Chapter 4: Temporality and Self-Distance
The Future is already; otherwise how could my love be love?
(Sartre 1969: 165)
One of the things that narrative theory can learn from philosophy is a proper sense of the importance of the future. I have suggested several times already that narrative theory shows a preoccupation with memory, retrospect and the archiving of past events, and has an undeveloped potential to address questions about the present and future.The significance of the notions of ‘anticipation’ and ‘prolepsis’ is that, in different ways, they refer to this relation between the present and actual or possible futures.
With philosophy as its teacher, narrative theory can turn its attention to narrative not only in its function as archive, but to the question of narrative as a mode of being.
In Heidegger’s account of being, for example, the future is the all important tense. Like Derrida, Heidegger tends to view things normally understood as secondary and derivative as primary and primordial, and so it is with the relationship between time (Zeit) and temporality (Zeitlichkeit) in Being and Time. If, for a moment, we view time as a mind-independent entity and temporality as the experience of time in consciousness, or time within the condition of being, it might normally be assumed that the latter derives from the former. According to Heidegger, there is a conception of time as a series of ‘nows’ which is shared by ordinary people and philosophers from Aristotle to Bergson.
These philosophers and ordinary people will view time, with its fundamental terminology of ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’ as a primordial entity from which the human experience of time is derived. For Heidegger, it is the other way around: temporality is a mode of being from which the concept of time is derived. In simple terms, time is not something which exists in the world and is then reflected in the human mind, but something which arises from human being (Dasein) and is then projected onto the world. According to this view, it is a mistake to think that human minds passively experience the time of the outside world. For Heidegger, ‘world-time’, like the concept of time in general, is actively produced by human modes of being which subsequently temporalise our sense of the outside world. This is in fact what temporality is: it is the process of temporalising. As Heidegger puts it, ‘it is not an entity at all. It is not, but it temporalizes . Temporality temporalizes’ (377). This is in itself an important characteristic of Heidegger’s contribution to the philosophy of time, but it also helps to understand how the future comes to occupy a dominant position in his account of being. If ‘time’ and ‘world-time’ are mere derivatives from human temporality, rather than the other way around, the traditional account of ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’, tensed as that which did exist, does exist and will exist, can no longer function as the foundational framework for time:
In our terminological use of this expression (temporality), we must hold ourselves aloof from all those significations of ‘future’, ‘past’ and ‘Present’ which thrust themselves upon us from the ordinary conception of time. This holds also for conceptions of a ‘time’ which is ‘subjective’ or ‘Objective’, ‘immanent’ or ‘transcendent’. Inasmuch as Dasein understands itself in a way which, proximally and for the most part, is inauthentic, we may suppose that ‘time’ as ordinarily understood does not represent a genuine phenomenon, but one which is derivative [ein abkünftiges]. It arises from inauthentic temporality, which has a source of its own. The conceptions of ‘future’, ‘past’ and ‘Present’ have first arisen in terms of the inauthentic way of understanding time. (1962: 374)
Several of our key analytical concepts are here consigned to a secondary and derivative position: the framework of past, present and future, the distinction of objective and subjective time, and the conceptions of immanent and transcendent time which have dominated since Kant.
Heidegger also claims that it is from inauthentic temporality that time is derived, meaning that it derives from a kind of passive human experience of time as an endless sequence. Authentic temporality on the other hand is a more active, decisive, and self-owned relation to time, one which knows that time, forBeing
, is finite, and crucially, one which can project forward to Death, in the mode that Heidegger refers to as Being-towards-death. The critical question therefore becomes: what is an authentic and primordial temporality? The answer is variously offered by Heidegger, as Care, Being-towards-death, and Being itself, all of which offer associated aspects of this active and decisive relation to time.
He also calls this relation ‘anticipatory resoluteness’, a phrase which carries within it the whole chain of associations which comprise authentic and primordial temporality.
Anticipatory resoluteness is authenticBeing
, and as anticipation, its orientation is towards the future. There is also an inauthentic way of relating to the future, just as there is both an authentic and an inauthentic way of relating to the present and the past.
But
the most important aspect of temporality is that the dimensions of past, present and future, which Heidegger calls ecstases, are unified so that Being has a triadic structure. AuthenticBeing
will project forward to death and backwards to birth and beyond as a way of understanding how to act, and from this point of view the present is always structured, or temporalised.
Inauthentic being will tend to lose itself in presence, or pay heed only to the immediate past and future in the contemplation of the present situation. In authentic Being, there is always a projection forwards to death, towards the end of being, or towards what Heidegger calls ‘the possibility we have characterized as Dasein’s utter impossibility’ (1962: 378), in such a way that Being sees itself as authentically whole, and finite. The authentic future, or perhaps the authentic way of relating to the future, is ‘temporalized primarily by that temporality which makes up the meaning of anticipatory resoluteness’ (1962: 378). This chain of associations, of authenticity, anticipation, resoluteness and Being-towards-death make up the future aspect of the ecstatic temporality of being. This is not a future that we wait for, but a process of temporalising which involves the ‘unity of the ecstases’, in other words the triadic structure of being. Heidegger insists constantly on the equiprimordiality of the ecstases, and yet, at the same time, insists on the priority of the future:
In enumerating the ecstases, we have always mentioned the future first. We have done this to indicate that the future has a priority in the ecstatical unity of primordial and authentic temporality. This is so even though temporality does not first arise through a cumulative sequence of the ecstases, but in each case temporalizes itself in their equiprimordiality. But within this equiprimordiality, the modes of temporalization are different. The difference lies in the fact that the nature of the temporalizing can be determined primarily in terms of the different ecstases. Primordial and authentic temporality temporalizes itself in terms of the authentic future and in such a way that in having been futurally, it first of all awakens the Present. The primary phenomenon of primordial and authentic temporality is the future. (1962: 378)
So it is not that the futurecomes
first. This cannot be what ‘priority’ means, since there is no sequence. Rather, the three ecstases of past, present and future are all in operation at the same time whenever temporality temporalises. And yet whenever it does so authentically it always does so ‘in terms of’ the authentic future, in other words the scouting forward to Death in a mode of anticipatory resoluteness as described above, and therefore it ‘first of all awakens’ the present. There is a contradiction here, and it contains a tautology. The contradiction is that having said that the future does not come first, or have priority in any temporal sense, a clear temporal priority is assigned to the future by the phrase ‘first of all awakens’. The tautology is that within the equiprimordial unity of the ecstases, the future has priority because itcomes
first, which is a repetition, not an explanation. It might be argued that this is not temporal priority but conceptual priority, or that conceptual priority is being expressed through the metaphor of temporal priority, in which case the charge can be modified from that of contradiction to that of irresponsible choice of metaphor. Alternatively, and perhaps more sophisticatedly, it might be thought that it is the very inseparability of conceptual and temporal priority that authentic temporality designates, but if this is so, the charge of tautology must stand over any claim which bases the conceptual priority of the future in its temporal priority or vice versa.
