Chapter 2: The Present
The present, as philosophy knows well, doesn’t exist, and yet it is the only thing which exists. The past has been, and so is not, and the future is to be, and so is not yet. That only leaves the present. But as long as the present has duration, any duration at all, it can be divided into the bits of it that have been, and so are not, and the bits of it that are to be, and so are not yet, so that the very duration of its existence consigns it to non-existence. The problem here is obvious: the relationship between presence and existence is logically circular, or tautological in the manner of a claim that a = a. Worse than that, the tautology is embedded in the tense structure of language, which insists that ‘has been’ and ‘will be’ are equivalent to ‘is not’, since what ‘is’ must be rendered in the present. The claim that what ‘has been’ ‘is not’ barely constitutes a claim at all, since all it does is to relive the conspiracy of being and presence which inhabits tense.
The complicity of presence and being, and its incumbent logical problems, hangs over all notions of the present, so that the analytical framework of tense acquires a metaphysical importance. In this discussion, three notions of the present are in question: the historical present, the philosophical present and the literary historical present. In relation to the first, I intend to invoke a set of ideas about a new experience of the present which is produced by social and technological change, ideas which have been used to characterise the contemporary world. Second, there is the idea of presence, the understanding of presence as it has been approached in philosophy, and particularly the ways in which it has been complicated and rejected in philosophy after Heidegger and Husserl.
Finally, there is the question of the ‘contemporary novel’, what that means, and how it participates in and analyses this changed experience and understanding of time. In each case then, for the world, for philosophy, and for the novel, the notion of the present is divided between the thing reflected upon and the apparent modernity of the reflection.
Social Theories of the Present
The notion that the present, understood as the contemporary world, or the historical present, is marked, or even characterised, by a changed experience of the present can be approached in a number of ways. I would like to offer three ways into this discussion, under the following headings:
(1) Time-space compression; (2) Accelerated Recontextualisation; and (3) Archive Fever.
To begin with, we might look to David Harvey and Fredric Jameson, both of whom have developed versions of the claim that the experience of the present has somehow changed. Harvey, for example, in his discussion of time-space compression (1989: 240-59) begins from the position that the time taken to traverse space, whether at the infinite speed of telecommunications or the relative speed of jet travel, produces a compression of time horizons ‘to the point that the present is all there is’ (240). Harvey traces this process as a change in the way that space and time are represented: a gradual process of representing the whole of the earth within a single spatial frame, from Renaissance mapping to the first photographs of the globe from space. Time-space compression of this kind has implications for the experience of the present partly because it extends the span of the present to encompass places once thought to be at a considerable spatial, and therefore temporal, distance. The telephone, like the view of earth from space, creates a co-presence or simultaneity between Europe and Australia which has greatly expanded the temporal and spatial horizons of the ordinary conceptions of the present and presence. In Jameson’s analyses, there is a similar emphasis on the expansion of the present as a kind of underlying logic in the contemporary phase of multinational capitalism. Our contemporary social system, Jameson claims, has begun to ‘lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social formations have had in one way or another to preserve’ (1992: 179). Something of Lacan’s account of schizophrenia is at work in this characterization, in the sense that there is some loss of temporal order, of the linear admission of meanings which organises a discourse, or a sentence, in time. The sense of orderly significance in which meanings are spread out in time has therefore yielded to a chaotic co-presence of meanings, as if all the words of a discourse constitute a kind of babble produced by their simultaneity. The very thought of global simultaneity which Harvey regards as the characteristic frame of the modern mind evokes this babble, in the form of a multifarious totality suspended in an ineluctable present. If ‘presence’ is divided between spatial and temporal properties, between the spatiality of ‘here’
and
the temporality of ‘now’, these supposedly new experiences of the present seem to offer an account of its contamination by the ‘there’ and the ‘then’, or the spatiotemporally absent.
Many of the most compelling theories of the contemporary advance some version of this contaminated present, and some account of the collapse of temporal distance into simultaneity. Accounts of postmodernity were generally preoccupied with the difficulty, if not impossibility, of continuous novelty, innovation or originality, and therefore often characterised postmodern originality as mere repetition, recycling and recontextualising of past forms. The notion of postmodern style as ‘accelerated recontextualisation’, or the recycling of the increasingly recent past, is one model on which the present is understood as the bearer of historical traces. ‘Recontextualisation’ can of course mean many things: an everyday object is recontextualised when it is placed in an art gallery, and a Shakespeare play is recontextualised when it is read in relation to the war in Iraq. In cultural criticism and the advertising industry, however, the term commonly indicates some kind of reference to the styles of the past:
some
revival of a previous aesthetic through the repetition of its forms and fashions. To take clothing design as an example, it is clear that the fashion of the 1990s and since was proceeding in a linear sequence through the decades of the mid-twentieth century, recontextualising styles from the 1960s before moving on to the 1970s and 1980s. It might look at first as if the recontextualisation of clothing style must observe a respectable gap between the original and its recontextualisation.
