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The Art of Time, Theory to PracticeA vicious circle shapes much work on the problem of time in postmodern culture. Jean-François Lyotard, Fredric Jameson, David Harvey, and others trace a bad reci-procity between crisis in time and cultural crisis more generally: if postmodernity puts time in crisis, there can be no change, progress, or thinking otherwise; postmodernity redoubles, making more trouble for time. Lyotard, for example, defines “time today” as “controlled time” destructive to thought itself and therefore beyond rethinking, be-yond repair (76). When Jameson notes that “the subject has lost its capacity actively to extend its pro-tensions and re-tensions across the temporal manifold and to organize past and future into coherent experience,” he too means to locate a certain cultural incoherence beyond our capacities to resolve it (25). The “time-space compression” that defines but obscures postmodernity for Harvey largely has the same effect, which might be said to extend across the ages as well, with origins as early as what Richard Terdiman has called the “memory crisis” of post-revolutionary France and recent iterations as various as Antonio Negri’s critique of “totality without contradiction” (53), Richard Sennett’s account of “short-termism” (9), and James Gleick’s complaint against “the epoch of the nanosecond” and “the consequences of haste in our culture” (6, 13). These time-crisis theorists share the view that time is essentially a diversity of forms fatally vulnerable to the singularities of modernity. Human temporality ought to distinguish strongly but flexibly among past, present, and future, to pattern out all possible durations—to serve as a fully open and varied field of opportunity; but “time today” collapses the temporal manifold, sets only a given pace, and thereby limits possibility. Because it destroys any basis for real recourse—due, that is, to the reci-procity between time-crisis and crises in thought, memory, and experience—time-crisis theory tends to suggest that there is nothing to be done about it.

Compare narrative theory: it reverses this vicious circle, arguing all the while that narrative engagement creates human time even as (or just because) modernity would destroy it. As early as Gotthold Lessing’s classification of literature as the “art of time,”

Jesse Matz is Associate Professor of English at Kenyon College.  His article in this issue of Narrative is part of a larger project on the practice of narrative temporality. 

NARRATIVE, Vol 19, No. 3 (October 2011)Copyright 2011 by the Ohio State University

Jesse Matz

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reciprocalities of time and narrative have been essential to our sense of the nature and value of narrative form. Mikhail Bakhtin, Paul Ricoeur, Frank Kermode, Peter Brooks, Mark Currie and others have attributed human temporality to the “healthy circle” of narrative construction. And they have also implied something more practi-cal. Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative mainly theorizes the temporal ontology implicit in narrative configuration rather than its practical use, but his chapters on Woolf, Mann, and Proust show people innovating narrative temporalities for real human uses—tem-poralities that “transform human action” (2:160). Ricoeur is not alone in raising this question of practice. When Peter Brooks calls plot the “structuring operation peculiar to those messages that are developed through temporal succession” and “cannot other-wise be created or understood,” when he concludes that narrative plot is “the product of our refusal to allow temporality to be meaningless,” he looks beyond the ontol-ogy of narrative time to what “we,” after our refusals, actually do with it (10, 21, 323). Frank Kermode’s The Sense of An Ending says narrative meets temporal “needs”—that its structures fit it for existential demands that are also, by ready implication, practical demands for “temporal integration” (46). Even Paul de Man implies something similar. Unlikely to endorse any practice of temporal integration, de Man does note, in his discussion of “the rhetoric of temporality,” that “the prevalence of allegory always cor-responds to the unveiling of an authentically temporal destiny” (206). “The self seen in its authentically temporal predicament” becomes an object of insight, and, in turn, an agent of styles of temporal reckoning even de Man implies “we” might cultivate. In theory, then, human time is a product of narrative’s temporal dynamics. Theory often implies practice, however, suggesting that we consider human time a matter of active, deliberate performance, not just a hermeneutical given but an achievement of collab-orative human action or perhaps even an individual accomplishment.

Such a practice has also been the object of a host of texts for which time is a pragmatic project. Whereas many texts address the problem of time or experiment with ways to mimic it, certain texts go further, making a compelling practical argu-ment: read narrative forms to cultivate or restore real-world temporalities. A Christ-mas Carol, for example, is a parable of the temporal instruction to be had through narrative engagement. Dickens’ ghosts dramatize the form of redress proposed by the Victorian novel and its vigorous extensions into past and future. When Scrooge finally vows to “live in the Past, the Present, and the Future,” saying “the Spirits of all Three shall strive within me” and that he will “not shut out the lessons they teach,” he has learned to perform the temporal diversity modern capitalism would destroy (69). Other texts well-known for showing the truth about time—texts by Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust and others—also model ways to reinvent it aes-thetically, geared to restore or even innovate temporal possibilities. Even postmodern narratives have this special intentionality, according to Ursula Heise, who, noting that “the temporal structure of the postmodern novel . . . is a way of dealing aesthetically with an altered culture of time,” begins to account for the claim made by those texts that would contribute to a practice of temporal answerability (67). But what exactly does it mean to “deal aesthetically” with time crisis? Is aesthetic dealing real solving? Do these texts offer a way to create time, as Ricoeur suggests, in spite of what Lyotard might reply?

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This essay asks what happens when narrative texts answer Lyotard with Ricoeur in the spirit of Dickens—how, why, and with what effect they ask us to address real-world time-crisis through a practice of narrative engagement. Deliberately utopian for the sake of argument, inevitably diverse in its considerations, the essay poses some of the key questions raised by any such use for narrative temporality: What justifies reading Ricoeur (and the critical tradition he represents) for these practical implica-tions? What suggests that temporalities modeled in narrative forms might transfer into real opportunities? How would this practice actually work, and what would be its instruments, objectives, and results? Answers to these questions will focus on the possibility that narrative devices redress time crisis—that time’s failures provoke nar-rative forms, which, in response to narratological analysis, ready the tools through which we reconstruct everyday temporal opportunities. In other words, the essay will argue that narrative’s temporal dynamics, its performance of durations, frequencies, speeds, and other time-schemes, might constitute an “art of time” through which to practice temporal diversity.1 And the essay will link this practice to the broader cul-ture of time-work to which it would contribute, the larger public culture of temporal cultivation within which the “art of time” might play a leading role. If this argument sounds too utopian in scope or advocacy, it might instead be understood as a frame-work for interpreting those texts that make the argument themselves: whether or not the temporal dynamics special to narrative form do reverse the vicious cycle of time crisis, key texts propose that they do, and understanding those texts requires that we know how, why, and with what effect they make that claim.