In the spirit of the idea that the contradictions and tautologies of Heidegger’s writing are inherent in the modes of being he describes, to be thought of as strengths rather than flaws, it could be said that the triadic structure of past, present and future represents a system which is nothing other than a tautology masquerading as an analytical distinction. How can one give definition to any of the three terms in this system without merely defining it negatively in relation to the other two: the past is that which was present, the present is that which will be past and was future, etc. Semiology has encouraged us to think of such signs as having no content other than these systematic relations, so that the idea of the present is actually constituted by the past and future, and has no positive content of its own. In this light, Heidegger’s idea of temporality as the unification of ecstases might be thought of as a recognition of this kind of inseparability and mutual constitution. Heidegger constantly reminds us in Being and Time to discard the ordinary conception of time, which would encourage us to think of the present as the only domain of existence and being. And why must it be discarded? Because every time we look analytically at the present, we find it divided by, indeed constituted by, relations to the past and the future. Hence, in his discussion of the present, the inauthentic relation is that of ‘making present’, or constructing the illusion of being present-at-hand, while the authentic one is the relation which Heidegger refers to in the phrase ‘the moment of vision’, that is a present which envisages the future by projecting forwards. The inauthentic relation to the present is the one which, in the act of ‘making present’, denies the constitutive role of the past and future in the present, while the authentic relation envisages, and therefore highlights, the future. This is very interesting for my purposes, for a number of reasons. The first is that it is clearly consonant with the idea we have already discussed in relation to Derrida - that the present thought of in the ordinary way as ‘now’ is less authentic than the idea of the present as divided between past and future, and in particular, the present as anticipation. Given the mutual co-implication and constitution of the three ecstases, there is no reason to privilege one above another, since each is included in the others. For Heidegger and Derrida, this condition of reasonlessness provides a reason, which is that the traditional privilege accorded to the present must be strategically opposed, since it can have no basis, and therefore functions as a presupposition. This view of the unity of past, present and future, whether derived from ecstatic unity or semiological relationism, provides a defence against the charge of contradiction and tautology. The contradiction between the equiprimordiality of the ecstases and the priority of the future is merely the difference between a temporal/conceptual priority and a strategic priority tilted against the presupposition of undivided presence, while the tautology is merely the expression of the mutually constitutive role of signs.
There is a second reason that Heidegger’s rejection of the present is of particular relevance to me. The authentic relation to the present, we have seen, is the ‘moment of vision’, in other words, the event in the present which projects forward into the future. The inauthentic relation to the present is ‘making present’. The hermeneutic circle with which I have been working proposes an act of reading which consists in the presentification of the past, and a mode of being which consists in the projection forward to a future which looks back on the present. In Heidegger’s terms, the first is the inauthentic present, or making present, while the second is the authentic present, or moment of vision. If the central idea of the hermeneutic circle is that the two activities, or modes, produce each other, we must accept that in Heidegger’s framework, this involves the mutual production of authentic and inauthentic temporalities. What I have been calling the ‘presentification’ which is involved in the decoding of narrative fiction is not exactly what Heidegger means, most of the time, by ‘making present’. Nevertheless, the basic process involved in the inauthentic ecstasis of the present is that of either isolating presence from the unity of the ecstases, or privileging it, as a way of upholding presence as the basic condition of being, and this must also be the activity of reading when past events are, to use Heidegger’s phrase, made presentat-hand: the character of events as ‘having been’, which is encoded in their tense, is simply decoded as presence.
Heidegger’s notion of authenticity adds an interesting dimension to the hermeneutic circle of reading and being. But authenticity is much more, in Being and Time, than rejecting presence in favour of the future.
Authenticity is deeply bound up withindividuation,
and with self-ownership and these characteristics of authentic being are linked to the future partly through death. Being-towards-death brings authenticity to Dasein not only in the form of a sense of finite wholeness to life, but also for its intense perspective on the ownership of Dasein. Because nobody can do my dying for me, Being-towards-death reminds me that nobody can do my living for me either, and therefore offers me an intensified individuation and sense of ownership over my Dasein. What this means, for our purposes, is that the reading of fiction involves not one but two fundamentally inauthentic processes. I have just suggested that the process of ‘making present’ in Heidegger and the presentification of reading fiction share a condition of inauthenticity as modes of being. Now there is another source of inauthenticity, namely the vicarious nature of fictional experience. In reading a fiction, I am normally engaged in the construction of presence where there is none, but I am also letting someone else do my living for me. In this tradition of phenomenology it is always dangerous to assume that authenticity is simply a positive value and inauthenticity a negative one, and for this reason, the argument here is not simply pointing to the conclusion that there is something bad in the reading of fiction.Having said that, in both Heidegger and Sartre, there is a complex network of evaluative terms at work in the description of inauthenticity - of negativity, everydayness, fallenness, nothingness, bad faith, tranquillisation, alienation, etc.
