Mark Currie

About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time

Series Editors Preface Acknowledgements Introduction About About Time Chapter One: The Present Chapter Two: Prolepsis Chapter Three: Temporality and Self-Distance Chapter Four: Inner and Outer Time Chapter Five: Backwards Time Chapter Six: Fictional Knowledge Chapter Seven: Tense Times Bibliography Index.

The Expansion of Tense

Peter Brooks is one of several theorists and critics who have understood the “strange logic” of reading a narrative to be bound up with the “anticipation of retrospection”: “[i]f the past is to be read as present, it is a curious present that we know to be past in relation to a future we know to be already in place, already in wait for us to reach it. Perhaps we would do best to speak of the anticipation of retrospection as our chief tool in making sense of narrative, the master trope of its strange logic” (23). He reaches this suggestion by combining two apparently separate traditions in narrative criticism, one that characterizes the tradition of telling as one in which “everything is transformed by the structuring presence of the end to come” and the other for whom the action of a novel takes place before the eyes as a “kind of present” (ibid.). A fictional narrative, he seems to be saying, can do both of these things at the same time: it can ask us to decode events narrated in the past tense as a kind of present, and ask us to view those events as structured in relation to a future which is already there and waiting for us to reach it. It is clear that, for Brooks, the reason that a narrative can do both of these things, that is to experience the events of a novel as a kind of present and as a kind of past, lies in the fact that the future already exists, and the inference is that the anticipation of retrospection cannot operate as the master trope in the strange logic of what we might call, for want of a better word, life. In life, the future is open, unwritten, and susceptible to our intentions, desires and efforts in a way that cannot be said of narrative.

The invention of deconstruction

Acknowledgements PART I: INVENTION, ADVENT, EVENT 1. After the Event: Looking back on Deconstruction 2. The Discovery of America: the Reception of Derrida in the United States PART II: THE DOMESTICATION OF DERRIDA 3. Domestication Narratives 4. The Question of History in Derrida and de Man PART III: DECONSTRUCTION AND CRITICAL AUTHORITY 5. Derrida and the Authority of Linguistics 6. The Ventriloquism of Paul de Man PART IV: PHILOSOPHY, LITERATURE AND RESPONSIBILITY 7. Metaphor and the Invention of Truth 8. Performativity and Obligation 9. Conclusion: Invention and Responsibility Bibliography Index

Time, Narrative and Culture

This chapter is about the experience of teaching narrative in the context of philosophical and social theories of time. Most critical writing about time and narrative is focused on the question of memory, but this chapter argues that expectation, anticipation and surprise are equally fruitful concepts for teaching narrative. It looks at the notion of ‘epochal temporality’, or the claim that different historical epochs have distinct and describable experiences of time, and asks what this might mean for an understanding of narrative time in the contemporary novel. It explores the idea that, in the historical present, there is a preoccupation with the unforeseeable, which differs significantly from predominant conceptions of time in the second half of the twentieth century. The chapter also aims to set out a range of useful narratological concepts, particularly related to the notion of narrative tense, which is useful for the description of time structures in so-called ‘epochal temporality’ and for the teaching of time experiments in contemporary fiction. The chapter is closely tied to a third-year undergraduate module in which students work on a range of modern novels.

Conclusion: Invention and Responsibility

The idea that there was some kind of turn, after the 1980s, towards issues of ethical and political responsibility is now well established as a version of the history of deconstruction. Sometimes this is thought to be attributable to Derrida’s own increasingly social, ethical and political responsibility after the Heidegger affair in 1987 and the de Man affair in 1988: many have spoken of the ‘ethical turn’ in Derrida’s work, and by extension, an ethical turn in criticism and theory more generally. It has been my argument in this book that Derrida’s most consistent interests throughout his career were based in questions about time, and that the primacy of questions about time is what was least well understood by proponents of deconstruction in literary studies in the United States in those first decades. My argument is therefore part of a discernible process of revision that has been underway more recently, and which seeks to emphasize the arguments about time that are at the centre of Derrida’s thinking, whether about structure or ethics, from the beginning. Martin Hagglund, for example, has intervened to question a range of readings of Derrida which sought, in the 1990s, to yoke him to Levinas, or to take Derrida’s own statements of absolute agreement with Levinas’s work as evidence of some ethical turn.1 Hagglund’s work is one of the places where temporality and presence are reinstated as the questions that are, particularly in Derrida’s late writing, more basic than, or perhaps merely inextricable from, questions of ethics.