“Narrative temporality” here is not limited to the chronological linearity for which it is often mistaken but understood to include the many temporalities narrative actually brings into play. The term here refers to the prodigious, nonlinear complexity involved even in the simplest narrative utterance, the collocation of time-frames en-tailed even in linear narrative action, the complexity so amply recognized in narrative theory and readily apparent despite the common-sense habit of equating narrativity with sequence. Similarly, temporality is defined in phenomenological terms as the perspectival, horizonal range—the diversity—that produces the manifold of past, present, and future and brings variety to the relationships among them, the forms of duration that convert presence into a field of difference. But because phenomenology links time-consciousness to aesthetic form and to social life, ethics, politics, and psy-chology, any practice of narrative temporality must only fail to simplify time’s notori-ously complex definitions. Further confusing the issue are the endless complications that have also subjected the phenomenology of time to ontological, existential, and poststructural variations. If the definition of temporality is therefore an open ques-tion here, the confusion is essential—indeed, central to this essay’s goals. Studies of time in literature have tended to presume that texts pose ontological questions or that they represent time in such a way as to get at the truth of our experience of it. Even arguments that discover potentially salvific temporalities in narrative forms stop short of the implications of applying them.2 By contrast, this essay risks focus on the possibility that narrative texts are phenomenological instruments through which to transform temporal realities, pragmatic opportunities that make time more truly an open question. And a public one: to say that narrative forms constitute a public prac-

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tice of time is to say that these forms often invite application to an array of potential shared endeavors rather than only to reflect subjective realities or ideal ontologies. The difference will become clearer as we turn now to the crux through which the art of time might go from theory to practice: the phenomenological hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative.

TIME AND NARRATIVE: FROM RICOEUR TO COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

For Ricoeur, the problem of time is its discordance: it splits into past, present, and future; it is sequence, and yet it is duration; it is experiential but cosmological and truest, somehow, both as eternity and as change. Endlessly it presents us with these aporias, Ricoeur notes, and its discordances are primordially baffling unless narrative intervenes. Narrative is concordant discordance; it replies to the aporetics of time by structuring discordance and converting its paradoxes into a “living dialectic” (1:66–67). Narrative engagement uniquely enables temporal speculation through its three-fold mimesis: temporal preunderstanding proceeds through narrative configuration to readerly reconfiguration, so that productive discordances remain true to time’s aporetics. A doubleness also distinguishes the time of the telling from the time of the told, also in the spirit of concordant discordance, and, thus doubled and trebled, narrated time becomes a kind of matrix adequate to time’s discordances while yet a structure. Blocked conflicts become positive, productive tensions, and human time emerges, so uniquely that “there can be no thought of time without narrated time,” or, to quote a phrase that hardly needs quoting, “time becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after a narrative; narrative, in turn, is meaningful to the extent that it portrays the features of temporal experience” (3).

But we might ask: Organized by whom—meaningful to whom? Is this reciprocity of time and narrative a purely essential one, only a “deep kinship,” or do real people actually practice these portrayals, for practical purposes (xi)? What actually provokes reciprocation here, prompting time’s narrative organization (on the one hand) and narrative’s adoption of temporal features? Phenomenological hermeneutics does not dwell on situated practice: Time and Narrative is not a handbook. But Ricoeur’s treat-ment of “the means by which we reconfigure our confused, unformed, and at the limit mute temporal experience” does raise the question of real performance (xi). It raises that question somewhat mutely, however, and our practical reconfigurations need explanation at another level of inquiry. For phenomenological hermeneutics keeps Ricoeur only to a certain ideal level of practice, keeping out the contingen-cies of ordinary social life. Peter Osborne notes that Ricoeur’s account of narrative’s beneficially “imperfect mediation” fails to account for the “regulatory practices of a common social life”; Cornelius Castoriadis has undertaken the effort to expand Ricoeur’s argument by making the social-historical its starting point. As these critics suggest, social practice should be seen always already to intervene here and must be recognized as a decisive temporal agent. Even if Ricoeur does attend amply to history and to praxis, it remains to apply his approach to what we might call the

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happenstance of narrative temporality—the actual occasions on which the circle of time and narrative comes around to contingent social action and individual human understanding.3 Adding this contingency to the circle makes its practical contours emerge. The relationship between human time and narrative organization becomes an actual collaboration between acts of temporal understanding and the particulars of narrative form. That is, pursuing Ricoeur’s analysis through the happenstances of social and cognitive activity proves even more emphatically that “there can be no thought of time without narrated time,” by proving that narrating time also enables individual understanding and creates new social resources. The narratorial dynamics that give actual minds diverse forms of temporal facility are equally but differently essential—part of a temporal practice that could bring Ricoeur’s analysis to the level of timely cultural engagement.4 In a moment we will consider an example of the way this transposition might reframe engagement with a text Ricoeur himself discusses (Proust’s A la recherche). First, however, let us find proof that Ricoeur’s time-narrative reciprocity does indeed circle through practical understanding—that temporal cog-nition, too, depends upon narrative construction. This dependence has lately been the interest of cognitive psychologists whose work shows that temporal cognition transfers from narrative form because that is where it mainly occurs.

Cognitive psychologists have studied every aspect of temporal cognition—scalar timing, duration discrimination, perception of temporal events, memory of every kind, temporal ordering—but these areas of study have not come together into any general account of temporal understanding. No “general process model” explains how these aspects of cognition emerge into temporal awareness. Indeed, “a burning question . . . is whether the many and varied phenomena . . . may be treated as manifestations of a coherent set of processes, or, instead, only as a collection of essentially unrelated processes that entertain only superficial relations to each other” (Michon and Jackson 298). For the most part, this incoherence has discouraged inquiry into temporal cogni-tion; theorists note that “the topic has never been high on the cognitive science agenda” because “the various sorts of investigations into time-related issues” have not coalesced (Van Gelder 250–51). Lately, however, incoherence itself has become central. Leading cognitive psychologists now say that time in the mind is naturally incoherent and must defer to surrogates to emerge into temporal understanding.5

Cognitive psychologist John Michon divides temporal cognition into two mo-ments. First is what he calls “tuning,” the set of automatic processes through which low-level, reflexive behavior keys itself to progressive events in the environment.6 Tuning is an array of diverse, often unrelated processes; it is unconscious and cog-nitively impenetrable, precognitive and, therefore, not time. Time is “the conscious experiential product of the tuning process” (Michon 40). It emerges through explicit attention to tuning and is a “derived entity,” “a construction a posteriori,” belonging to “the declarative domain of knowledge” (42). Michon sums up the difference by calling tuning “timing your mind” and calling temporal cognition what happens when you are “minding your time.” These catch-phrases stress the fact that “time is a conceptual structure . . . that is designed specifically to represent and solve problems whenever the tuning process fails” (41–42). We implicitly, automatically tune to our environment, but when something disrupts the process—when there is conflict among bedrock

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temporal processes, or automatic processes are inadequate to the demands of new en-vironmental conditions—we become conscious of the process and time results. Time, then, is a kind of cognitive supplement, a remedial representation (though not en-tirely an arbitrary construction, because it responds to precognitive circumstances). Time is the purposive reparation of broken adherence to natural temporality.