Even if it pretends otherwise, and regularly resorts to this ‘otherwise’ as an alibi, the description is an evaluation, and therefore, since authenticity is structured as a future-oriented project, such a project is presented as a superior form of understanding.
This is a complicated issue, and the current project does not allow an adequate excursion into it. I will say, with David Wood,
that the concept of authenticity in Heidegger is ambiguous, and especially so on the question of its positive and negative meanings in relation to how to understand and how to live. The important point for current purposes is that there is a structural connection between the authentic and the inauthentic, and indeed, that for Heidegger, there is always something inauthentic in the authentic. The issue of authenticity at it features in Heidegger is a digression from the central concern here which is to describe the temporality of being in its relation to the temporality of reading. But it is an issue of such importance to the phenomenological approach to temporality that it is difficult to leave it out, particularly when it is developed in such close association with the question of anticipation.
For Heidegger, the priority of the future cannot be understood in terms of the ordinary conception of the future. It is the authentic part of the present: the moment of vision which takes place in the present but looks forward to outcomes, through which Being better understands itself. This ‘better understanding’ of itself is a project which derives from one of Heidegger’s opening characterisations of Dasein, that ‘inits
very Being . .
Being is an issue for it’ (1962: 32).
Human being, in other words, is partly defined by thinking about being - ‘Understanding of Being is itself a definite characteristic of Dasein’sBeing
’ (his italics, p. 32) - and this understanding is best when it occurs as resolute anticipation. Let us paraphrase this situation in the customary way, namely by using distance as the metaphor which expresses this doubleness of being: that being is always partly at a distance from itself. In the act of reflecting upon itself, it will be reflecting upon the fact that it is, in its nature, self-reflecting. This is what distinguishes human being from the being of rabbits and rocks.As Sartre puts it in Being and Nothingness, the thing reflected upon is profoundly affected by the fact that ‘the reflective consciousness must be the consciousness reflected on’ (1969: 151).
Against this rather confusing unity between the subject and the object of reflection, philosophy traditionally resorts to the metaphor of distance. Sometimes this is the spatial distance of the order of ‘alongside’: ‘the turning back of being on itself can only cause the appearance of a distance between what turns back and that on which it turns. This turning back upon the self is a wrenching away from self in order to return to it’ (his italics, p. 151). The temporal version of this distance is also a wrenching away and a return, that is, a projection forward into the future in order to return to reflect on the self as an object of the quasi-past. This is what Heidegger means when he talks about the future as Being-coming-towards-itself: that the future-oriented project of anticipatory resoluteness creates a split in the self and produces a temporal distance between the reflective consciousness and the consciousness reflected on, a distance which decreases as Dasein tries to catch up with, or actualise, its own projections. One of the things that this metaphor of distance confirms is that some remains of the distinction between subject and object are to be found in the phenomenology of Heidegger and Sartre, since the unity of the reflective consciousness and the consciousness reflected on is inexpressible without this schism and the distance between the two modes of self that are created by it.
Narrative theory has something to learn from Heidegger’s and Sartre’s rejection of the present as the basis of human being, but it may also have something to teach philosophy when it comes to the issue of distance.
Wayne Booth’s monumental study of narrative point of view, The Rhetoric of Fiction, is the most systematic account of distance in the structure of narrative. For Booth, distance is the framework which gives fictional discourse its layers, and the basis of most of its rhetorical effects.
He enumerates various forms of distance which authors establish and abolish at their whim, as well as forms of distance which are adopted by readers of fiction. In the case of authorially controlled distance, he establishes a set of spatial relations in which distance can be controlled: distance between the narrator and the implied author, between narrator and characters, between the narrator and the reader, between the implied author and the reader, the implied author and characters, etc. The nature of the distance that can occur in any of these relations also varies: it may be physical, in the sense that the narrator may describe from a distant point of view, it may be temporal, in the sense of distant retrospect, or it may be moral in the sense that the narrator may judge the moral character of the characters he narrates. In the case of reader-controlled distance, Booth offers a set of resistances which a reader might adopt, normally on the basis of moral difference, in relation to characters, narrators or implied authors which an author may attempt to overcome through his ultimate control of narrative distance, and in this interactionlies
the persuasive power of fiction. The control of distance is often divided between author and reader, for example in the case of aesthetic distance, which means on the one hand a kind of critical sophistication adopted by a reader which distances that reader from the involvement which might normally be brought about by the mechanisms of fiction, and on the other, a kind of authorial control which creates such readerly distance, in the manner, perhaps, of Brechtian alienation.
This is an immensely productive analytical framework for Booth and through it he produces highly illuminating readings of Henry James, Jane Austen and James Joyce. If Sartre’s concept of distance is that which appears between the reflective consciousness and the consciousness reflected on, Booth’s concept seems most germane when addressed to the question of first person narration. Before I discuss the idea of first person narration as self-distance, however, it is worthwhile dwelling on the overall framework for some preliminary types of self-distance which operate slightly less consciously in the system. The very idea of an implied author, which Booth describes as the ‘second self’ created for the purposes of novelistic communication, provides one type of self-distance which inhabits this analytical system. The idea of ‘aesthetic distance’ is another example, which Booth holds up as a critical virtue, and which involves a kind of superiority over the common reader which one might associate with academic criticism. He claims, for example, that ‘only an immature reader ever identifies with any character, losing all sense of distance and hence all possibility of an artistic experience’ (1961: 200).