Wearing a kipper tie in 1982, after all, would simply be deemed unfashionable, whereas by 1990 it had acquired the ironic weight of a recontextualisation, and similarly the resurgence of the flared trouser leg had to respect a period of absence which marked the gap between the original style of the 1960s and 1970s and its repetition in the 1990s. The point about accelerated recontextualisation, however, is that this gap becomes increasingly, if not infinitely, short, so that the temporal distance between an original and its recontextualisation is abolished altogether. If the irony of the kipper tie depends on temporal distance, the acceleration of the cycle of recontextulisation in general must dispense with the ironic content of recontextualisation in general, so that the repetition of past aesthetic styles becomes value-free. The style of the present, according to the logic of accelerated recontextualisation, is more obviously constituted by traces of the past, which are no longer held at a distance by the temporal gap between the present and the past. This is perhaps most apparent in technological areas of commerce such as music, television or computing, in which the speed of recycling is unrestrained, so that, for example, the television advertisement can produce parodic representations of films which are on current release, or popular music can refer to current events. It might be claimed that fashion, and perhaps design in general, alters the present by reaching into the future as much as it reaches into the past. Design, as a form of in-built obsolescence, ensures the renewal of markets for its product in the future. It may be that there are aspects of design which still link the notion of the present, or of modernity, to the idea of progress: that technology in the present is better than it used to be, and worse than it will become. But in most areas of contemporary commerce, the notion of progress is, at best, an alibi, and more often the notion of newness is better understood as a self-serving value, with no function other than to connote newness itself. If clothing styles remained the same, frozen by edict, the notion of the contemporary, of the present, would be liberated from its frantic commercial pace, and no longer marked by its imminent and immanent obsolescence. As an aesthetic commodity, the present anticipates its own pastness in its very form, and is experienced, like everything else in the contemporary world as the object of a future memory. In the mode of accelerated recontextualisation, the process which consigns the present to memory is conducted at infinite speed, since the present commodity is always already in the past.
This commercial logic, the so-called acceleration of social time, opens into the idea of archive fever: the frenzied archiving and recording of contemporary social life which transforms the present into the past by anticipating its memory. The temporal structure of a present lived as if it were the object of a future memory is the primary focus of this book, and the central tenet of its theory of narrative. But it is clearly also a characteristic of what is thought of as contemporary society by those in the most commercial and media driven economies. Archive fever, as it is described by Derrida, is above all a future orientation, or a mode of anticipation, which structures the present:
. . the archive as printing, writing, prosthesis, or hypomnesic technique in general is not only the place for stocking and for conserving an archivable content of the past which would exist in any case, such as, without the archive, one still believes it was or will have been. No, the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future. The archivization produces as much as it records the event. This is also our political experience of the so-called news media. (1996: 17)
Archivisation is our experience of the so-called news media because the cause-and-effect sequence of an event and its recording as news is reversed in a highly developed media capitalist society: an event is recorded not because it happens, but it happens because it is recorded.
We know this from many decades of photography, and now, in an accelerated way, from the digital video camera: the present which is recorded is produced by the possibility of photography, by the act of photographing, and would not take place otherwise. The archive is not a passive record, but an active producer of the present: an ‘archiving archive’
which
structures the present in anticipation of its recollection. We know this also from narrative consciousness, which is by no means an exclusive characteristic of the contemporary world, but which is now assisted by a technological army of recording and archiving devices. Narrative is the ancient, as well as the contemporary, version of this consciousness, which lives its experience as if it were recorded in the preterite tense, and conceives of its future actions as things that will make good stories, and good memories. The structure of the archiving archive, or the envisaged future which produces the present as memory, is the heart of narrative.
The only claim that might be made for archive fever in relation to contemporary society, therefore, is that it is an accelerated, and technologically assisted, version of a phenomenon as inherent in the human condition as the telling of stories. Nevertheless, the grip that this fever currently has on the world of personal and collective self-representation is not to be underestimated or ignored on the grounds that it has a history.
The Vanishing and Banishing of the PresentThese
three notions of the contemporary - time-space compression, accelerated recontextualisation and archive fever - which are rooted in the idea of a transformed concept and experience of the present, are certainly not alien, or even new, to philosophy in its dealings with the concept of presence. In fact, an exploration of the philosophical analysis of presence raises some difficulties which challenge the basic vocabulary of the sociological accounts offered above: difficulties which relate to issues such as the concept and the experience of the present. To designate some relevant philosophical inquiries into these aspects of the present, I would like to gloss three well-known notions which characterise approaches to the present in phenomenology and its critique: the present as a crossed structure of retentions and protentions, anticipatory resoluteness, and the logic of supplementarity. The first heading refers to Husserl’s account of the present, the second to Heidegger’s emphasis on future-orientation as the foundation of being, and the third to Derrida’s critique of temporal hierarchy in philosophical thinking. Under each heading I intend to offer only the most basic account of a trajectory of philosophical thought on the present and presence, and taken together, a kind of philosophical context for the observations which follow on questions of the present and presence as they occur in the contemporary novel. It is also worth observing, at the outset, that the three former headings, which sketch somenew
experience of the present, offer not only an account of time-consciousness, but of some degree or mode of self-consciousness, whether personal or collective. The compressed global stage, the intense now-awareness of recontextualisation, and the selfdistance involved in archive fever are all conditions in which a subject is self-consciously aware of its representation, or its perception from the outside, from the point of view of another. The conjunction of time and self-consciousness is a constant one in philosophy, but less so in approaches to the contemporarynovel,
and this in one of the areas in which narrative theory can benefit from an engagement with philosophical approaches to the present.