Time’s remedial representations range from simple to complex, from literal pat-terns to metaphorical ones, and at their most elaborate they become “formal” rep-resentational structures. “The difference,” Michon writes, “seems to reside mostly in the level of abstraction that is required to match a representation with the temporal structure of the concrete episode that it represents” (42). Here is narrative’s oppor-tunity—the place for Ricoeur’s “discordant concordance”—for here is the need for representations at once formally removed from natural temporal occurrence and keyed to the failed “tunings” they would remediate. Here, time needs patterns flex-ibly attuned, provisionally generated, and true to the diversity other representations would resolve away.7

“Time is the conscious experiential product of the processes that allow the (hu-man) organism to adaptively organize itself so that its behavior remains tuned to the sequential (i.e., order) relations in its environment:” Michon’s summary definition of time lays stress on the conscious production of time, the deliberacy of the process, and also its supplementarity (40). Time does not come naturally to us. It is not natural to cognition, but instead defers to representational constructions, for practical time locates itself in the narrative forms that supplement failed efforts to tune to a natural environment. Narrative serves here as a “cognitive artifact,” one of what David Her-man and others have called the “tools for thinking” distributed outside the individual mind.8 Time is not deterministically the property of the brain, nor is narrative; rather, the two generate each other reciprocally around cognitive gaps—what Ellen Spolsky has called “gaps in nature”—and they do so as social and cultural provisions, in and through socio-cultural representations.9 These cognitive gaps can enable us to under-stand the reasons for specific narrative temporal forms. Cognitive psychology is use-ful to justification of a narrative practice of time not just for the theoretical evidence it provides but for its potential to articulate exactly the “tunings” that specific forms of narrative engagement remediate.

For example, Katherine Nelson’s work on “episodic memory” can help us pin-point the precise ways in which certain narrative languages propose innovative tem-poralities. Nelson argues that “the idea of a specific past in which previous experi-ences took place is . . . a construction of language users” (“Memory” 279). Episodic memory—recall of specific events, as opposed to semantic memory, in which specific events vanish into the general knowledge base—is developed in children through narrative elaboration: “protoepisodic fragments and scripts” only become “full mem-ories when elaborated into narratives through talk with parents.” Narrative actually creates the past as such, “[making] possible the maintenance of conflicting simulta-neous representations of reality,” giving children the very capacity to conceive of the conflict between “was” and “is” by presenting them in the same field of attention (264, 278). It seems that cognition would naturally overwrite past realities and make them available for retrieval only insofar as they served some semantic purpose. Narrative temporality, however, enables cognition to preserve the past in the form of episodic

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memory by introducing the very sense of the past. Nelson concludes that narrative is therefore necessary to the full range of temporal recognition we might otherwise presume to be built into the mind. Not only the past but the future—indeed, the temporal manifold—depends on the way in which narrative enables transcendence of a single-minded point of view.

Nelson’s findings match Michon’s: “The child’s knowledge of time concepts is knowledge mediated through language and cultural artifacts” (Language 288). Like Michon, Nelson shows how cultural supplementation enables temporal possibility—and how its specific forms depend upon specific forms of narrative action. Further such evidence comes from Daniel Gilbert’s work on “affective forecasting.” Gilbert ar-gues that true openness to the future naturally fails because of a certain “presentism”: the mind ordinarily attributes present conditions to future possibilities, thereby fail-ing to reckon with future possibilities at all, or presuming they match projections of past experience. The work necessary to imagine futurity happens by other means. Some “surrogacy” is necessary, and although Gilbert describes it as a matter of hu-man sociability (information on possible future feelings from other people feeling them in the present), his account of the surrogacy process sets up the same narra-torial constructions at work in temporal cognition as Michon and Nelson describe it. Through collaborative explanation, “presentist” time-frames extend into possible futures, and a social narrativization once again creates temporal landscapes unavail-able to the individual mind.10 Once again we see time-narrative reciprocity enabling cognition through the social artifact, and offering up ways to meet the challenges of “time today”—modeling the enhancement of temporal possibility in tune with the kind of opportunities now presented worldwide. In other words, cognitive psychol-ogy now affirms that Ricoeur’s association of time and narrative does indeed occur at the level of situated understanding and can therefore become a matter of practical, critical personal and social engagement.

NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE AS COGNITIVE TUNING: PROUST AND THE PSEUDO-ITERATIVE

But what would it take to make it so? Is narrative’s temporal surrogacy something still effectively natural, in that it happens apart from any aesthetic intention, or is it avail-able to the kind of initiative necessary to make it a purposeful textual practice? Here we need to identify the “artifacts” in narrative responsive to the “gaps” time emerges to fill. If, as I have claimed, we should look for the forms of narrative engagement that remediate our cognitive “tunings,” where would we find them? One possibility—the one this essay will pursue—is that they correspond to the narrative devices named in narratology, that those devices remediate the cognitive functions Michon and others describe. Narratology details the narrative dynamics through which temporal cogni-tion emerges into temporal agency; its terminology names the functions that supple-ment temporal cognition and key it to new possibilities. This is to repeat what many critics and theorists have said about certain aspects of the relationship between narra-tive forms and temporal awareness—for example, what Martha Nussbaum has argued about the slow recognition patterned out only in narrative forms (261–285), or what

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Gary Saul Morson has argued about “tempics,” and, more specifically, the benefits of narratorial “side-shadowing” to our recognition of alternative life possibilities (6).11 But a sharper narratological focus, with broader implications—an instance of what David Herman calls postclassical narratology—closes tighter links in a longer chain, specifying precisely the practical dynamics that would link individual mental action through narrative to the temporal cultures of the contemporary world (“Scripts” 1048).

The terms in question have been articulated most comprehensively in Gérard Genette’s Narrative Discourse. They are those categories of order, duration, and fre-quency, the different narrative speeds and modes of anachrony Genette has used to explain exactly how Proust modeled breakthrough temporal postures. They would be a practical crux here, because they are the measure of any text’s practical temporality, the points at which specific narrative structures remediate cognitive action, and, by extension, contribute to larger cultures of time. Genette shows Proust to be replete with just the creative dynamics through which narrative forms meet temporal op-portunity. The full complexity of Proust’s temporal experiment—beyond that which makes him the classic example of modernist culture’s assault on clock time and the prophet of memory—is laid out in Genette’s recognition that Proustian order, dura-tion, and frequency leave no traditional narrative temporalities intact. Genette does not, however, concern himself with the cultural sources of Proust’s experiments or their potential cultural effects. Were we to restore these experiments to their fuller pragmatic contexts, we would find that Proust’s experimental temporal dynamics re-spond to (and propose critical redress of) temporal challenges incipient to those that preoccupy time-crisis theorists today.