The proximity of identification is uncritical in contrast to the distance of artistic experience, and this establishes an interesting split in the act of reading. It suggests a division in being according to which the aesthetically distanced reader both reads and is conscious of reading, both a reader and a witness of the reading process, where what is witnessed (naïve reading) is disowned.Or perhaps not.
Perhaps the naïve reading is never actually witnessed by the aesthetically distanced one but imagined as the act of another.In which case we are left with a different kind of split, or self-distance.
Sartre notes that Reflection as witness can have its being as witness only in and through the appearance; that is, it is profoundly affected in its being by its reflectivity and consequently can never achieve the Selbstandigkeit (self-standingness) at which it aims. (1969: 152)
This means that the naïve reading knows itself observed, and therefore never occurs as such, since it is already altered by this knowing. I would suggest that we all know this problem whenever we drift into the fantasy that our innermost thoughts are being observed, by God, a law court or a friend, only to realise that the content of those thoughts is therefore the fantasy of such an inspection itself.
This helps to highlight the importance of temporal distance in reflection and self-narration. No difficulty is presented to the idea of reflection when the subject and object of reflection are separated in time, but when they coincide, a logical regress is produced which makes it impossible to reflect on anything except reflection itself. Sartre does not quite say this, and this is where I believe the philosophy of reflection may have something to learn from the theory of narrative. When the reflected and the reflective coincide, Sartre tends to describe them as if they are both together and separate: ‘its
meaning as reflected-on is inseparable from the reflective and exists over there at a distance from itself in the consciousness which reflects it’ (1969: 152). This is the spatial distance of ‘over there’ rather than the temporal distance of ‘back then’ about which narrative knows so much. Phenomenology has a highly developed sense of the future when it comes to the imbrication of presence with future projections, but a less developed sense of the future projection as a manner in which distance between the subject and object of reflection can be produced. This is certainly not to say that philosophy in general has been unaware of the paradoxes of reflection or of self-referentiality: it could be argued that this awareness is what philosophy is above all else. But there is an interesting little kingdom of expertise on this subject, which foregrounds the role of narrative consciousness in the production of temporal distance between the self as the reflected-on and as reflective consciousness, and which is found in the analysis of self-narration in narratology.
The fundamental problem of phenomenology is a question of immanence: how can a consciousness explain something which it cannot stand outside? This is what is expressed by Sartre’s paradoxical formula which envisages the reflective and the reflected as simultaneously unified and separated, or singular and double. One might say that there is a logical problem that emerges whenever the subject and the object merge as they do in the act of self-reflection. Nor is this a problem confined to the issue of ‘consciousness’: it operates in any situation which involves self-reference. The liar paradox is a good example of the havoc that self-referentiality produces in logical terms. If I say that I am lying, it becomes impossible to judge the truth of what I am saying. If I am indeed lying then what I say is not true, in which case I cannot be telling the truth that I amlying
, and so I must be telling the truth. This logical havoc is produced by the co-incidence of the statement and what it refers to in time.
It is the kind of problem that arises in cases of self-referentiality, and can be easily solved by the introduction of some kind of separation between the saying and the said. If I claim, for example, that ‘all generalisations are false’, the same thing happens because, as a generalisation, the statement is included in the set of statements it judges. The statement ‘all generalisations are false, except this one’ is not logically contradictory in the same way - does not have the value of true and false - because the statement exempts itself from the set of its referents. This exemption is a kind of distance between the subject and the object of a statement, and one kind of distance that can be deployed in this way is temporal distance. If I say that ‘I used to be a liar’, no problem arises. The statement is still self-referential, but the change of tense produces distance between the subject and the object of the statement.
The study of narrative has much to learn from the philosophy of time, but this is one of the places where the direction of teaching is the other way around. It is true that symbolic logic has made major advances into the role of tense in valid argument forms in recent decades, but the more thorough expertise in the analysis of the temporal distance involved in a statement such as ‘I used to be a liar’, seems to me to lie with narratology, especially as it has accounted for the subtleties of unreliable narration. Again Booth is a pioneer here, and his framework of the varieties of distance allows an analysis which sees a statement such as ‘I used to be a liar’ as two different forms of distance at the same time: it contains the temporal distance of tense, but also moral distance, the self-distance of moral judgement. One of the interesting things about Booth’s analysis of unreliable narration is that it demonstrates the distance between a narrator and a reader in circumstances in which the reliability of that narrator has come into question: when a narrator tries to mislead, or simply does not know the truth. But this is not exactly the situation here.
What is perhaps less noticeable about the tensed statement ‘I used to be a liar’ is that it constructs a contrast between the ‘I’ of the time of narration and the ‘I’ of narrated time along the lines that the former is truthful and the latter dishonest. This is a common paradigm for narrative discourse ingeneral,
and narrative fiction in particular. It is the paradigm of the confession, in which a reformed narrator looks back on what a sinner he or she used to be. Such narratives must involve the moral self-distance of the confessor, as exemplified by Hogg’s Robert Wringham in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner:
As I am writing only from recollection, so I remember of nothing farther in these early days, in the least worthy of being recorded. That I was a great and repentant sinner, I confess. But still I had hopes of forgiveness, because I never sinned from principle, but accident; and then I always tried to repent of these sins by the slump, for individually it was impossible; and though not always successful in my endeavours, I could not help that; the grace of repentance being withheld from me, I regarded myself as in no way accountable for the failure. (1981: 113)
The moral distance between the narrator and the narrated here is permitted by the temporal distance between the recollection and the recollected, and it works in two ways. It is both the recounting of sin, and the recounting of the justification of sin so that the distance is directed towards events and the mind that accounted for them. It is not only that I used to sin, Wringham tells us, but that I used to deceive myself as to the sinfulness of my sins. Just as the liar paradox establishes a moral contrast between the liar of the past and the present truth-teller, so the confession contrasts the moral personality or the narrator with that of the narrated, as reliable narration of a former unreliability, or the truth about lies.