In Husserl and Heidegger, there is a reworking of Augustine’s notion of the vanishing present. For Augustine, the present lacks extension: in its undivided form, the present is infinitely small, or without duration, and if it is given extension, in the form of some block of time to be designated as presence, that presence will be necessarily divided between elements which have been and those which are still to come. The present is therefore never before us, and any designated duration, whether it be a lifetime, a year, a month, a day, the duration of a song, or of a note in a song, it is subject to this logic of division, and therefore condemned to vanish. The elusiveness of ‘now’ becomes, for Augustine, the elusiveness of time in general, since in the vanishing of ‘now’, time loses its foundational concept. Hence in the celebrated example in Confessions, Augustine compares the passage of time to the recitation of a psalm, in which the text of the psalm passes from the future into the past, and the now of this recitation is comprised only of the awareness or memory of that which has already been and the expectation of that which is still to come. Husserl begins his essay The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness with more or less the same analogy: that of a melody in which the now is understood as the sounds which are still present to consciousness, and concludes that this presence is structured by retentions and protentions, or elements of the past which are retained in the consciousness and those which are present as anticipatory expectation. This simple observation - that presence is never present - is a fundamental and recurring tenet in the work of Heidegger and Derrida, both of whom contrast an ordinary conception of time, based on the uncritical conception of time as a sequence of nows with one in which presence is divided.
For Heidegger and Derrida, there is much more at stake than a set of debates in metaphysics. The vanishing now of Augustine’s ruminations on time create severe difficulties for the very idea of being, since being and presence are so subtly entwined in our thinking, and entwined also with the idea of linguistic meaning. The starting-point in this chapter was that the idea of existence was somehow tautologically inherent in tense structure, or perhaps more accurately the temporal reference of linguistic structures, and this point can be easily extended from the notion of existence to those of being, reality and indeed to most problems in the philosophy of language. In the work of both Heidegger and Derrida, then, there is a rejection of presence and the present as anundivided,
or self-identical foundation for time, or indeed for anything which exists in time, which is everything. And whereas in Augustine and Husserl there is a preoccupation with memory and retention (which in Husserl are related but not identical facets of consciousness), in Heidegger and Derrida there is an emphasis on future-orientation: on that aspect of the present which projects forwards in anticipation or expectation of things to come. It is in this framework that Heidegger’s anticipatory resoluteness and Derrida’s logic of supplementarity can be most readily understood. Anticipatory resoluteness is a mode of being associated by Heidegger with authenticity (a topic which receives more detailed treatment in Chapter 4), entailing a mental activity of projection forwards to death which is inherent in human being. This mode of anticipation is a way in which the envisaged future marks the present, structures the present, so that the very being for which presence is supposed to act as a foundation is structured by the non-being which it anticipates. There is a sense here in which something in the future is seen to inhabit the present, and therefore functions in a way which is homologous with the anticipation of retrospect which we discussed as archivisation earlier. In fact, the thinking behind ‘archivization’ is derived directly from Heidegger’s emphasis on the future, and might be schematised as what Derrida refers to as the ‘logic of supplementarity’ (1973: 89). Again this is a logical scheme which is returned to throughout the chapters of this book, but which requires a preliminary characterisation here.One of the patterns of thought that Derrida, with his Heideggerean background, often fixes upon is the explanation which views the ‘supplement’ as somehow secondary to the ‘origin’.
The supplement is to be understood here as something extra which comes afterwards, and which Derrida’s readings consistently showhave
some conceptual priority over the origins from which they are supposed to follow. The logic of supplementarity, for Derrida, is a counter-logic which such explanations carry within themselves. This is to say that an explanation which secures itself on the scheme of an originary presence followed by a supplement which is extra and secondary will often contain its own counter-logic which suggests the supplement is in fact prior. It is this logic of the supplement which underlies the account of archivisation offered above, and which views the envisaged future memory as a causal agent in the present.A phenomenon as widespread as news-consciousness, or as digital video self-archiving, can be said to have its philosophical equivalent in the division of the present, and in the emphasis on the future which characterises Heideggerean anticipation and Derridean supplementarity.
This set of issues about the present and presence follow quite different trajectories outside the tradition of phenomenology. For many thinkers about time the very idea of the present is horribly egocentric and must be banished in the name of objectivity. The present is, after all, a kind of perspectivism which centres any enquiry in the spatial and temporal position of a particular person or set of persons. But what would it be like to think about time without the concept of the present, or to think about anything without the notion of presence. Such an approach is often favoured by theoretical physicists who adopt the ‘block universe’ view of time in order to eliminate the perspectivism of an account of time organised around the past, the present and the future. It is a logical consequence of the rejection of the present that the dependent notions of the past and future are also banished, since their existence is entirely relative to the present. What is being rejected here is a tensed view of time, and what is being adopted is an untensed view of time. Understood at its most basic level, tense is a relation between the time of an utterance and the time of the event being spokenabout.
The position from which I began this discussion, namely that the present is the only thing which exists, and yet also does not exist, is not foisted upon us by the tensed view of time.
There are, of course, philosophical positions which consider the past to have existence of a kind which is not accorded to the future, so that the past and the present are deemed to exist, or have reality, while the future exists in an open state, as possibility which passes into actuality. Such a view does some justice to the direction of time and represents a widely held assumption that the future is ontologically distinct from the present and the past. Untensed views of time, however, generally hold that there is no ontological distinction between the past, present and future, and that in order to purge understanding of its egocentricity and its linguistic aberrations, time must be viewed as a single dimension. The untensed view of time therefore maintains that the future exists, and that the ontological priority of the present is an error produced by the mere psychological experience of time.
The remainder of this chapter applies some of these social and philosophical approaches to time to an understanding of narrative, and more specifically to an understanding of the nature of contemporary fiction. It aims in particular to explore the role of a tense framework in the characterisation of contemporary fiction.
