no means a catastrophe for the analysis of tense.
Rather it points to the importance of an understanding of tense which does not place the entire burden of time-reference on the verb. Crystal, and many other analysts of tense have shown that tense operates at a discursive level higher than the tense-form of the verb, for example through indexical references such as ‘yesterday’, ‘today’ and ‘tomorrow’. It is straightforward, for example, to produce a reference to future time in the present tense with the use of such an indexical: ‘I am leaving for France tomorrow’. In miniature, this illustrates an important principle for the relation between tense and time: that time reference cannot be located in the verb itself, so that the analysis of temporal structure must look to other features of a sentence, or to larger units of discourse than the verb form itself. For this reason, for example, a narrative which is written in the present tense should not be thought of as being tensed (in the philosophical sense) differently from one written in a past tense, since the time reference to the past is not determined by the tense of its verbs. The divorce between tense and verb forms is rather like the recognition in narratology that a so-called first-person narrative voice does not correlate to the observation of first-person pronouns. Genette’s preference for the terms ‘intradiegetic’ and ‘extradiegetic’ over the traditional categories of first-person and third-person voice isa recognition
of a fallacy which is similar in nature to that of the correlation of verb-tense with temporal reference: the fallacy that there is a formal linguistic basis on which these aspects of narratological description are founded. There is some reason for retaining the terminology of tense in relation to temporal reference in narrative, but the understanding of tense on which the terminology is based must come from philosophy rather than grammar.
It is a commonplace of the philosophy of time in the analytical tradition that philosophical positions on time fall into two basic camps which are known as the tensed and the untensed or tenseless views of time respectively. These twoviews,
and their relationship to narrative, require further exposition, but for the moment serve as a justification for the retention of the terminology of tense in this discussion, despite the chasm between the linguistic verb form and its temporal reference.
Crystal’s demonstration of the complexity of the relationship between temporal reference and verb tense has some very interesting implications for the idea that it might be possible to move inferentially from linguistic structure to metaphysical propositions about time. But this is not the direction that Crystal’s own inquiry takes in the analysis presented in ‘TalkingAbout
Time’. The demonstration of the complexity of temporal reference in this analysis is followed by a discussion of what he calls the ‘literary dimension’ of talking about time. Far from inferring anything about the nature of time from the temporal structure of language, this section reverts to a kind of content-based citation of literature in which time is addressed explicitly as a topic. We are offered Dylan Thomas reflecting on the nature of time in Under Milk Wood and T. S. Eliot’s invocation of Aboriginal time in Burnt Norton. Perhaps more astonishing in its failure to take on board the implications of his own argument is the citation of a passage from As You Like It, in which Rosalind explains to Orlando the ‘diverse paces with divers persons’ with which time passes, and from which discussion he draws the following staggering conclusion: ‘This early instance of temporal relativity, anticipating Einsteinian insights by some 300 years, brings us closer to the way in which some cultures routinely think of time, as a relative, dynamic, influential, living force, and express it in their verb forms, vocabulary, idiom, and figurative expression’ (2002: 123). There is, in this transfer of attention from the structures of tense in a language to the explicit thematisation of time in literature a reflection of what we might call the problem of time in literary criticism, that is, the retreat from formal and linguistic aspects of temporal structure to mere citations and paraphrases of literary statements about time. If literature really says something about time in the sense that it makes some contribution to metaphysical reflections on time, it will be analysed by a serious effort to understand the temporal structure of its discourses rather than by the citation and paraphrase of its statements by a content-based criticism. In Crystal’s article this is all the more surprising because the consideration of literature follows from a brief discussion of the linguistic-anthropological approach to the question of time. According to the anthropological view, commonly associated with Benjamin Lee Whorf, our sense of reality is directly associated with the structure of language, and therefore, when it comes to time, the ‘metaphysics of time’ which operates in a culture can be accessed by analysing the structures of language of that culture. One of the obvious consequences of this view is that any analysis that upholds it will be indifferent to the explicit content of a discourse and therefore any open statements about time that it may make. Instead it will aim to identify the metaphysical suppositions about time which are inherent in the system and structure of a particular language. Crystal, following Whorf, offers a range of observations which work from linguistic structures to a concept of time: the Hopi tense system and its lack of past and future tenses; the attachment of tensed endings to words that are not verbs in Potawatomi and Japanese; and the use of the same word to signify ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’ in Arrernte and Wik-Mungkan to name three. These examples seem to suggest that some kind of concept of time can be read off from aspects of a languagesystem, that is from the ‘formal ways in which languages express time relationships’ (2002:116).