The most interesting aspect of confessional narratives in my view is that they almost always entail a steady decrease in temporal distance between the narrator and the narrated, and this must necessarily entail the erosion of the moral distance between the confessor and the confessed. When exactly did the liar of the past transform into the honest narrator of the present? Self-distance must end in self-presence as the events of a life catch up with the moment of telling it, and somewhere in this narrative, the moral transformation of the narrator is required in order to protect the discourse itself from the moral failings, such as lying, which it narrates. In Wringham’s case the deceit simply doesn’t stop, and we witness him lying right up to the end of his narrative. Lying in fact becomes the closing theme of the novel, not only because Wringham continues to narrate his own lies as he runs from the law (he tells the guests in a hotel that he is a poor theology student from Oxford), but because the ensuing question about the reliability of the memoir then migrates metaleptically to the editor’s narrative which closes the novel: the manuscript ‘bears the stamp of authenticity in every line’, and yet ‘God knows!
Hogg has imposed as ingenious lies on the public ere now’ (1969: 245-6). There is a kind of crisis that approaches in confessional narrative as the subject and the object of narration threaten to coincide.
Perhaps the most comical example of this is Dr Jekyll’s confession in Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, where the moral narrator and his immoral alter ego literally cannot coincide because they are separately embodied: they are the personifications of the schism of the subject and object of confession.
The most telling example of the confessional narrative in this respect is Saint Augustine’s Confessions. This is a text well known for its foundational importance in the philosophy of time, but the lesson it teaches about time is not often understood in the context of the crisis that occurs in confessional narrative structure.
As for Hogg, the issue of the unreliability of distant recall is prominent in the early stages of Augustine’s confession, but in a ludicrously exaggerated form, as the narrator attempts to confess the sins he committed when he was a baby. He cannot remember these sins, but he knows he must have committed them, since other babies do. The sins are heinous indeed:
So I would toss my arms and legs about and make noises, hoping that such few signs as I could make would show my meaning . and if my wishes were not carried out . I would get cross with my elders . and I would take revenge by bursting into tears. (1961: 25-6).
There is a danger that we start to read this moral supererogation as spoofery, as ironic confession, so unwarranted is the self-admonishment for these reconstructed sins, and yet there is something comically convincing about the tone of questioning that pervades his account of babyhood, that ‘if babies are innocent, it is not for lack of will to do harm, but for lack of strength’ (28). And yet this is anything but irony, and the progress of the confession assures us that the sins that we commit as babies, of which we have no memory, are no different from the sins that we remember, but which were committed in a state of ignorance of the truth, or of distance from God. The confession is in its nature a recollection of a state of ignorance, and this means that it is not a recollection at all, since you cannot remember what you did not know. The recognition of ignorance comes later, and in the form of a realisation of ignorance which accompanies the narration of events, so that the moral distance between the narrator and the narrated becomes a kind of announcement, paradoxically, of the unreliability of the narrator, despite his location after the enlightenment in the domain of truth. There is no logical difference then between thenarrator
who recalls the sins he cannot remember as a baby, and one who writes ‘I knew nothing of this at the time.I was quite unconscious of it, quite blind to it, although it stared me in the face’ (33).
Sentences such as this pervade Augustine’s recollections, and remind us of the future, or the future of confession in psychoanalysis. In the Freudian tradition, psychoanalysis operates on the assumption that mental disturbance is a state of self-ignorance to be overcome in the moment of narration by self-knowledge. The past, in other words was a lie, and the present is the cure in the form of truthful, reliable self-narration. But in the act of self-narration, the unreliability of the narrator merely takes a new form, remembering the past not as it was, but in the light of the present. In order to tell the truth about a lie, one must tell a lie about the truth, both of which, as every philosopher knows, result in a lie.
In Book X of Confessions, the question of memory, of its reliability as an account of the past, comes to the fore. It is in fact an essential stepping-stone in the narrowing gap between the narrator and his creator, or between falsehood and truth. To find God, we must go beyond the senses, and towards those faculties not shared by horses and mules, which comprise the soul. Here the narrative recedes to give way to a philosophical contemplation, and the actions of remembering and forgetting which have constituted the narrative become objects of direct reflection:
I can mention forgetfulness and recognize what the word means, but how can I recognize the thing itself unless I remember it? I am not speaking of the sound of the word but of the thing which it signifies. If I had forgotten the thing itself, I should be utterly unable to recognize what the sound implied. When I remember memory, my memory is present to itself by its own power; but when I remember forgetfulness, two things are present, memory, by which I remember it, and forgetfulness, which is what I remember. Yet what is forgetfulness but absence of memory? When it is present, I cannot remember. Then how can it be present in such a way that I can remember it? If it is true that what we remember we retain in our memory, and if it is also true that unless we remembered forgetfulness, we could not possibly recognize the meaning of the word when we heard it, then it is true that forgetfulness is retained in the memory.