Performativity and Obligation

J. Hillis Miller has undoubtedly been one of Derrida’s most attentive and inventive readers from the first moments of the impact of his work in the United States. The tribute to de Man, discussed in the previous chapter (Miller 1985), nevertheless illustrates one of the central difficulties of extracting Derrida’s core statements, such as those on the absence of signatory and referent, from their contexts. Aside from the ubiquitous terminology of presence and absence itself, Derrida’s work is full of emblems and metaphors that represent these absences. The ‘sun’ is one such emblem, but ‘Writing’ and ‘Arche-writing’ in Of Grammatology are no less metaphorical in the way they represent the absence of the person who means or refers. This does not mean that signifying subjects or external objects, people and things, melt into air. The post card and the gramophone are among many emblems of absence, like the signature and telecommunications in general that come to stand in for this key characteristic of writing as language founded on absence.

The Question of History in Derrida and de Man

It is quickly apparent in any investigation of Derrida’s attitude to history, particularly in his early writings, that nothing is straightforward. Evidence cannot be found to support either a simple acceptance or rejection of ‘history’ as a concept, or historicism as a commitment. It seems that this lesson was never learned by commentators who sought, in the 1970s, to align Derrida in a factious debate between historicism and formalism. Working with unsupportable caricatures of New Criticism, Myth Criticism and Structuralism as versions of formalism that banished all forms of historical perspective, it was the belief of commentators such as Gelley, Miller, Booth and Lentricchia that the promise of even the possibility of historical perspective in Derrida’s work placed him outside the tradition of formalism in the United States.

Derrida and the Authority of Linguistics

It is probably assumed too readily in retrospect that Derrida had something to say about the nature of language, and that deconstruction as a critical practice either rested on that something, or demonstrated it at work in literature. In this chapter I am going to argue that this was and is not the case, that Derrida made almost no pronouncements on the question of what language is and isn’t, and that deconstruction did not rest, in this sense, on any sort of linguistic premises. It is much safer to think of it the other way around: that writings about language, that is to say, language about language, like the discourse of linguistics, shape and construe their object according to well-established habits and patterns of thought that are never properly demonstrable, and derive from philosophical positions. Rather than assume that deconstruction rested on linguistic premises, it is safer to regard Derrida’s writings as demonstrations that linguistics rests on something prior or primordial, and that this primordiality goes by the name of deconstruction. In this chapter I am going to try to justify this claim, and in so doing to prepare the way for a further argument that this relation comes out in a very different way in the writings of Paul de Man.

The Discovery of America: The Reception of Derrida in the United States

It is often said that the charisma of a charismatic leader is not located in the personality of the leader but conferred upon the individual by the needs and desires of those who follow. A simple version of the logic of supplementarity is at work in such an argument: the thing that follows produces the thing that it is supposed to follow from. This is a useful way of thinking about the invention of deconstruction, and more specifically, about the way that the reception of Derrida produced an account of Derrida that was only loosely related to what he had actually written, and reflected instead the complex needs and desires of the academy. This chapter focuses on just how complex those needs and desires were in literary studies in the United States from the 1960s to the 1980s, and on the very confusing historical circumstances in which Derrida was produced, mediated, translated and transformed by his reception.

Metaphor and the Invention of Truth

If the transparency of scientific writing is its guarantee of truth, it is immediately apparent why deconstruction should have acquired a reputation as some kind of challenge to the veritative possibilities of writing in general. Deconstruction was not only notorious for the opacity of its own writing, but for its relentless interest in the metaphorical basis of all writing, including that which thought of itself as the most literal rendering of the world. There is always a sense that the flaunting of metaphor in post-structuralist writing is part of a more general, literary tendency to debunk the transparency of writing in general. We can see this from the other side in a kind of suspicion of the metaphoricity of the literary mind in general, of which deconstruction would be only the latest chapter. Here, for example, is Richard Dawkins describing the literary mind at the beginning of Climbing Mount Improbable: I have just listened to a lecture in which the topic for discussion was the fig. Not a botanical lecture, a literary one. We got the fig in literature, the fig as metaphor, changing perceptions of the fig, the fig as emblem of pudenda and the fig leaf as a modest concealer of them, ‘fig’ as an insult, the social construction of the fig, D.H. Lawrence on how to eat a fig in society, ‘reading fig’ and, I rather think, ‘the fig as text’. The speaker’s final pensee was the following. He recalled to us the Genesis story of Eve tempting Adam to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Genesis doesn’t actually specify, he reminded us, which fruit it was. Traditionally, people take it to be an apple. The lecturer suspected that actually it was a fig, and with this piquant little shaft he ended his talk. This kind of thing is the stock-in-trade of a certain kind of literary mind, but it provokes me to literal-mindedness. (Dawkins 1997, 1)