Why then, when Crystal turns to literature, does he retreat from the view that a concept of time can be discerned in the formal ways in which literature expresses time relationships to one in which time is addressed at the level of theme and content? When looking for a tensebased perspective on the metaphysics of time in narrative, the argument that time-reference is not directly correlated to verb tense offers an interesting premise, while the practice of discovering passages which thematise time in literature offers something disappointingly pre-critical.
A-Series and B-Series Semantics
The real possibilities for a narratology informed by tense philosophy are indicated by, among other works, Peter Ludlow’s thesis in Semantics, Tense and Time, the basic goal of which is to ‘illustrate how one can study metaphysical questions from a linguistic/semantical perspective’.
Interestingly, Ludlow also begins from Whorf’s anthropology, and the claim that the reality of time can be inferred from the structure of language. For Ludlow, however, this is not the same as a claim that some contingent, culturally different concept of time can be inferred from the language of a particular culture, but rather, as he claims, the generative grammar of the past few decades has shown us, that ‘the differences between human languages are superficial at best’ (Ludlow 1999: xiii):
I think that on a certain level of deep analysis his [Whorf’s] description of the Hopi tense system was basically correct - not just for the Hopi, but for all of us. That is, I think that a close study of English does not support the thesis that there is such a thing as tense - at least not the sort of tense system that is compatible with currently favoured philosophical theories of time. (1999: xiv)
Ludlow is quite sure that speakers of English in fact conform to the claim made of the Hopi, that we have ‘no words, grammatical forms, constructions or expressions that refer directly to what we call “time”, or to past, present or future.’ Like Crystal then he is sceptical in regard to the possibility of reading metaphysical beliefs from verb tenses alone, but confident nevertheless that metaphysical commitments about the reality of time are entailed in the structures of language. In other words ‘tense’
here
means something more than verb tense, and the study of this enlarged notion of tense will therefore offer a ‘way of studying metaphysical questions from a linguistic perspective’. By following the argument about tense, therefore, it is possible to develop a theory of narrative tense which is capable of analysing what narratives say about time without resort to the kind of thematic or content-based analysis that we find in Crystal’s argument, and which prevails to such a surprising extent in commentaries on the contemporary novel.
The distinction between A-series and B-series theories of time, which has been so entrenched in the philosophy of time in the analytical tradition, is capable of some important contributions to an understanding of narrative, and particularly so when it operates, as Ludlow’s argument does, by moving between linguistics and metaphysics. The theory based on an A-series conception of time (A-theory) normally holds that the future and the past do not exist, and that existence therefore is presence.