It follows that the very thing which by its presence causes us to forget must be present if we are to remember it. Are we to understand from this that, when we remember it, it is not itself present in the memory, but is only there by means if its image? For if forgetfulness were itself present, would not its effect be to make us forget, not to remember? (1961: 222)
The answer to this looks straightforward. I can remember forgetting a meetingyesterday,
therefore it is perfectly possible to remember forgetting. But am I really remembering what it was like to forget, in the sense of making it present? After all, forgetting the meeting yesterday was very much like not having one at all, in fact it felt exactly the same as not forgetting anything. To remember it as forgetting is to fail to remember it as it was, since it only becomes forgetting after I have remembered the meeting. The simple answer to the question then, that remembering forgetting is unproblematic, takes it for granted that memory entails the temporal distance between the self as the object and as the subject of narration. We might say that it is implicit in the words ‘memory’ and ‘remember’ that the kind of presence, understood as temporal coincidence, on which Augustine’s aporia is founded, is banished, so that temporal distance is the very basis of their intelligibility. But to submit to this pragmatic solution is to allow the unexamined notions of ‘remembering’ and ‘forgetting’ the power to lie undetected. We might agree here with Heidegger that the idea of retention as a ‘making present’ of the past is human temporality operating in its most inauthentic mode, or with Deleuze in Difference and Repetition when he argues that it is ‘futile to try to reconstitute the past from the presents between which it is trapped, either the present which it was or the one in relation to which it is now past’ (1994: 81). Remembering is never real, in the sense of making present again the former present of the past. In the act of remembering, we transform the former present, and this is particularly clear in the memory of forgetting, which is identified as forgetting only by becoming what it was not. The temporal self-distance of retrospect is a lie which reveals the truth, and this renders the truth a matter of temporality rather than simple presence.
The nature of the confessional narrative is to offer an unfolding allegory of the temporality of all language. It presents an example of the collapse of temporal distance in the act of self-narration. As the self of the past catches up with the self of the present, and as narrated time threatens to coincide with the time of the narrative, a crisis beckons. In the case of memory, this crisis would happen regardless of the conspiracy of moral and temporal distance of confession. When narrated time catches up with the time of the narrative, there is nothing left to remember but memory itself, and nothing left to write about but the act of writing. And this is exactly what happens in Confessions. Whereas Dr Jekyll’s moment of co-incidence with himself is death and silence, since Hyde kills him, Augustine’s involves a frantic philosophical conversation with God before the silence. When he no longer has any past to narrate, the narration turns to consideritself
and the very temporal problems that narrative self-reflection raises. Commentators often speak, as Kermode does, of the ‘great eleventh chapter of Augustine’s Confessions’ (1966: 53) as if it were a detachable tract on the nature of time. But just as Book X is a reflection on the issues of forgetting that begin in babyhood, and represent a response to the problem of what to do when remembered events coincide with the act of remembering, so too, Book XI reflects on the problem of presence towards which the narrative is moving from its beginnings. The quest for truth is expressed from the start in terms of distance:
How long it was before I learned that you were my true joy! You were silent then, and I went on my way, farther and farther from you, proud in my distress and restless in fatigue, sowing more and more seeds whose only crop was grief. (1961: 44)
There are three types of distance that cooperate here and throughout the narrative. The first is distance from God, the second is distance from truth and the third is temporal distance. The story is told in a proleptic mode, in the sense that it anticipates the time of the narrative at every stage, the eventual reform, the proximity to God and to the truth which lie in wait, and the moral progress entailed in this diminishing distance is itself a guarantee of the reliability of the narrator. The young Augustine is not only a thief and a fornicator, he is a self-deluding liar: ‘Many and many a time I lied to my tutor, my masters, and my parents, and deceived them because I wanted to play games or watch some futile show or was impatient to imitate what I saw on stage’ (1961: 39). For us to trust him as a narrator, therefore, we need to know that a transformation has occurred which distances him from this past characterised as ignorance and falsehood. The milestones on this quest are unmistakable partly because the idea of distance is a constant metaphor, and one which combines with the conventional Christian tropology of the voice. As above, distance is silence, or the absence of conversation, while proximity is marked by the approach of God’s speech. We know that this speech is coming because it is anticipated, again in the mode of Prolepsis 2, which travels forward to the time locus of the narrator: ‘as I now know since you have spoken to me.’ (1961: 61). When the voice is first heard, it is at a distance - ‘And, far off, I hear your voice saying I am the God who IS’
(147) - and in the later stages has comeso
close as to be within, in the heart and soul of the confessor.
A complex self-commentary unfolds with this diminishing distance between falsehood and truth which concerns the nature of philosophy itself. As the confession proceeds, there is a clear shift away from autobiographical narration and a clear increase in philosophical speculation.
I have already said that this is one way of dealing with the problem of running out of story to tell, since all that is left to narrate is narration itself. Book XI therefore takes the present as its subject, and not only what is happening now, but the idea of the present. Just as Book X leaves the acts of remembering and forgetting behind in favour of a reflection on remembering and forgetting as abstract philosophical topics, so too Book XI turns its attention from the past to the nature of time in general terms. This is a paradigmatic literary structure which is found in diaries which turn to contemplate the nature of diary-keeping, and of course Proust’s discussion of the shape of time in Book VI of In Search of Lost Time. But philosophy is not just an activity which Augustine turns to at the end ofConfessions,
it is also a prominent topic of the narration which precedes the more philosophical books. Philosophy is one of the forces thatbrings
the confessor’s reform about, acting as a kind of middle ground between rhetoric and the word of God. As a sinner, Augustine is a teacher of literature, and when he emerges from his filthy cauldron of lust at the start of Book III, it is through a rumination on the evils of vicarious experience, in the form of literature and drama, and in particular the evils of pitying those who suffer on stage. The self-commentary here is inevitable, not only because we are in the midst of a vicarious experience of Saint Augustine’s own suffering (though no doubt finding Augustine the Sinner infinitely more interesting than Augustine the Saint)
but
also because it incorporates into his own language and discourse an explicit reflection on language and discourse. The love of literature is, in retrospect, clearly part of his moral turpitude, as is his interest in rhetoric, and Augustine constantly contrasts both with truth, yet it is through the study of rhetoric, and the sense of superiority and conceit which accompanied his success in it, that he came upon philosophy:
The prescribed course of study brought me to the work of Cicero, whose writing nearly everyone admires, if not the spirit of it. The title of the book is Hortensius and it recommends the reader to study philosophy. It altered my outlook on life. It changed my prayers to you, O Lord, and provided me with new hopes and aspirations. All my empty dreams suddenly lost their charm and my heart began to throb with a bewildering passion for the wisdom of eternal truth. I began to climb out of the depths to which I had sunk, in order to return to you.For I did not use the book to sharpen my tongue.