For example, one of Genette’s more durable narratological chestnuts: “pseudo-it-eration.” Pseudo-iteration is Genette’s term for a peculiar habit of anachrony in Proust. “Iterative” narration makes single reference to something that happened frequently. It contrasts with “singulative” narration, which makes single reference to a past event that occurred only once. The iterative tends to take the imperfect verb form—so, for example, “I used to see him there,” or “I saw him there a lot,” as opposed to the singu-lative “I saw him there once.” French verb tenses of course inflect these distinctions somewhat differently— passé simple (aorist), passé compose, and imparfait complicate this absolute distinction between an event located to a particular past moment and one with more extensive temporal range—but Genette’s theory of Proustian iteration nevertheless identifies a view of the past that accounts for much of what makes the Recherche unique. “In Proust the singulative scene itself is not immune to a sort of contamination by the iterative:” Proustian narration tends toward an unusual combi-nation of the two (121). Sometimes Proust will narrate in the iterative aspect—writ-ing, for example, that he used to have lunch an hour late every Saturday—but then describe allegedly regular occurrences in singular detail. Genette writes of “scenes presented, particularly by their wording in the imperfect, as iterative, whereas their richness and precision of detail ensure that no reader can seriously believe they oc-cur and reoccur in that manner, several times, without any variation.” Such scenes develop from iterative pretexts to singular descriptions; conversations that took place between Léonie and Françoise “every Sunday” at Combray will quickly develop one Sunday’s contents, without any change in narrative aspect. Genette claims that this conflation indicates a “sort of intoxication with the iterative,” an extreme literalization

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of what is normally just a suggestive figure of rhetoric. Proust “forgets the distinction of aspects”—but why? For what reasons, and with what result?

What causes Proust’s aspectual conflation? Many things, of course, many of which are aesthetic motivations or textual prerogatives perhaps not really amenable to practical forms of analysis. And yet we might note that the pseudo-iterative cor-responds to a certain temporal chiasmus, a conflation of episodic and semantic past-ness, one meant to contravene modern time-schemes that isolate events and prevent their general relevance. This is not to say that time in Proust mainly works this way; this is not to try for any major contribution to the theory of Proustian memory, or even to argue that the distinction between episodic and semantic memory has much to do with Proust’s theory of time. It is simply to say that the Proustian pseudo-it-erative might be read pragmatically as a way deliberately to widen the backing of momentary experiences.

A singular event is episodic; an event that has entered semantic memory has an iterative significance to the present, the backing of regular experience, a lesser link to the past as such. The two orientations toward the past event are incompatible, but in pseudo-iteration they are yoked together. Proustian narration integrates them perhaps to close a gap between a modernist sense of dislocation and the continu-ities lost with the culture Proust recalls. To put it crudely: Combray was a world of iteration—one in which the past always had full explanatory bearing upon the pres-ent. By contrast Proust’s modern present is singular in its experiences, since past and present experiences increasingly fail to match. These are commonplace observations: the modern moment was one in which traditional experience lost relevance; Proust tries to recover lost time. Even so, we might explain Proust’s “intoxication with the iterative” as a deliberate effort to restore continuity between the episodic and seman-tic pasts, in the face of early-twentieth-century challenges to what might have once seemed to be their natural “tuning.”

Insofar as those challenges are now greater, Proust’s efforts might be instructive. Reading the Proustian pseudo-iterative, noting its historical provocation and cogni-tive ingenuity, could it be possible also to practice it—to try for this temporality in everyday life? If indeed modernity yet endangers the semantic past, is there a chance for preservation in the narration of episodes into semantic continuity? Might the ob-solescence of pastness be counteracted through this expanded form of narratological inquiry? These questions bring us to the main ones: can we transfer the temporal un-derstanding embedded in narrative forms to conscious action, and, in turn, to critical thinking about time crisis? Could such critical thinking amount to a temporal prac-tice, a way to respond to “time today,” an explicit motive for narrative engagement?

OTHER TECHNIQUES, OTHER PRACTICES: FROM DEATHBED PROPHECY TO BOOMERANG ANACHRONY

The implicit hope is to cultivate this and other critical temporalities, extracting them from their textual sources and applying them to public temporal enhancements. The temporal proficiencies of narrative texts would become those of the mind and of minds thinking and acting together—the forms of imagination necessary to rethink

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the singularities of time today and to subject its totalities to the diversity of narra-tive’s provisional designs. Pseudo-iteration could correspond to artful techniques through which to prepare in advance to draw out the general relevance potential to any momentary experience, to test apparent anomalies for iteration and thereby nar-row the gap between tradition and modernity. Or practices not unlike new-historicist techniques for extrapolating anecdotal information: when Stephen Greenblatt defines the “representational technology” of the “representative anecdote,” he has derived a critical practice from a narratorial technique much the way we might derive one from Proustian pseudo-iteration (3). Other critical practices could involve any number of other such uses for narrative temporality in which its forms serve less to reflect reali-ties than to propose new possibilities.12 What follows here are some samples, sugges-tive only, of other ways that practicing the art of time might extrapolate narratological insight.

Deathbed narration models a peculiar habit of retrospection. Deathbed narrators reconstruct their lives from the perspective of its imminent end, exploiting death’s finality to determine life’s real meaning. Past moments leap out of sequence to assert their essential primacy and a new order of events enables enlightening juxtapositions. Deathbed narration recovers what Walter Benjamin claims storytelling used to bor-row from death more generally: death’s delirium loosens the links of linearity and, by letting life’s moments regroup themselves according to alternative priorities, lets truly human significance carry the day. This form of narration aims less to represent the temporal reality of the dying mind than to give our ongoing lives the benefit of their ending in advance, to invent a time-scheme capable of better insight than what we achieve from one moment to the next. For example, The Death of Artemio Cruz: here the dying mind is free to achieve a destiny that had been in reality betrayed by daily ambitions, a personal redemption that is also that which Mexico itself might achieve through the virtues of advance retrospection.