It is possible to say only that the events of the past did exist, and that the events of the future will exist, but these events are tensed in relation to the present, to now, which is thought of as having special ontological properties. The A-theory is therefore a tensed theory of time, and goes by a variety of other names such as presentism and the moving now theory. B-theory, on the other hand, dispenses with the idea of the now, and therefore with the idea of events being past and future. Time, according to B-theory, is a sequence of events all of which are equally real, and between which the only relations are those of earlier than and later than, and the idea of ‘now’ or ‘the present’ is merely psychological. B-theory is therefore untensed, and is often thought of as an objective and essentially spatial way of understanding events, as if time were spread out like a landscape. A-theory gives time properties (the properties of being present, past or future) while B-theory views time in terms of relations (of being earlier or later than). The interesting thing about the B-theory, especially for our purposes, is that though it denies any special ontological status to the present, or indeed any real ontological difference between the past and the future, it is not quite true to say that it dispenses with the ideas of present, past and future altogether. B-theory explains what we mean when we view something to be past, present or future as just that: something that we ‘mean’ or something which is an effect of linguistic meaning. The idea of the past, for example, is something which comes into being only when some utterance produces it. If I say that my fifteenth birthday is in the past, what I mean, according to B-theorists, is that it is earlier than the event of my saying that it is in the past, and similarly, ‘now’ and ‘in the future’ just mean ‘the time of this utterance’ and ‘later than this utterance’. The relation between the present, the past and the future, which is encoded in linguistic tense, is therefore just a way of placing events in relation to the utterances which refer to them, so that A-properties can simply be translated into B-relations. Reciprocally, the A-theorist characteristically views the earlier than/later than relations of the B-series as a scheme which simply asserts the properties of presence, pastness and futurity in a way that seeks to eliminate the subjectivity and the special ontological status on which the idea of presence rests. In the analytical tradition it has generally been assumed that these perspectives are incompatible, and that the philosopher, and indeed the theoretical physicist, is obliged to choose between tensed and untensed conceptions of time.
Hence, the fundamental positions on time can be mapped onto these apparently opposing theories from the debate between presentism and eternalism in philosophy to the difference between temporal becoming and the block-view universe in contemporary physics. Clearly Augustine’s difficulties surrounding the existence of the present operate according to a tensed account of time, whileits
opposite, namely the view of eternity as a spatial and static landscape is a perspective available only to God. Those theories of time, both before and after Kant, which hold that the object of study can be only that which is accessible to the humanconsciousness
also hold that there can be no access to the B-series conception of time: that it is an essentially non-human perspective.
How might the A-series/B-series distinction work when it comes to the theory or narrative, and particularly to fictional narrative? I observed in Chapter 1 that the phenomenology of reading a novel differed from the phenomenology of life more generally insofar as the future, in a novel, is not absolutely open. In the written text, thefuture lies in wait in a specific way, in that it is possible to flout the linearity of writing and take
an excursion into the future. I can abandon the moving now of fiction, the place of the bookmark, and skip ahead at will. I do not require the wormhole of authorially controlled prolepsis for such an excursion, in the sense that I can leaf through the novel and seize on any moment of the fictional future. In this sense the fictional future is not really open, because events in the future are already written and awaiting myarrival,
and this can be verified by actually visiting them out of turn. This is most obvious in the case of a novel that I have read before, where I know for certain what is to come, and have to feign to myself, or reconstruct, the experience of not knowing. It is one of the features of the B-series that it does not give any special ontological privilege to the present, and that it views all moments, including ‘future events’, to have an equal status. As a temporal structure it might appear as if the fictional narrative represents, artificially, a B-theory of time in the sense that its time sequence is laid out spatially as a book, and that all moments of that sequence exist equally, co-temporaneously as written words. Whereas the existence of the future is controversial in extra-fictional human time, it is much less controversial to claim that the fictional future already exists. The discourses of fatalism and determinism regularly borrow from this feature of writing, whether fictional or not, to describe the future as in some way written, or scripted, since something that has a script does not have an open future. The privilege of the present is undermined by writing, and so too is the asymmetry between the past and future, since the future is no more open, no more affected by decision and choice than is the past.