It was not the style of it but the contents which won me over. (1961: 58-9)
Though full of lies, literature led him to the vanity of rhetoric, which presented him with philosophy, which satisfied a love of wisdom and truth and led him closer to God. As such, his narrative enacts the story it tells, since it not only describes the conversion in these terms, but also gradually abandons narrative in favour of philosophy. The confession narrates a whole set of transitions which it also enacts in its own style and structure, from distance to proximity, from youth to wisdom, from falsity to truth, from literature to philosophy and from devilry to God, and in this way it holds the past at bay, and prevents the moral unreliability of the past from contaminating the truth of the present.
But it is very difficult to see this transition as a success, or indeed to see the philosophy of time presented in Book XI as anything other than a subversion of this separation of lies from truth. From the very moment that Augustine announces the discovery of philosophy, he also warns against the dangers of philosophy, and of its potential to deceive and mislead:
There are people for whom philosophy is a means of misleading others, for they misuse its great name, its attractions, and its integrity to give colour and gloss to their own errors. Most of these so-called philosophers who lived in Cicero’s time and before are noted in the book. He shows them up in their true colours and makes quite clear how wholesome is the admonition which the Holy Spirit gives in the words of your good and true servant, Paul: Take care not to let anyone cheat you with his philosophizings, with empty fantasies drawn from human tradition, from worldly principles; they were never Christ’s teaching. (59)
Augustine’s training in rhetoric was clearly not wasted, and we see him here excelling in the mode of rhetorical prolepsis, in anticipation of an argument against the truth-telling powers of philosophy. At the moment of declaring that he has moved on from the trickery of rhetoric to the truth of philosophy, he rolls out the oldest trick in the rhetorical handbook, namely the preclusion of an objection through its anticipation.
This moment in Book III bears a very complex relationship with the philosophisings of Book XI. If it succeeds as prolepsis, it will preclude the objection to philosophy, and in so doing affirm the trickery of rhetoric against which the truth of philosophy is defined. If on the other hand it fails, it will install in the reader exactly the suspicion that it aims to preclude: the suspicion that philosophers might be cheating us. Either way, the prolepsis contaminates the truth to come with the falsity which it aims to leave behind, to relegate to the past. Augustine is merely repeating the trick played upon him by Cicero, the great master of prolepsis, in order to convince his readers of the truth of his own claim that the philosophers of the past are liars, and so that they belong with his own youthful personality on the other side of the moral contrast of the confession to his own narrative present. There is internal anticipation here, of the philosophy to come, and there is external anticipation, which works on the objections of the reader, and which reveals the fiction of a private conversation with God in its own true rhetorical colours.
How does this rhetorical and narratological reading affect the content of what Augustine argues about time in Book XI? One answer to this has already been offered. Book XI may have been taken by philosophers as a detachable tract about time, but it is also a tract embedded in the narrative structure of a self-reflection, and more specifically, in the logical problems of truth and falsity faced by self-referential discourses. It would be melodramatic to say that Book XI is not about time, but about narrative, and perhaps more accurate to claim that it is incapable of holding these two subjects apart. The distance between time and narrative cannot be maintained, because the philosophical discussion erupts as a necessary reflection on the temporal crisis which occurs when a dishonest past catches up with the moment of sincere narration which seeks to exclude it. But this is not the end of the story. In the analysis above it is clear that the confession depends on the separation of lies from truth, and therefore on the temporal distance that the narrative provides as a mechanism.
Yet the contribution which Book XI has made to the philosophy of time is exactly the opposite of this, insofar as it places in question the very possibility of separation on which the narrative depends.
The argument of Book XI is well known: time thought of as a series of ‘nows’ is incoherent, in that it seems to suggest that nothing has any existence. The past does not exist, because it is by definition what used to exist, and the future does not exist yet. Yet the present also cannot exist because it has no duration: as soon as it does have duration it can be divided into future and past segments, and in the process rules itself out of existence again. The solution to this is to endow past, present and future with existence by translating them into memory, direct perception and expectation, since these correspond to three things that clearly do have existence: the present of past things, the present of present things and the present of future things. The example through which this is argued is the perception of sunrise:
Suppose that I am watching the break of day. I predict that the sun is about to rise. What I see is present but what I foretell is future. I do not mean that the sun is future, for it already exists, but that its rise is future, because it has not yet happened. But I could not foretell the sunrise unless I had a picture of it in mymind.,
just I have at this moment while I am speaking about it. Yet the dawn, which I see in the sky, is not the sunrise, which is future. The future, then, is not yet; it is not at all, it cannot possibly be seen. But it can be foretold from things which are present, because they exist now and can therefore be seen. (268)
In this moment before sunrise, it is claimed, something is present to the eye, and that something contains within it traces of what has been and what is to come. This is fundamentally the phenomenological view of time that we find in Husserl, where the present is a crossed structure of protentions and retentions, and in Heidegger’s unity of ecstases. But Heidegger, as we have seen, rejects presence as the foundation of existence, and the reasons for this show up very clearly in the relation between Augustine’s argument and his example. First he says that presence has no existence because it has no duration, then that presence can be divided into three. This is normally taken not as a contradiction, but as a moment of genius which compensates for the lack of extension of the present with the distension of presence in the mind. In other words, it is not that the present doesn’t exist, but that it exists in a particular way to the mind, as a crossed structure of protentions and retentions. The past and the future are therefore merely aspects of thepresent,
or rather that they only have existence for humans as presence, in the present. What then is theOther
of time? For Augustine it is God, who is outside time, in eternity. Yet eternity itself is ‘a never-ending present’. Despite the lack of extension of the present, it would appear that for both the human and the divine mind, the present is all we have, and that the distension of past, present and future in the human mind creates a kind of fragment of that complete unity, the never-ending present, apprehended by God.