Narrative Fiction and the Present One of the obvious things that can be said about a fictional narrative is that, in the relationship between a text and its reading it offers a kind of model of time. The reading of a novel, for example, like Augustine’s recitation of a psalm and Husserl’s description of listening to a melody, involves the passage of events from a world of future possibilities into the actuality of the reader’s present, and onwards into the reader’s memory. Read in the right order, therefore, the novel is asymmetrical in the same way that time is, since the present of the reading becomes a kind of gateway through which words, descriptions and events pass in their transition from the realm of possibility into the realm of actuality.
The experience of reading, thus described, corresponds to a tensed conception of time and represents the egocentric, or subjective, pole in the relation of the reading subject to the textual object. The untensed view of this relation would therefore correspond to the text itself, to its determinate number of pages, verbal structures and sequence of events from beginning to end. A text, as an object, corresponds to a ‘block universe’ account of time, and therefore to the notion of time cleansed of unwanted egocentricity, of the psychological clutter of a given reading, and as such represents the pole of objectivity. As far as the subject/object relation goes, the reading of a novel offers a more sophisticated model than the stock philosophical examples of tables, trees in the wood, or Oxford college quads, partly because of the temporality of reading. The most basic reflections on this analogy between reading and living, however, throw up some of the fundamental problems in the philosophy of time. It would seem sensible, for example, to view the relation of tensed and untensed approaches to time as being as inseparable as the relation between subject and object. The idea of tensed and untensed conceptions of time as polemic opponents looks deficient from a philosophical point of view, just as it is deficient to think of a text and its reading as somehow incompatible with each other. Phenomenological approaches to the act of reading have referred to the reading process as one of actualisation or concretisation to reflect this coming-into-existence of the events of a narrative as they pass from the future into the present and the past, and therefore offers a model of time in which the tensed and the untensed views of time exist in a dynamic relation with each other. It is useful here to think of the terminology associated with the tradition of Anglo-American philosophical approaches to time, which distinguish between tensed and untensed approaches to time as the difference between the A-series and the B-series. The A-series represents a view of a sequence in terms of the past, the present and the future, while the B-series represents the time of a sequence as a block, in which the relations between events are understood as a sequence of times and dates in which events relate to each other in terms of before and after.
In the A-series, or in A-theory, the present seems to have a special ontological status which brings with it a set of questions about the reality of the past and the future, while in the B-series, or in B-theory, the sequence of time is a kind of spatialised block in which all events are seen as existing together. The debates between thesepositions,
and accounts of their interaction are complex, and are the subject of more extended discussion in Chapter 8. But for our present purposes it is worth considering the application of the A-series and the B-series to the understanding of a narrative fiction. An A-theory of narrative fiction would involve attention to the moving present of the reader, while the B-theory would view the narrative as a block in which the sequence of events should be understood as having before and after relations. We find an A-theory narratology, for example, in the analysis of point of view in the sense that it takes account of the control and distribution of information in fiction, and attends to questions of what a reader does and does not know at particular stages of a reading.We find a B-theory narratology at work in literary structuralism, for example, when it views the temporal sequence of a narrative as a structure.
The emphasis on opposition in structuralist narratology, for example, tends towards B-theory because it looks at temporally separated components of a narrative as if they were co-present, perhaps viewing the beginning and ending of a novel in terms of co-present poles, or the contrast of good and bad characters as structural oppositions. Of course, in real acts of narratological analysis it is almost impossible to prevent the A-series of a narrative from merging into its B-series, the tensed sequence of reading from interacting with the untensed, objective sequence of the text, and this in itself demonstrates the difficulty of a separation of a sequence of time as an object from the egocentric experience of that sequence. Would it in fact be possible to talk about a novel entirely as a B-series without regard for the linear sequence of nows which would comprise the egocentric experience of a reading? And reciprocally, would it be possible to talk about the tensed present of reading without reference to the relations of before and after of the linguistic sequence of a text, or of the imagined temporal sequence of narrated events? It is one of the achievements of narratology to organise the many different time loci involved in reading, and in the interaction between a reader and a narrative text, into some kind of analytical framework, and it might also be considered one of the great achievements of narrative fiction that it can act as a kind of warning to philosophy against the simplicities of distinctions such as that between the tensed and the untensed conceptions of time.
In the relation between fiction and life, however, there is an important ontological boundary which is normally understood as the difference between being and non-being. If we think about this in terms of the idea that a narrative fiction provides a model of time, and that this model consists primarily of the interaction between the tensed and the untensed conceptions of time, there is an obvious and interesting problem. Put simply the problem is this: in life the future does not exist yet, but in narrative fiction, it does. Of course there are many problems with such a proposition, one of them being the idea that something fictional can exist, or perhaps more accurately, it could be said that the only reason that the future can exist in fiction is that things in fiction don’t exist. Theoretical physicists, fatalists and other B-theorists may disagree from the other point of view, that in life, the future does exist just as it exists in fiction, but that, imprisoned as we are in the ineluctable present,we
have no access to it. These objections are not really obstacles to the argument about time and narrative that I want to present, because both recognise a certain difference of access to the future between the fictional and the real universe. Whether this ontological boundary is redrawn, blurred or erased, the world of narrative is one in which the future has already taken place, and is not open.