It would seem then that the world of written narrative (let us stick for the moment with fictional narrative) presents a B-series of a more certain kind than is ever given in ‘lived experience’. And yet there is also a kind of experiential present at work in the reading of fiction. When Peter Brooks talks about reading as the decoding of the preterite tense as a kind of present, he refers to a kind of tensed sense that the reader makes of fictional retrospect, living the events through the moving now of the reader’s present (Brooks 1984: 22). According to this moving now, reading is like life, to the extent that the events that have been read are like those that have been lived. They become part of the past. They are remembered in their sequence, and as explanations for the situation of the present. The future, on the other hand, has all the semblance of the extra-fictional future. It is open, often unpredictable, and the subject of anticipations, fears and desires. In previous chapters I have claimed that fictional narrative in various ways forges together anticipation and retrospect, as the anticipation of retrospect. Prolepsis, as we have seen, does this by incorporating into the present a future from which that present will be viewed, whether that future is a fictional event or the event of its reading. The double time of detective fiction gives prolepsis an elaborate power to conjoin the forwards motion of narration to the backwards motion of explanation, and therefore to instruct the experience of events in the light of their outcome. In terms of the debate between A-theory and B-theory, a similar claim can be made for fictional narrative: that fictional narrative is characterised by its special power to articulate a tensed theory of time to an untensed theory of time, though it may be that this is no more than the demonstration of how preposterous it was to separate the two in the first place.
This is a rather bold claim, but it is one that can be supported relatively easily by an analysis of the tense conditions of fiction. The phrase ‘tense conditions’ here has to be distinguished from any straightforward conception of verb tense. As Crystal’s argument indicates, the analysis of tense, and therefore the analysis of temporal structure in discourse must be enlarged beyond the notion of verb tense in order to account adequately for the complex system of time reference. Ludlow’s argument is similar, insofar as it points to aspects of tense that are not encoded in the verb, and uses these aspects to test semantic theories which advance A-theories and B-theories of time. At the core of the argument is a claim that I would want to distance my own argument from, in ways that will become clear, that the A-series of time corresponds more closely to reality than the B-series. ‘Metaphysics’ Ludlow believes ‘is, in part, the study of what is real’ (1999: 1), and by extension, the ability of A-series and B-series based semantic theories to cope with the complexities of temporal structure in language will tell us important things about which conception of time is more effective, as it were, in the study of reality.
Ludlow’s interest lies in indexicals and temporalanaphora, that
is those words which point to times past, present and future which are not part of the verb form. His aim is therefore double: on one hand he seeks to show that B-series approaches to time cannot account semantically for these aspects of language as adequately as A-series semantics, and on the other hand, to show that weaknesses which have been identified in A-theory can be defended or even repaired. I am not going to analyse the account Ludlow offers of A-series semantics and its ability to explain indexicals and temporal anaphora. I am interested, however, in the defence he mounts for A-theory in general and the critique he develops of the B-series account from linguistic premises. In the first place, then, let us consider the principal problems with the A-series account of time.
The most famous objection is McTaggart’s, who originally formulated the problem by arguing that the A-theory is essential to any coherent conception of time, but also that it is contradictory, and therefore that time cannot be real (McTaggart 1908). The argument is as follows. The A-theory, according to McTaggart is committed to the idea of change, and as many commentators since McTaggart have pointed out, the metaphors used to describe this commitment to change are generally ideas of motion, passing and flowing. Hence, the river characteristically offers an account of perpetual change through the metaphor of flowing water, where the water that will flow past one’s Wellington boots is still upstream, the water that is flowing past them is in front of one’s eyes, and the water that did flow past them is now downstream. In this scheme, the importance of past, present and future is evident. If, for analytical purposes we decide to name a single molecule of water M, we can say that in relation to an observer standing in the river, M is in the first place, when it is upstream of the observer, in the future, then subsequently it is present and within the eyeshot of the observer, and thereafter is downstream and therefore in the past. Clearly this is not a moving now conception of time. The now, by this metaphor, is staying still while events flow or pass. Nevertheless, according to A-theory M has the properties of being future, past and present at different times, and because these properties are incompatible - because something cannot be past and future, or present