The story of Artemio Cruz is a familiar one. An innocent young man at the mo-ment of the Revolution, Cruz betrays his ideals and those of his nation, slowly but surely becoming a loveless symbol of political corruption. In his youth, he is mo-tivated by desire, and everything is open to him; as he ages, his will wins out, driv-ing him single-mindedly through a series of dubious achievements. Cruz finally gets what he deserves as his body—clearly also the body politic—gives out, disintegrating into putrid disarray. But here he also gets a chance at redemption, because the death of the body is the mind’s opportunity to transcend the instrumental will and restore the freedom of desire. Free to see beyond the demands of the moment, this transcen-dent view singles out past moments in which love lost its chance to assert its better judgment. Sorting those moments into a narrative of increasing opportunities for re-dress, making its incomplete anachronies a constructive form of fragmentation, this retrospective agency slowly but surely constructs its alternative to the consequences of the will. When, finally, Artemio Cruz is born, deathbed narration has finished its absolution of him, but it has also established itself as a framework through which to remain open to real possibility. For Artemio Cruz asks us to see the present as a future past and, by judging it on that basis, better understand how it fits different possible futures. That this reversal has social and political uses is indicated by the way

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Artemio Cruz implies it would truly make the nation ready for Revolution: if Cruz’s dying body figures the body politic, his dying mind restores its conscience, tracing a way back to first principles. More specifically, his dying mind splits in two—one part all too closely consumed by the pain and fear of the dying body, but another already transcending it, gone into a posthumous mode. This posthumous voice is really the novel’s deathbed narrator and it speaks to Cruz in a second-person voice like that of an omniscient narrator offering wisdom to a hapless but redeemable protagonist: “You will be that boy who goes forth to the land, finds the land, leaves his origins, finds his destiny, today, when death joins origins and destiny and between the two, despite everything, fixes the blade of liberty” (272). In such admonitions and more generally in a narrative mode that develops into a unique form of prophecy, Artemio Cruz innovates its aesthetically complex style for temporal diversity. This is the voice the novel would put into our heads—the narratorial language it would teach us to hear. Its contribution to the art of time is a form of inner self-critique that could speak timeless caution to our pursuit of momentary projects.

If The Death of Artemio Cruz aspires to transfer narrative order to temporal prac-tice, speed is the inventive basis for the contribution of another major proponent of temporal cultivation: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. The political consciousness Elli-son’s protagonist finally achieves and its potential to reshape anti-racist activism cor-relates to his mastery of the speeds at work in narrative form. This mastery develops in response to a fundamental crisis in time: Ellison dramatizes what Ricoeur would call a basic aporia in his novel’s dramatization of the conflict between existential and social freedoms. To be truly free and to be free from social oppression are unfortu-nately conflicting motivations, defined by conflicting temporalities. Existential free-dom would demand a certain timelessness while social freedom would come through schemes of progress. Ricoeur might also note that Invisible Man achieves its “concor-dant discordance” by patterning together the two temporalities without falsifying any harmony between them and that it does so through persistent invention of speeds adequate to freedom’s conflicting forms. Ellison goes from theory to practice, how-ever, by giving his aporias a contingent social cause and a practical form of redress. Racist “history” specifically is the cause of time-crisis, and narrative speeds model the timing for interventions against it.

The narrator of Invisible Man is very different from its protagonist. The protago-nist stumbles blindly through chaos, in ironic picaresque “jumping from the pot of absurdity into the fire of the ridiculous,” lacking all temporal bearings. But the nar-rator seems to enjoy superhuman temporal insight, enhancing his descriptions with precise and complex reference to the speeds at which things occur (495). When, for example, at the start of the novel’s final riot there is a “sudden and brilliant suspension of time,” a pause, and then a “time burst” as things proceed again at a hectic pace, Ellison stresses a peculiar difference between the disorientation that overwhelms his protagonist and his narrator’s speed control (523). The difference turns out to be a product of the novel itself: much like Proust’s Marcel, Ellison’s narrator has devel-oped temporal insight through a novel’s worth of temporal confusion, and the style through which he ultimately narrates reflects the gain. Also as in Proust, the contrast between the protagonist’s temporal blindness and narratorial insight sets off the tem-

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poral advantages of narrative form: here, too, it is a way of indicating how narrative redresses the problems it represents.

Central to the novel’s lesson in speed-control is the chronotope of “invisibility.” When Ellison’s protagonist meets those “men out of time” who have chosen invis-ibility, he develops a useful sense of the stakes of the choice between invisibility and history, between the free-agency of historical non-existence and the terms of histori-cal inclusion (430). Invisibility confers specifically temporal advantages: “Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and impercep-tible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead” (8). This awareness explains the occult perceptivity he develops as the novel moves toward its conclusion. It only becomes a real advantage, however, when the improvisations of “invisibility” become a matter of writing. Once driven underground, Ellison’s protagonist begins to write; beginning to write makes him see that “even an invisible man had a socially responsible role to play,” which in turn transforms him from protagonist to narrator, from one who only experiences the harrowing disjunctions of speed to one who can convert them into forms of public understanding (568). They are truly forms of “responsibility” because they prepare Ellison’s narrator to articulate the timing necessary to do anti-racist work. Through-out the novel, timing is at issue, as advocates for racial progress obsess over the right speed for social change. The novel’s conflict between existential and social temporali-ties seems to ruin changes for successful timing; planning seems absurd when politi-cal tactics conflict with the prerogatives of human freedom. By developing a form of timing that could reconcile invisibility and responsibility, Invisible Man proposes one way to stage politics without betraying what it sees as universal human values.

Ellison said Invisible Man began with “an ironic, down-home voice,” improvisa-tional in the manner of jazz, irreverent but committed (xi). He also characterized the novel in terms of fiction’s role as a “form of symbolic action,” geared toward “negating the world of things as given in favor of a complex of manmade positives” (xvi–xvii). The novel’s symbolic action, what it makes for our use, is in large part its sense of timing, which it posits as a way to ironize the pace of social change—to moderate its immediate ambitions with “invisible” skepticism. This potential practice links jazz aesthetics to politics in such a way as to render them temporally reciprocal and to suggest that this novel’s improvisations extend beyond its terms to pattern further pursuits of political visibility.

A third and final example here is a form of anachrony that restores the past to the present, a tendency in time-travel texts that literalizes a tendency in narrative more generally. Time-travel texts sometimes mount a critique of the nostalgia that can motivate them. Their returns to the past are sometimes nostalgic fantasies, but the fantasy is often undercut when it becomes clear that, even despite time-travel, time never stands still. Just as soon as characters launch back into some past moment, that moment gives way to the next one. Time proceeds. We see that nostalgia has no fixed object but always aims at a moving target; time past was always a moment in progress, always subject to change and flux. When time-travel narratives stress this reality, they give us a kind of “boomerang anachrony,” jumping back into the past

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only to move forward again, hovering over the nostalgic moment only long enough to reckon with the fantasy of its permanence. At once thematic and formal, boomerang anachrony happens in different ways. A classic filmic moment has the time-traveler appear in the past only to be rushed forward by a crowd or a truck: in such cases, there is thematic stress upon the formal anti-nostalgic critique narrative consistently makes when it addresses the past. Just as time travelers discover that the past is always leading onward, readers find that recollections relocate narrative action not to fixed points but to perpetual process. In that discovery is a bracing corrective to the stasis that often transfixes the recollective mind. Narrative combines varieties of pastness that the mind might tend to separate. The result is culturally effective as well as psy-chologically enriching, because it modifies the sense of the past that often motivates reactionary attachment to moments that never were.