According to this perspective, the tensed view of time, in which only the present exists, and the block view of time, in which the past and future are equally existent, interact because in the act of reading we are experiencing the past as quasi-present, and not because there is any ontological difference between fiction and life. The relevant ontological category here is written text, rather than narrative or fiction. In the oral delivery of a story, the future is open, and particularly so if I am making it up as I go along. In written text, the future lies there to the right, awaiting its actualisation by the reading, so that written text can be said to offer a block view of time which is never offered to us in lived experience. But this is as true for fictional narrative as it is for non-fictional narrative, since the existence of the future is clearly produced by the structure of temporal reference in a written narrative, and not by the nature of fiction itself.
If the written narrative offers a model of time, then, it offers one which is fundamentally at odds with what we might call ‘lived experience’.
There is, as J. R. Lucas expresses it, a fundamental modal difference between the past and present on one hand and the future on the other:
The future is not already there, waiting, like the reel of a film in a cinema, to be shown: it is, in part, open to our endeavours, and capable of being fashioned by our efforts into achievements, which are our own and of which we may be proud. (1989: 8)
The unreality of the future, its openness, contrasts with the alreadythere-ness of the future on the reel of a film, and by extension with the already-there-ness of the future in writing, whether it is a novel, an autobiography, a history, a psalm or a melody. We might ask why Augustine and Husserl don’t attend to this modal difference more explicitly when they use the psalm or the melody as a model of time, or view the fictional narrative, considered as a model of time, as flawed by this already-thereness of the future. The answer to this question, however, goes some way towards the identification of a key philosophical issue which has generally been absent from the discussion of time in narrative, and which also helps to locate the key concerns in the future of this discussion. In Lucas’s discussion there is a clear conviction that thought can do no justice to the passage of time and the direction of time unless it upholds this distinction between the reel of a film and the lived experience of time. But this is not to say that the mind is not capable of some temporal tourism:
Although in point of fact we are necessarily located in the present, in our imagination and thought we are free to adopt any temporal standpoint, past, present or future, that we please, and view events thence. It is a deep metaphysical fact that though in our bodies we are time-bound, in our thoughts we are not. I, my mouth, my body, my hand, am imprisoned in the twentieth century. But my mind is free to range over all time. (1989: 11)
The philosophical problem here, which has some place in narrative theory, is fairly simple. The tradition of thinking about time which runs from Augustine to Husserl is one in which Augustine’s theistic conception of untensed eternity gives way to an entirely tensed phenomenology of internal time-consciousness. In Husserl’s account of the melody, as in subsequent phenomenological accounts of reading, the past, the present and the future exist strictly as a unity in human consciousness. In Lucas’s view, which I am using to represent a broadly Anglo-American philosophical approach to the question of the future, the mind is free to roam in time, but the body is stuck. This separation of the body and the mind, and by extension, of time and temporality, is exactly what is not admissible in phenomenology, which restricts itself to the study of phenomena as they are apprehended in human consciousness, and so can admit to no mind-independent view of time, or to anything other than imprisonment in the mind. How then does this difference between the time of the mind and the time of the universe affect the idea of narrative as a model of time? In Lucas’s view, the mind is free to roam, but this is imagination and not reality. According to this view, the reel of a film, or the sequence of words in a book, are reifications of the mind’s freedom to adopt any temporal standpoint, to imagine and to roam, but because it is mere imagination, it follows that the reel of a film or a fictional narrative cannot provide a reliable model of time. If we take the already-there-ness of the future as the touchstone for this unreliability, or of the difference between written narrative and life, it becomes necessary to identify two distinct problems: that of retrospect and that of fictionality. In the case of retrospect, the already-there-ness of the future is a product of temporal reference, whether the future is imagined or actual, and in the case of fictionality, the already-there-ness of the future is the product of the mind’s freedom to invent the future. The difficulty of distinguishing between these kinds of textual future might be attributed to the conventions of narrative which borrow the future’s already-there-ness of non-fictional retrospect for the purposes of authenticating the future’s already-thereness in fiction. In the effort to separate the mind from reality, and therefore render the fictional narrative useless as a model of time, it would appear that the ontological objection that the future exists in fiction but not in life is implicated in a more general problematic, namely the temporal reference of retrospect.
Where does this leave the idea that narrative is fundamentally different from life? It is clear in the argument above that the existence of the future in narrative depends somewhat on the idea of writing or recording. It might be more reasonable to claim that it is writing in general which fails to correspond with the nature of time by virtue of its determined and accessible future, and therefore that if we think about narrative, as much recent narrative theory is inclined to do, in more general terms, the problem evaporates. If, for example, we think of narrative not as writing but as a mode of consciousness, or perhaps, with Derrida, think of writing in a massively expanded sense as something which encompasses experience more generally, we go some way towards resolving the asymmetry between narrative and time. Similarly, we might regard the existence of the future in written narrative as irrelevant on the grounds that, like future events more generally, this existence is actualised only by the passage of events from possibility to actuality in the act of becoming present. The as yet unread future of a narrative, it might be argued, is no different from the future in general in the sense that the reading of future words and events has not yet happened, and therefore does not exist. These two ideas, of narrative as a kind of consciousness rather than as a kind of writing, and of the non-existence of the future of written events are positions from which it might be possible to rescue the idea of narrative as an inadequate model of time. The second counterargument, however, that the future of a text and future moments in general are, ontologically, on a par is not immediately convincing, and here we uncover what is really meant by the idea that a narrative is a ‘model of time’. The idea of an ontological difference between the existence of the future in text and the existence of the future in general survives this objection fairly easily, since it is the ability of a reader to take an excursion into the future, to jump ahead and return to the present, that has no obvious analogy in lived experience. What is more, the unknowability of the future in a block universe is largely predicated on the collective nature of the present, and again there is no correlative for this in the fictional narrative as a model of time. Many people may be reading the same book as me, but the present of these readings will all differ from each other, so that some will finish, and so know the future, before others. It is the collective imprisonment in the same present that gives the notion of objective or cosmological time its meaning, and this ineluctability of the collective present can not be reflected in the reading of a written narrative. It is more rational to think of the narrative, the already-there-ness of its future, and its tangible block view of its own universe, as a model which exactly fails to represent the ontological conditions of human being. In this failure, the model of time which is offered by narrative does its work by crossing the boundary between actual and potential futures to produce a hermeneutic circle between narrative and time, which encourages us to envisage futures on the model of teleological retrospect which narrative encodes.