The past, according to this scheme, exists for the human mind only as the present of the past. Like Heidegger, Augustine offers an account of the experience of time as an ineluctable unity, and one which differs from the ordinary conception of time. But whereas Heidegger rigorously substitutes the familiar and commonsensical words (past, present and future) with new terms and phrases, Augustine is content to continue with the old ones despite their potentially misleading effect:
By all means, then, let us speak of three times, past, present and future.
Incorrect though it is, let us comply with usage. I shall not object or argue, nor shall I rebuke anyone who speaks in these terms, provided that he understand what he is saying and does not imagine that the future or the past exists now. Our use of words is generally inaccurate and seldom completely correct, but our meaning is recognized none the less. (1961: 269)
The disarming candour with which he warned against the dangers of philosophy is repeated here in relation to language more generally, in the warning that words themselves are not accurate, and particularly that the words ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’ do not mean what they say. The relationship between confession and philosophising reaches a new level of tension here. It is not only that the narrative structure of the confession seems to depend upon the temporal separation of the narrator and the narrated, or Augustine past and present, it is also that the very words, and indeed tenses, of the narrative are rooted in a philosophy of time which the philosophical reflections reject. Put at its most simple, the features of discourse which mark its retrospect, such as past tenses and temporal locators such as ‘once’ and ‘then’ are misleading us into thinking that the past is before us, when in fact only the present ispresent.
The word ‘past’ is a lie because it disguises the presence of the present. This is a confession that knows that it cannot deliver the truth about time, because that truth is outside of human time, in the eternity experienced by God. The contrast that Augustine develops between time and eternity therefore works to establish that time itself is a lie.
On one hand Confessions seems to depend upon the separability, or the temporal distance, which is permitted by the separation of past, present and future. On the other hand, the narration seems not only to enact, but to state explicitly, that this temporal separability is impossible.
This paradox is not as much of a calamity, or even a logical inconsistency, as it may appear. If the threefold present is inescapable for the human mind, we are merely saying that the temporal distance that separates the past from the present, and which permits the moral self-judgement of confession is immanent in the present. The paradox then is that this temporal distance is not actually temporally distant, and indeed that no temporal distance can ever really exist for the human mind, since presence is all that there is. But in the terms of Augustine’s own argument, there is no presence either, since as soon as there is presence, in the sense that presence has duration, there is only absence in the form of the past and the future. As Heidegger well knew, presence cannot function as the principle that unifies present, past and future, and it is obvious that Augustine’s argument is simply contradictory. It argues first that the present has no extension, and then that it is distended in the human mind; but it is illogical that something which has no extension can be distended, since the condition of lacking extension is the condition of not being distended.
As David Wood remarks in his discussion of Heidegger,
it is difficult to make sense of any purely phenomenological account of time, that is of the threefold present, or of the unity of the ecstases, without reference to an external, cosmological or ordinary conception of time. How, asks Ricoeur, can we make sense of the threefoldpresent,
or of the distension of the present in the mind, without reference to an objective and cosmological sense of the past, present and future? The very meanings of ‘memory’, ‘direct experience’ and ‘expectation’ are dependent on the concepts of the past, present and future. It would seem that what happens in the account of temporality offered by both Augustine and Heidegger is that the ordinary conception of time as a series of nows, with the past behind us and the future before us, is merely relocated within consciousness, so that the idea of time as a product of the mind is merely an immanent repetition of the ordinary conception of time.
Augustine’s relocation of the past, the present and the future is of course based on the argument that neither the past and future, nor the present can exist, in the sense of being present to consciousness. But this is an entirely circular argument: it begins from the presupposition that existence is presence to consciousness, and proceeds to demonstrate that presence is never present to consciousness, only to conclude that nothing exists. The argument that the lack of extension of the present is compensated for by the distension of the threefold present by the mind is nothing more than a bid to rescue the situation from the abyss of nonexistence by resurrecting the notion of presence, which reappears without justification as the basis on which things exist in the mind. In other words the view of time as the threefold present can only be half of the picture, and though the human mind can have no direct access to the other half, that is to the direct perception of past and future in their entirety, the intuition of the past and the future is necessary to the present, and to the conception of the threefold present. The paradox of temporal distance then is merely the recognition that an account of the inseparability of past, present and future in the mind depends upon their separation in the ordinary, or metaphysical, conception of time, and in reverse, that the metaphysical conception of time cannot deny the inseparability of past, present and future in consciousness.
But is consciousness the right frame of reference here? Many parts of Augustine’s argument offer a notion of presence to the mind as the foundation for being and time, but when we move forwards in the history of philosophy, there is a discernible tendency to displace the notion of consciousness with the category of language itself, or to shift from the analysis of the mind to an analysis of textuality. The notion of narrative consciousness is itself something of a conflation of the externality of writing and the internality of consciousness, and it is to this monistic universe, to this rebellion against the idea of consciousness itself that a theory aiming to encompass the written text and a mode of being under the rubric of narrative must turn.
Notes
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Author: Mark Currie