and future - McTaggart claims that A-theory leads to contradiction. The standard objection here is that it is, of course, perfectly possible for something to be past, present and future, just not at the same time. The whole point about the A-theory is that it arranges time in terms of these properties, but these properties change: events change from being future to being present to being past. M therefore does have the property of being future, the property of being present and the property of being past, but not at the same time. McTaggart considers this to be an inadmissible defence on the grounds that it involves an invocation of the B-theory which holds that time is a sequence in order to separate the incompatible ontological properties advanced by the A-theory. This part of McTaggart’s argument can appear quite foolish, but the way in which it is foolish tells us something useful, and particularly so about time and narrative. It is clear that McTaggart’s problem lies in viewing the B-series and the A-series as incompatible theories. It is certainly clear that the problems with each theory, as they have been analysed over the last century, lie in those aspects which each theory, taken in isolation, abandon as the property of the other. An adequate theory of time must be both tensed and tenseless: it must be capable of accounting for the properties of past, present and future, and at the same time be capable of analysing the more objective relations of earlier than and later than. McTaggart’s claim that it is somehow cheating for an A-theorist to invoke the B-series is an authoritarian defence of a distinction which should not have been upheld in the first place, when it is the very necessity of a compatibilist combination of A-series and B-series which is the principal insight yielded by the attempt to hold them in opposition. The problem is well known and so is the solution. It is fundamentally the same problem as that of Augustine’s contrast between the present and eternity, and phenomenology’s opposition between temporality and cosmological time, and its solution normally takes the form of a recognition that presentism isn’t intelligible without borrowing some of the conceptual resources of its other - the idea of sequence or objective time - while the idea of sequence lacks any ability to account for time in the way that it is lived and perceived by human beings.
Before we return to the relevance of tense in the analysis of narrative, and the question of what narrative tells us about the tensed and tenseless theories of time, it is worth analysing the link between the A/B distinction and the Augustinian aporias of time. Augustine’s key analogy between time and the recitation of a psalm is particularly suggestive for narratology:
Suppose that I am going to recite a psalm that I know. Before I begin my faculty of expectation is engaged by the whole of it. But once I have begun, as much of the psalm as I have removed from the province of expectation and relegated to the past now engages my memory, and the scope of the action which I am performing is divided between the two faculties of memory and expectation, the one looking back to the part which I have already recited, the other looking forward to the part which I have still to recite. But my faculty of attention is present all the while and through it passes what was the future in the process of becoming the past. As the process continues, the province of memory is extended in proportion as that of expectation is reduced, until the whole of my expectation is absorbed. This happens when I have finished my recitation and it has all passed into the province of memory. (Augustine 1961: 278)
Like the river, the analogy of the psalm provides a model for the flow of time in relation to a witness: the river’s static witness becomes the presence of ‘my faculty of attention’, through which the words of the psalm pass, transforming the future into memory. It is of course possible to view the relation of motion and stasis differently. Instead of a static witness, through which water or words flow, we might equally posit a static landscape through which a witness journeys, or a static structure of words through which the reader or recital makes active progress. The advantage of the analogy of the psalm is that, as a scripted discourse, with a verbal structure determined in advance, there is a clear B-series which allows one to claim that each moment, each part, past, present or future of that discourse does have existence. That is to say, there is some imagined vantage point from which the discourse can be seen as a whole, not as a series of nows strung out in time, but as a structural unity in which all parts have an equivalent ontological status. On the other hand there is also an A-series, which is the now of the reader, in the sense of the bit of the discourse currently under the light of what Augustine calls the faculty of attention. There is a tenseless view of the psalm, which ignores the moving now of the recitation, and postulates a B-series in which different parts relate only through the relations of earlier and later; and there is a tensed view, according to which the only bits of the discourse which exist are the bits currently passing through the faculty of attention, while the remainder wallows in the ontologically secondary realms of expectation and memory. Reading, then, offers a particularly useful model for the interaction of A-theory and B-theory, being an analogy for the prescripted landscape and the movement of a subjective witness across it.