One of the striking abilities of the fictional narrative, as Genette has analysed, is its freedom to roam in time, and particularly in the use of the anachronies of analepsis and prolepsis. The discussion in this chapter began by pointing to a distinctively modern temporality which experiences the present as the object of a future memory. The full discussion of prolepsis, and the interaction between fictional prolepsis, which involves an excursion into an ‘actual’ future, and non-fictional prolepsis, which involves an excursion into a potential future, is the subject of the discussion in Chapter 2. By way of preparation, however, it is worth noting that there is something performative about this relationship, in the sense that a discursive utterance has the power to bring a state of affairs into being.
This is by no means the whole story of the performative, as the next chapter will argue, but it may be fruitful to contemplate the enormous increase in the use of prolepsis in fiction, film and television of the last three decades. It is perhaps part of the more general self-knowingness of these narrative media that they should seize upon the already-there-ness of the future in the verbal structure of fiction, or, as it used to be, the ‘reel’
of
the film, and bring it to the forefront of narrative experimentation. It is not my intention to focus on filmic versions of proleptic narratives, but it is clear that there is an increasing preoccupation with the proleptic plot that runs from Nicholas Roeg’s Bad Timing to the generation of films that follow from Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. In contemporary fiction, the flashforward has become established as a fundamental device not only of the self-conscious experiments of metafiction, but as a realist mode of storytelling. There is no easy formula with which to encapsulate the relation of narrative prolepsis and the philosophical problem of the relation of time and narrative, but we might start by observing that prolepsis flaunts the kind of freedom to roam that we associated earlier with the mind, the imagination and fiction. We might also view this as a symptom of divided presence: that is, as a version of that modern experience of time which tends to install within the present traces of the past and future. Prolepsis can be regarded as a kind of instruction in the significance of events in the light of later events or outcomes, and this is the very definition of teleological retrospect. It is too easy to view the anachronistic tendencies of contemporary narrative fiction either as some introverted self-analysis on the part of the novel on the conventions of narrative, or as some mere passive imitation of a new experience of time which is external to the novel, and at work in social reality. The assumption in this discussion, however, will be that the ascendance of anachrony, and in particular the fashion for prolepsis, is a performative function which produces in the world a generalised future orientation such that the understanding of the present becomes increasingly focused on the question of what it will come to mean.
The Novel’s Now and the Novel Now The Derridean problematic of presence brings Augustine’s puzzle of the vanishing present, Husserl’s account of the present as a crossed structure of protentions and retentions, and Heidegger’s priority for the future in being-towards-death, to bear on the structure of the sign. In Derrida’s essay, ‘Differance’ (1982: 1-27), for example, the division of presence is the basis of the trace structure of the sign, which is to say that the concept of the sign is no more the container of meaning than the present is the container of presence. If we think of the sign, we might say that it bears within it retentions of the past which are of various sorts. The sign depends upon former uses which have established its meaning by convention, and cannot signify in the present without these retentions of the past. Perhaps more importantly, the sign is embedded not only in a history, but in a linguistic chain, a sequence of words which provide the discursive context for its meaning. It would be impossible to argue that the sign, understood as the word, in some way carries its meaning around with it, and deploys it in the same way in any context. Thesequence of words in a sentence, for example, ensure
that any word is marked by those other words which precede it and follow from it in the sequence.
If we think about the moving now of the sentence, it is clear that a sophisticated combination of the tensed and the untensed views of time are at work in its production of meaning. There might be some kind of controlled admission of words as they pass from the sentence’s future into its past, but there must also be a view of the sentence as a whole, or of some larger unit of discourse which comes into view as a block, and of which the now of reading is a survey. In Derrida’s argument, this means that the common idea of a word as somehow a container of meaning is no more intelligible than the idea of the present without the concepts of the past and the future. Traditionally, linguistics has viewed the word as a carrier of meaning in the sense that it can operate on its own, out of context, or in different contexts, as a minimum free form. The phoneme on the other hand means nothing in itself, and only comes to signify in combination with other phonemes when they combine to make larger blocks such as words. But this view of significance is subject to the same laws as Augustine’s vanishing present, in the sense that there is no limit to the division of presence involved in the model of significance as a sequence of nows. If phonemes have duration, they can be divided, and similarly it can be argued that words must retain and await the past and future of a sequence in a way that is comparable with phonemes. But the problem of distinguishing between the word and the phoneme in terms of sequence-dependence does not simply banish the notion of the present or of the presence of meaning. A sentence, for example, requires the controlled, linear admission of meanings, as well as the block view. If the words of a sentence were encountered simultaneously rather than in order, they would obviously fail in their mission to signify, and a reader incapable of viewing a sentence asa dialectic
of tensed and untensed views of time would be unable to read.