“It was a soft, reposeful summer landscape, as lovely as a dream, and as lone-some as Sunday. The air was full of the smell of flowers, and the buzzing of insects, and the twittering of birds, and there were no people, no wagons, there was no stir of life, nothing going on”: Twain’s Connecticut Yankee thusly finds himself at first in a landscape stilled by its pastness, but it turns out he is not actually alone, “for there was a fellow on a horse,” who then leads him at a comfortable pace into the action of King Arthur’s court (9, 6). The intervention matches that of Twain’s medievalism more generally: both lead away from a falsely frozen past into its actual former presence, in order to correct the sort of nostalgia that falsely serves present interests. Connecticut Yankee thereby theorizes a practice common to narrative anachrony—thematizing a property special to narrative form much the way A Christmas Carol thematizes the Victorian novel’s power to enhance the temporal manifold. At work in any number of narrative texts, this property is perhaps best appreciated in Genette’s account of a Proustian practice related to pseudo-iteration: a tendency to forget the analeptic character of recollection. Often in Proust a recollection will have no clear ending, in-stead continuing onward until it rejoins the present narration, “eluding the juncture” that would distinguish the past from the present (Genette 65). Genette notes that “the boldest avoidance . . . consists of forgetting the analeptic character of a section of narrative and prolonging that section more or less indefinitely on its own account, paying no attention to the point where it rejoins the first narrative” (65–66). Forgotten analepsis is the boldest version of boomerang anachrony. It most fully converts past-ness to presence in such a way as to stress its living provisionality. And it most fully demonstrates the artificiality of this temporality—its unnatural source in the complex narratives that would transform time-schemes naturally available to us.

TEMPORAL REDRESS IN PRACTICE

In each of these cases temporal dynamics special to narrative form are presented as practical artifacts; thematic frameworks encourage us to recognize not just the truth of a text’s temporal representation but its potential use, which applies not only to the problem thematized by the text but to broader practice. What Ricoeur theorizes is shown to work in reality. But because most texts do not thematically show the tem-

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poral work potential in their narrative forms and because the value of that work must emerge not just where it is embedded but where it will be done, this practice of the art of time needs reference to projects beyond textual critique. That context is largely pro-vided by time-crisis theory, since the warnings through which Jameson, Lyotard, and others have dramatized the problem of time in contemporary culture could motivate us to discover the rehumanizing temporalities yet available in narrative forms. And yet that project is already underway. Context for the art of time already exists across a range of contemporary cultural initiatives and activities, and narrative temporality might take its place among—and, I will argue, enrich—these ongoing efforts to culti-vate fuller temporal opportunities.

Practical enterprises that may seem to have little to do with literary study in-volve efforts at temporal redress similar to those enabled by narrative form. Even the slow-food movement, for example, and related initiatives that seek to moderate the baseline pace of late-capitalist economies (Japan’s “Sloth Club,” the Now Founda-tion, the “downshifting” movement, the Tempo Giusto movement in music) operate with the same effort at the restructured temporality essential to narrative time. These movements do not simply choose a slower pace or a longer present over those al-lowed in contemporary life. They try for “balance.” As Carl Honoré puts it, “Slow philosophy can be summed up in a single word: balance,” which means “Be fast when it makes sense to be fast, and be slow when slowness is called for. Seek to live at what musicians call the tempo giusto—the right speed” (15). In psychology, Philip Zimbardo promotes the benefits of temporal diversity: his “time-perspective inven-tory” assesses temporal orientations toward the end of fostering a “‘balanced time orientation,’ an idealized mental framework that allows individuals to flexibly switch temporal frames among past, future, and present depending on situational demands, resource assessments, or personal and social appraisals” (1272). Sociologist Michael Flaherty describes such efforts at “making time” as part of a larger cultural effort at “temporal agency.” Exploring the many forms of “time work” active in contemporary American culture, Flaherty brings to light a range of “intrapersonal and interper-sonal efforts directed toward provoking or preventing various temporal experiences” (11), developing a “typology of the agentic practices through which we customize our temporal experience” (136). What develops through attention to this context of time work is something like what Bourdieu calls “the work of time” in his Logic of Practice. Bourdieu’s focus is “the temporal structure of practice,” but we might re-verse his terms to discover the habitus of these practical efforts to “make time” and to coordinate them with the time-work of narrative (107). For Flaherty’s typology closely matches that of narratology’s temporal dynamics—“duration,” “frequency,” “sequence,” and other narratological terms title the chapters of his work—suggest-ing that collaboration among these fields of temporal endeavor could prove mutually beneficial. It is not just that these widespread efforts at making time provide a context within which to characterize the projects of narrative temporality but that narrative temporality, transposed to practice, provides enriching terms and helpful specificity for these other forms of time work.

Consider the example of one practice for which time is an essential object of discovery: the therapeutic regime known as “Narrative Therapy.” This very popular

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approach to psychological counseling aims to help people “re-story” their lives—to revise “problem-saturated” life stories into ones more conducive to happiness and well-being. A patient who presents with a problem is asked to tell his or her negative story; in the process of listening, the therapist eventually identifies positive elements that do not fit the story, and, on the basis of them, helps construct a new story in which the problem loses its central role. What Flaherty calls “temporal agency” is a critical goal of the treatment. When the therapist searches a negative story for the positive element upon which to base the “healing” version, he or she helps the patient to pinpoint a “shining moment,” a moment of potential rupture around which the new story might organize (16–17).13 The subsequent process of organization, undertaken by the patient, requires the temporal skill embedded in narrative forms. That process is of course not entirely a matter of temporal dynamics—it is as much a matter of in-terpreting events and their relations to one another, taking in other aspects of narra-tive dynamics more broadly—but “re-storying” means developing reflexive attention to the temporal perspectives and patterns necessary to get beyond the deterministic past, totalizing present, and absent futures responsible for the kind of problems Nar-rative Therapy treats. But not as fully as it might—and here is the opportunity for fruitful collaboration between the narrative art of time and this public therapeutic practice. Even if Narrative Therapy shares some of the motivations of narrative texts that propose to cultivate time, it has little of narratology’s power to describe and ac-count for temporal dynamics. In collaboration with narratology—conjoined to it in a larger practice of time—Narrative Therapy could enrich its power to “re-story” with a host of powerful analytic techniques and a more nuanced set of terms through which to add force and rigor to the constructive (and deconstructive) methods that have made it successful. Other contemporary public efforts to cultivate or restore tem-poral possibilities could likewise benefit from new means of access to the temporal resources housed in narrative forms. This collaboration, then, would at once bring new narratological acuity to public time-practices and find new public relevance for narratological methods, creating a reciprocity that redraws Ricoeur’s “healthy circle” in such a way as to cycle it through new fields of play.