The psalm may or may not be a narrative, but even if it is not, the ‘forward’ motion of reading enables it to function as a model of time, and an illustration of A-theory and B-theory. When the discourse in question is a narrative, the effectiveness of the model is doubled, in the sense that we are not only waiting for, or reaching towards, words from the future, but words which are the carriers of events. For a written narrative, the existence of the future is material, in the form of graphic signs or pages ahead, and it is referential. McTaggart’s argument can now be restated in a way that is more obviously related to fictional narrative. He claims, in The Unreality of Time, that in order for things to exist in time, events must be ordered in relation to a B-series and an A-series: that these two aspects of time must combine to offer an adequate account, but that the two perspectives are in fact incompatible, and therefore that they lead to contradiction. The link between this argument and the question of fictional time is made by McTaggart himself in The Nature of Existence, when he considers a possible objection to his argument that time sequences must be thought of in terms of Aand B-series. The objection that McTaggart fends off here is that fictional narrative possesses B-series relations but not A-series properties of time. According to this view, it is not possible to say, of fictional events, that they are past, present or future, but only that one event occurs before or after another. McTaggart claims that, in order for things to be thought of in time at all, they must be thought of in the A-series as well as the B-series, but in the case of fiction, we seem to be faced with events that do occur in time, but which are entirely in the B-series. McTaggart’s answer to this objection is that fictional events are not really located in time at all, since they are not existents, but that we nevertheless imagine them existing in time, and that to do so entails imagining them in the A-series as well as the B-series.
To support this claim, he offers the example of Richard Jeffries’ After London, a fiction which is set in the future: because we imagine the events of this novel to be located in the future, McTaggart claims, we are imagining fictional events, despite their unreality, to have the property of futurity, and therefore imagining them in the A-series. This is a particularly confusing example, which I would like to contemplate, in order to clarify what it would mean to say that fictional events are imagined in the A-series. If, for example, I think of a novel that is not set in the future, such as Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, it seems to me critical that I still think of its events as occurring in the future. It may have been written in the 1840s, and set in Puritan Boston, but my attribution of A-series properties to the fictional events is clearly not confined to the location of events in relation to my ‘historical now’. The revelation of Hester Prynne’s former marriage, and the paternity of her daughter Pearl are future in the sense that they lie in wait of the imagined now of reading, whereby the past tense of the narrative is decoded as a kind of present.
It may be that the A-properties are complex here, but they are nevertheless A-properties. Hence, I think of Hester’s narrative as something that will unfold for me from the future even while it is located, and tensed, in the past in the same way that I might read Jeffries’s After London and think of it as a future which is located in the past: as what the future used to be like. These two tense structures, of a past which lies ahead, and a future which is past, are inherent in the temporal reference of narrative fiction, and only the surface of a multi-layered conception of ‘now’ that operates in the reading of fiction.
The reading of a novel, in other words, is tensed, but not only for the reasons given by McTaggart: it is tensed not only in relation to the reader’s historical now, but also the now into which the reader is interpellated by the fiction, irrespective of history. Gregory Currie develops a different kind of objection to McTaggart’s remarks about fiction in ‘A Literary Philosophy of Time?’ (G. Currie 1999) as part of a general consideration of the possibilities that literature might have something to tell us about the nature of time. Currie takes issue with McTaggart’s basic claim that to imagine the events of fiction as taking place in time, we must imagine them in the A-series:
Now I say that the general claim - that imagining events in time involves imagining them in the A series - is wrong. On my view, the standard mode of imaginative involvement with fictions is to imagine that this is occurring before, after, or even contemporaneously with that, but not to imagine either this or that as occurring now, or in the past, or in the future. (1999: 54)
In other words, there is a conception of events in time entailed in the imaginative involvement with ficiton but it is strictly a B-series conception, and therefore McTaggart’s claim - that there is no conception of time without the A-series - cannot be right. Let us follow Currie’s argument that imaginative involvement with fiction does not involve the A-series. In the first place, he is clear that in order to show that McTaggart is wrong, he is not required to demonstrate that an A-series conception of time is never at work, but only that it is possible to have ‘temporally adequate’ imaginative involvement which is not tensed. To illustrate this, he turns from fiction to film. The crucial stage of this argument is the next one: ‘If we suppose that imaginative involvement with the film requires us to think of its events as tensed, then it seems overwhelmingly plausible that we are to think of them as present’ (1999: 55).