There is as yet no poststructuralist narratology which has responded to the problems of presence at the level of the narrative sequence. There are three distinct ways in which this presents an opportunity or a problem for narrative theory. First, there is the need for narratology to analyse the now of narrative sequences in terms ofa dialectic
between the tensed and untensed approaches to discursive time. Second, there is the question of the extent to which the divided presence of the narrative now has become an issue in the contemporary novel itself, that is to say, the extent to which the novel has come to understand itself as the discourse in which the trace-structure of moments can be most adequately explored. To this problem we might attach the claim that there is in contemporary fiction a prevalence of the analeptic and proleptic excursion, which enacts the trace-structure of moments in the refusal of linearity, as well as the claim that prolepsis has come to dominate over analepsis among the interests that narrative fiction has taken in its own temporal logic. In prolepsis, narrative can reflect and produce the future orientation that has been outlined here in relation to Heidegger’s Being-towardsdeath and Derrida’s différance. The third issue follows from the second, and the claim that prolepsis, or future orientation in general, might in some way characterise the contemporary novel. The issue for narrative theory here is a literary-historical one, but it concerns also the most multifarious and complex conceptions of the present to which literary criticism might devote its attention, namely the literary-historical present itself. The remainder of this chapter will concern itself with the latter of these problems.
The notion of the literary epoch has received considerable critical attention in recent decades, but these attentions have not often been focused on the notion of the contemporary. The discussion above indicates some basic problems for the notion of the contemporary novel, of the role that it may have to play in the production of modern temporal experience, for what it might have to contribute to discussions about time, but also for what it means to talk of the contemporary at all. If contemporary means ‘happening now’, it is subject to the same problems of duration and existence as the notion of ‘now’ more generally, and this is going to be a particular problem for the phrase ‘contemporary fiction’.
There are many senses in which contemporary fiction cannot be understood as happening now, and I do not intend to explore the many paths that open up here into deliberate misunderstandings of that phrase. The most common usages are probably those of the university module which calls itself ‘contemporary fiction’, where the phrase often designates fiction from the Second World War onwards, and those of the nonacademic fiction-reading world for whom the contemporary is much closer at hand. In both cases, the set of referents is enormous, and in both cases there is a necessary reduction of a multiplicity which operates through a kind of hegemonic struggle as a result of which particular novels come to represent their age. In the world of academic literary studies this is no different from the canonical nature of reading lists in earlier periods, where canons are understood as forms of domination always open to revision by some new form of domination. If we take Kermode’s phrase ‘forms of attention’ (Kermode 1985) as the currency which assigns value to these hegemonic works, it is plausible to view the newspaper-based fiction industry as an elaborate mechanism which bestows attention on particular works in a manner analogous to that of the academic process, but in a more commercial context. Nor would we want to claim that these two worlds are entirely, or even at all, separate.
The sociology of academic value-judgements is not my primary interest, but I take it as a basic truth that the works of contemporary fiction which attract forms of attention, be it money or academic discussion, acquire their hegemonic position, as concrete universals, as a result of forces which cannot be reduced to arbitrations of quality. What does interest me is the way in which works might satisfy the conditions of representativeness, that is, the way in which some fictional writing might be assumed to possess the characteristics of their epoch, and the extent to which this assumption is transposed into value, understood as a cluster of aesthetic value, exchange value and durability. The relationship between the characteristics of a novel and the idea of the present as an historical totality is one of the factors which will determine the contemporaneity of contemporary fiction, as if the very idea of the contemporary contained within it a double reference, on one hand indicating mere present-ness, and on the other the special power to represent the present. An example of this circular relation between ideas of the present and ideas of the contemporaneity of contemporary fiction can be found in Linda Hutcheon’s influential formulation in A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988) that socalled ‘Historiographic Metafiction’, in which the metafictional concerns of the Modernist novel converge with issues in historiography to produce a kind of fiction which is uniquely capable of fulfilling the ‘poetics of postmodernism’. If in the study of the Modernist period the hypercanonicity of Joyce and Woolf deprive a large sector of fictional production in the period of attention, so that the epoch is represented through a few deviant experiments, it is doubtless because of a complimentary force which represents the age in terms of a movement inwards, with Nietzsche, Freud and phenomenology, and which is corroborated by the techniques of narrative introversion, stream of consciousness and indirect discourse. For Hutcheon, the postmodern age is dominated by certain unresolved contradictions between history and fiction, arising from a generalised distrust of official facts, and a blurring of the boundary between events and facts as represented. The postmodern novel, then, is represented as one in which metafictional concerns are followed into questions about the representation of the past, and novels which are not of this kind do not represent their epoch. Yet the contemporary world that one might construct from the historiographic metafiction would be a hopelessly partial portrait, not least because the present world is not present in historiographic metafiction. If we think of novels such as John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman and A Maggot, J. M. Coetzee’s Foe, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Graham Swift’s Waterland, Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot and A History of the World in 101⁄2 Chapters, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, William Golding’s Rites of Passage, Peter Ackroyd’s The Great Fire of London, A. S. Byatt’s Possession, John Updike’s Memories of the Ford Administration, Robert Coover’s The Public Burning or Pat Barker’s Regeneration, it is apparent that an interest in the fictional representation of history does indeed underlie a significant strand of contemporary fiction. Nevertheless, Hutcheon’s argument that the historiographic metafiction is the paradigmatic postmodern novel has produced a distorting account of the fictional epoch, not only because there are countless novels which show no concern for the paradoxes of fictional and historical representation. The partiality of such a picture is inevitable. But where Hutcheon promotes the idea of representative-ness in the form of a circle between a kind of novel and a contemporary world concerned with ‘issues surrounding the nature of identity and subjectivity; the question of reference and representation; the intertextual nature of the past; and the ideological implications of writing about history’ (1988: 117), she goes some way towards effacing the agency of the academic literary critic in the construction of this circle. If the novel has developed preoccupations with the representation of history, of the status of facts and the textuality of history, it has done so in the same period in which academic literary studies has witnessed a resurgence of historicism, reanimated exactly by questions of identity, subjectivity, reference and representation, intertextuality and ideology. The representative-ness of the historiographic metafiction is a straightforward hegemonic representation of the interests of a particular social group as universal values, and that social group is represented most fully by the academic new historicist. If the novel’s now has some analogical relation to the idea of the present moment, the novel now has a similar relation to the contemporary world in general at a higher level of complexity. The four issues involved in this problem - the present of reading, the present moment, the contemporary novel and the contemporary world - are customarily stabilised through the imposition of some kind of structure of exclusion which will stipulate the limits of the present’s duration or the parts which will represent the totality. The counter-manoeuvre being offered here is to displace these structures of exclusion with a kind of analysis committed to the future orientation which, as it has been suggested, characterise the present moment, the now of reading, the contemporary novel and the collective experience of time which characterises the modern world.