CONCLUSION: THE ART OF TIME, THEORY TO PRACTICE

If Narrative Therapy and the Slow Movement are two examples of existing potential sites for time-practice collaborations, the very peculiarity of the proposition here—that taking the art of time from theory to practice might involve a sort of public narratology project—brings us to the edge of a telling gap in the reciprocity of time and narrative itself, or at least the practical version of it. For the practical version of this reciprocity would seem to require some motivating force, and, given the status of narrative analysis, that force would seem to be a pedagogical one. Texts that imply they should be read pragmatically for their forms of temporal engagement occupy a pedagogical position in relation to the public they would serve, whether or not they participate in the larger context of contemporary time work, and that position raises questions not only about their cultural status but about their ideological implications.

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“The lessons that they teach,” as Dickens puts it, might take place centrally in the classroom, and their pedagogical character dramatizes most fully the drawbacks and the advantages to heeding them. For it would seem then that “art” is not the word for it, if the practice of narrative temporality occurs through forms of instruction that derogate aesthetic experience to an instrumental status that would contravene the free play of pleasure and sensibility, the irresponsible gratification essential to the real value of texts like A Christmas Carol. Moreover, if the forms of temporal diversity and agency toward which these texts work establish temporal norms—if, in spite of their critical inventiveness, they presume universal goods—their pedagogical bent would become but another totalizing force for time crisis. And yet pedagogy as performed in this instance might have different associations. It has the potential to transform some of what sets pedagogy against aesthetic validity and ideological neutrality, because its “logic of practice” is one in which practicality is a matter of technical virtuosity. Precisely because narrative temporality would close gaps between aesthetic inven-tion and public possibility, it entails a pedagogy that would not distinguish between pure forms of textuality and their uses. A broader scope would redeem pedagogical intentionality, and the best way to make that case might be to spell out the specifics of the mode of instruction through which the art of time might get taught. Course-work in the art of time would match the reconstructed pedagogy of those texts geared toward temporal invention in its ability to link together texts and contexts, theory and practice, pleasure and possibility. Possible linkages would range from the socio-cultural contexts of “time today” to its thematization in key texts to the temporal dynamics through which narrative proposes its response, and, in turn, back through collaborative practices in contemporary culture and the ideological implications of the new temporalities they invent. A certain circularity here corresponds to that circle by which time and narrative theoretically engage in reciprocal enrichments; a holism relocates pedagogy to a key turn in the wider circle through which that reciprocity also comes to take in what people actually do—cognitively, socially—to enact narra-tive temporalities.14

And yet all this might mean putting too much faith in art and relapsing into the kind of aesthetic ideology already discredited in Dickens’ day; it might entail naïve ascription to modernist ideology (faith that art might redeem cultures threatened by modernization) and subject the true diversity of cultural forms to demands for “trans-cultural necessity,” to cite David Carr’s objection to theories that would pre-sume the universality of narrativity (182). There might be further reason to take a skeptical, critical view of the intention of texts and theories geared toward temporal pragmatics. But it is equally possible that these texts and theories change the terms of these associations as well. It might all come down to the way “narrative temporal-ity” is defined. If narrative temporality is not a matter of restrictive chronological linearity but instead a free exploration of the possible relationships among aspects of the temporal manifold, then the practical application of it to real-world possibilities might entail a form of engagement little different from aesthetic experience itself. Both would have freedom as their central component—the free play of perceptions long essential to theories of the aesthetic and crucial as well to the practice of narra-tive temporality defined as a provisional, prospective coordination of cognitive ac-

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tions. In other words, practicing the art of time might be one way to resolve by other means the oppositions that aesthetic experience has been said to mediate. Not merely instrumental, this practice would also avoid any ideological utopianism, because it would not necessarily aim at improvement. Its “redemptions” could well be counter-productive, insofar as they aim not at enhancements to personal or social goods but simply enhancements to the possibilities that temporalities subtend. Here is another way aesthetic experience would survive this practice’s practicality: the possibilities here include that of pleasure alone, the pursuit of forms of gratification enhanced through purchase upon even the most useless of time-schemes.

These reflections upon the aesthetic instrumentality, mitigated utopianism, and reformed pedagogy implicit in narrative temporality are finally most essentially use-ful for their help interpreting those texts that theorize or thematize it. Surely they characterize Proust’s elusive sense of the way writing relates to time, for he, too, would make use of texts without compromising their aesthetic freedom, and he too holds out hopes for something short of a better world. They correspond nicely to Ellison’s ironies. Surely these qualities characterize Dickens’ wish to school us without any loss to the raw thrill of the supernatural. And they characterize narrative theory: not just Ricoeur, Kermode, and Brooks but also much work on the value of narrative form operates with ambivalences generated by these half-hopes for temporal gain. Half-hopes are what the art of time should inspire. It is interesting to think that we get better at time by analyzing narrative forms (to put the point most baldly), but we can hope for something short of that: insight into the presumptions at work in texts and practices that would achieve temporal interventions. The provocation for these pre-sumptions as well as their justification in human forms of understanding and public life are worth knowing for the way they determine the meaning and reception of nar-rative texts and the impetus of theoretical endeavors in narrative study and beyond. And yet this essay has made the case for the practice itself (rather than more neutrally analyze the implications of the texts that make it themselves) because it is the kind of case that rarely gets made. When texts would seem to have designs upon us, we tend to try to expose them for it, and for good reasons. But what if they might do us good? Scrooge’s case is a chance to think about the difference. Does he really become a better man, or just a better capitalist, better able to turn time into money? Does A Christmas Carol diversify the temporal manifold, or subject it to a more effective routine? The temporality modeled in A Christmas Carol might be studied for its complicities rather than practiced for its opportunities, but since the opportunities are more likely to escape us today, they provide a fresh framework for new insight into the relationships among time, narrative, and public culture.

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ENDNOTES

1. “Temporal dynamics” is a variation on “narrative dynamics,” Brian Richardson’s term for “the movement of a narrative from its opening to its end,” “the beginnings of both the story and the text, the temporality of the telling, the movement and shaping of the plot, and the functions of the ending” (2). “Temporal dynamics” sharpens the focus on narrative time, but it might well include aspects of all of what Richardson includes in his definition.