Watching a film, according to this argument, involves imagining seeing the events represented by the film from the point of view of the camera, and therefore imagining seeing them occuring now. This is an argument which, as Currie admits, has enjoyed less than universal assent,
because of the conflation of the idea of tense with the idea of presence in so-called ‘fictional involvement’. The usefulness of film for Currie is that it illustrates a contradiction in the idea of presence, since films invite a viewer to imagine themselves as a witness within the spatiotemporal world of the film from the point of view of the character, and at the same time (most obviously in cases where fictional characters are alone) as a witness located outside that spatiotemporal world. The contradiction here leads Currie to suppose that imaginative involvement is impersonal, meaning that the events of the fiction are spatiotemporally related to one another but not to us, and therefore that we do not imagine the events of film, or fiction, as past, present or future.
The most striking aspect of this argument for those whose philosophy of time is less rooted in the Anglo-American analytical tradition, is its cavalier use of spatiotemporal presence as a foundational concept. The key step in the argument is the one which links tense to the concept of presence, and it is the logic of this connection which must be questioned.
The general argument of this study has returned repeatedly to the proposition that presence requires a kind of self-distance, and particularly that the present is predominantly apprehended as the object of a future memory. Where Gregory Currie argues that A-theory requires that fictional events are imagined as spatiotemporally present, I would suggest instead that a tensed view of fiction cannot operate with a notion of undivided presence as its guiding concept. The role of seeing in Currie’s argument is particularly revealing,
transposing as it does the supposed opacity of the graphic sign of fiction into the supposed luminosity of film. In fiction we do not see events, and therefore they are not present in the way that Currie intends. Moreover, to have a tensed view of events, we are ‘to think of them as present’, and yet in the majority of cases the verb structure of narrative fiction invites us to think of them as in the past. There are, as Derrida has reminded us, obvious ways in which the referents - the events of fiction, for example - are absent in writing.
The importance of tense to narratology is that it offers a framework for the analysis of temporal structure and temporal reference in narrative which will go beyond the idea of time as thematic content. This will in turn offer to narratology an exit route from some of the difficulties inherent in the notion of ‘about’, from which the discussion in this book began, and in particular from Ricoeur’s restricting notion that though time is a universal feature of narrative, it is the topic of only of few. The starting point for a tense-based theory of narrative, as I suggested above, might be based in fictional narrative, but would have scope to describe what I have referred to variously as narrative consciousness and narrative as a mode of being. It would begin in fictional narrative for several reasons, perhaps the most important of which is the freedom that fiction possesses to roam in time, and therefore to produce temporal structures of a complicated kind. One aspect of fiction’s complicated temporal structure is the special way in which a novel, for example, might possess both A-series properties and B-series relations, even if, as McTaggart claims, the B-series relations of fiction are only of an imaginative kind.
A narrative theory which begins in this compatibilism of tensed and untensed accounts of time acquires an ability to explain the proleptic mode of being, the experience of the present as the object of a future memory, which is by no means confined to fiction, and this ability derives partly from the relationship between fiction and life, or what Ricoeur calls the circle of configuration and refiguration. The value of tense-based narratology would therefore extend beyond the description of narrative fiction, and of its increasingly complex temporal structures, to an analysis of the relationship between time and narrative in general. The ability of narrative to produce or transform the human experience of time would be at issue in this analysis, and in a narratology that takes as its starting point the possibility of inferringa metaphysics
of time from the temporal structures of narrative.
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Author: Mark Currie