What then does it mean to say that the contemporary novel might be characterised by future orientation? One possible answer to this question is taken up in the next chapter, which aims to analyse the prevalence of prolepsis in contemporary fiction within a wider framework of a culture increasingly conscious of its own present as the object of a future memory. Part of the purpose of the next chapter is to show that even the apparent preoccupation with retrospect in historiographic metafiction can be understood as a kind of future orientation, and particularly when temporality is understood in terms of the formal structure of narrative in general. One of the striking tendencies in critical writing about fiction in the twentieth century is what might be called its thematicisation. One way to illustrate this tendency is to think of the relationship between fiction, criticism and theory as it existed in the formalist period and the way that this relationship is transformed in a period concerned with the historical content of literary works. In literary structuralism, for example, theory designated a body of work in linguistics which provided a descriptive framework for the analysis of literary form. In the case of literary narratology, this meant establishing a set of codes and conventions in relation to which narrative meaning was generated. For the structuralist narratologist, the question of what a fictional narrative was about was one which was bracketed, or made secondary to questions about how they signified through a set of internal and external relations.
Theory, in this context, means something akin to ‘analytical framework’,
and
, as its critics were quick to point out, in this sense ‘theory’ was quite alien to the nature and content of fiction. Increasingly, however, theory has come to designate a set of ideas about the nature of language, culture, history and identity, ideas which are then identified as the actual content of fiction. Linda Hutcheon’s work is an example of this tendency to understand theory as a kind of fictional content:
Historiographic metafiction shows fiction to be historically conditioned and history to be discursively structured, and in the process manages to broaden the debate about the ideological implications of the Foucaldian conjunction of power and knowledge - for readers as for history itself as a discipline. As the narrator of Rushdie’s Shame puts it:
History is natural selection. Mutant versions of the past struggle for dominance; new species of fact arise, and old, saurian truths go to the wall, blindfolded and smoking last cigarettes. Only the mutations of the strong survive. The weak, the anonymous, the defeated, leave marks . History loves only those who dominate her; it is a relationship of mutual enslavement.
(1983, 124)
The question of whose history survives is one that obsesses postmodern novels like Timothy Findley’s Famous Last Words. In problematizing almost everything the historical novel once took for granted,
historiographic metafiction destabilizes received notions of both history and fiction. (1988: 120)
This citation within a citation exemplifies a relation between fiction, criticism and theory from which we need to rescue ourselves.
Here the notion of theory is transformed from that of ‘analytical framework’,
from
something alien to the nature of content and the nature of fiction, to being the content of fiction itself. Likewise, the role of the critic is reduced to that of identifying theoretical content in fiction, and of passing between theory and fiction in a way that affirms their reciprocity and their mutual support. Goneis
the hermeneutics of suspicion, and the notion of critique. By constructing the relation of mutual affirmation between postmodernity and the postmodern novel as historiographic metafiction, the critical act is reduced to something less intellectually engaged than the heresy of paraphrase, and something more like an assemblage of statements which, if paraphrased, might be saying more or less the same thing. This is also the danger of the more general notion that contemporary novels are about time: that the philosophy of time and the novelistic treatment of time might be arranged alongside each other in a pointless demonstration that statements about time in philosophy and fiction might be alike. It is only when a degree of formalism is allowed back into the analysis that the critic can do justice to the nature of narrative: to the fact that its statements about time are inevitably involved with their temporal structure, or that time is a theme of narrative, but it is also part of the temporal logic of storytelling. This means that when it is the explicit content of a narrative, in the way that history is the explicit content of narrative in Rushdie’s Shame and Findley’s Famous Last Words, it is least interesting to us. For this reason also, Ricoeur’s distinction between tales about time and tales of time might be seen as an attempt to focus the notion of fictional narrative’s engagement with time on those novels in which time is a theme. It is in relation to the formal logic of temporal structure, and to the form of internal timeconsciousness, and not at the level of theme, that narratology can properly attend to the question of the present, and the ways that it is marked by the future.
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Author: Mark Currie