2. I do not mean to discredit this work, which is vital and often a crucial contribution to the endeav-or in question here. The essays collected in a recent issue of Narrative focused on time (2009), for example, make arguments that would have to enrich any practice of narrative temporality, but, as Rebecca Stern’s introduction notes, they focus on the way narrative forms reflect the temporalities of their moment: “the profound repercussions of these new ‘shapes’ of time appear in the aesthetic grammars of narratives that emerged in their wake” (238). Aiming to “attend to such shapes,” the essays choose not to pursue repercussions the shapes would in turn entail. Other important recent work similarly—and for good reasons—stops just short of narrative’s shaping effects. For example, Kate Haffey’s essay on the “temporality of the kiss” in Mrs. Dalloway, which reads the novel’s famous lesbian kiss as “the opening to a future that is not yet decided” and therefore, in “queer temporality,” an opening out of the time-schemes of compulsory heterosexuality (159), or Catherine Gallagher’s argument about “plots of undoing” through which Back to the Future demonstrates a negative “mode of historical understanding” (56): both show how the narrative texts in question make available certain modes of temporal understanding but do not choose to theorize temporal availability itself.

3. Praxis concerns Ricoeur throughout his work, but situated temporal practice comes up only when he takes up the question of ars memoria in Memory, History, and Forgetting (56–68).

4. This is not to say that phenomenological hermeneutics must defer to the human and social sci-ences, but rather the reverse: in the spirit of rapprochements Ricoeur himself theorized, these sci-ences discover narrative temporality at the center of their inquiry. See From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, where Ricoeur notes that phenomenological hermeneutics undo the opposition between explanation and interpretation, between positivism and hermeneutics, “[providing] a solution for the methodological paradox of the human sciences” and solving the problems that preoccupied Dilthey and other precursors (156).

5. See also Richard Block’s observation that “At present, no comprehensive model is able to account for the formation and maintenance of temporal perspective” (31).

6. I presume the link to Heideggerian “tuning” (Stimmung) is coincidental. It is not therefore insig-nificant, however, since Michon describes a phenomenon not unlike that at work in Heidegger’s account of temporal authenticity.

7. Similar to Leonard Talmy’s claim that “narrative can be construed as a system for structuring any time-based pattern into a resource for consciousness,” this argument differs in its location of this resource initially outside consciousness itself (qtd. in Herman, “Stories” 170).

8. David Herman, “Stories” 163. Herman cites Vygotksy and other sources (166–169), and this con-cept owes something to Louis Mink’s foundational claim that narrative serves as a “cognitive instrument” (though the difference between “instrument” and “artifact” is decisive).

9. Spolksy argues that literary forms fill gaps in nature—not that literature gives us insight into the workings of the mind or follows mechanically from them, but that cognitive gaps leave the field open to improvements literature artfully performs. Similarly, Joseph Tabbi and Elaine Scarry see art stepping in to redress, compensate for, or take an aesthetic opportunity from cognitive deficits.

10. Gilbert concludes that “when people are deprived of the information that imagination requires and are thus forced to use others as surrogates, they make remarkably accurate predictions about their future feelings, which suggests that the best way to predict our feelings tomorrow is to see

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how others are feeling today” (228, emphasis original). His account is not unlike that of Arthur Danto, who notes that “we are temporally provincial with regard to the future” and in need of “narrative organization” to develop a complete historical sense (343).

11. See also Wai Chee Dimock’s work on the way the “coils of time” that structure Henry James’s sentences enable temporal “kinship” (92), and, of course, foundational arguments by Anderson and Bakhtin. Broader claims for the relationship between time and “the literary” more gener-ally—claims about the way “the literary often structures our thinking about time now”—have recently been made in the essays collected in Time and the Literary (Newman, et al. 1). For an account of the relationship between narrative and temporal invention in key recent theoretical work see Matz.

12. That even ordinary narrative sentences propose unique temporal possibilities has been the argu-ment of linguistic accounts of “unspeakable sentences”—those forms of reference that expand the range of meaning by indicating unlikely chronologies. Ann Banfield, drawing on work by Käte Hamburger and Emile Benveniste, has argued that narrative contexts routinely produce sentences special for their temporal creativity. “Tomorrow was Christmas,” for example, is a sentence that combines three different temporal referents never combined in ordinary speech. Here again (and here most basically) the narrative artifact enables temporal inquiry that might not otherwise oc-cur. According to Banfield, unspeakable sentences show how literary forms construct subjectivi-ties different from those structured through other forms of communication. We might discover more specifically the making of alternative temporal subjectivity in and through these sentences. Benveniste argues that narrative language enables “instantaneous transfers” among tenses—transfers that are also effectively temporal theories, enabling a sense of the past (for example) not natural to ordinary language use (209). Hamburger proves that “action presented as the Here and Now of the fictive persons, nullifies the temporal meaning of the tense in which a piece of narrative literature is narrated” (98, emphasis original). This nullification, however, creates new and unique temporal meanings, for this “fictive time” becomes an object of understanding through which ordinary temporal landscapes are reconfigured from the point of view of a “presentification” dif-ferent from the presence of life in time. A critical purchase emerges, locating a crux of the form of temporal agency at work in narrative engagement more generally.

13. White and Epston note that “In order to perceive change in one’s life—to experience one’s life as progressing—and in order to perceive oneself changing one’s life, a person requires mecha-nisms that assist her to plot the events of her life within the context of coherent sequences across time—through the past, present and future. Put another way, the detection of change is vital to the performance of meaning and to the experience of personal agency in one’s life, and this detec-tion of change is engendered by the introduction of a linear conception of time. Despite this, the temporal dimension has been much neglected in the therapy world” (35).

14. It is worth noting that pedagogy has lately been playing a theoretical role in important efforts at just the kind of critique a temporal practice would entail. Gayatri Spivak and Alan Liu, for example, have lately looked to teaching for comparable advantages—Spivak in her claim that “if we teach our students the way to informed figurations of that ‘lost’ perspective” annihilated by the dominance of Hegelian timing our cultures might rediscover non-Western possibilities (116; emphasis original), Liu in his argument that intervening pedagogically in “cool” culture will mean “teaching that the contemporary instinct for technical competence need not be oblivious to the sense of history that is the primary means by which the humanities at once reinforce and critique culture” (307). Liu’s call for a pedagogical enterprise that enriches “technical competence” with the “sense of history” would justify a teacherly practice at once broadly relevant and consistent with the professional practice of criticism. Indeed Liu and Spivak suggest that the focus on temporality might reunite cultural work, professional criticism, and pedagogical practice by giving teaching a purpose at once publicly political and technically formal. If Spivak is right to locate cultural perspectives in temporal figurations, if Liu is right to equate history with technical competence, then a temporal practice geared toward teaching time could also give criticism a sharper edge.

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