Chapter One - Temporality in Narrative: Mimetic and Anti-Mimetic Approaches

Summary

What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; but, if I want to explain it to a questioner, I do not know. Yet, I say with confidence that I know that, if nothing passed away, there would be no past time; if nothing were coming, there would be no future time; and if nothing were existing, there would be no present time.

Saint Augustine, Confessions (2008: 343–344)

The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. “Where shall

I begin, please your Majesty?” he asked.

“Begin at the beginning,” the King said, very gravely,

“and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”

Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (2009: 106)

In Book XI of Confessions, Saint Augustine highlights a familiar paradox: despite being immersed in time and constantly referring to measurements of it in daily life, we seldom ponder its nature; on the rare occasions when we do, time appears to us a tantalisingly elusive and definition-defying concept. Ever since Saint Augustine posed the question, definitions of time, as Russell West-Pavlov puts it, “have been perennially unsatisfactory” because “[t]ime is both eminently common-sensical and highly abstract at once” (2012: 4). What is normally accessible to observation is obviously not time itself but its effects; in everyday experience time is discerned insofar as it produces changes in human life. Hence, what Anna Plata calls “our folk understanding of time” involves viewing time with apprehension as an overwhelming, intransigent and ultimately destructive force, “bringing about irreversible changes to humans (including the human body); passing by and not coming back; leading to ageing and death and hence being perceived as threatening” (2018: 14). Notwithstanding the fact that time is a major question in philosophy as well as a subject of scientific inquiry, our daily cognition of it is typically so narrow that it not only leaves out the larger philosophical and scientific issues, but, as Mieke Bal claims, it does not encompass the long-term time of history either. Bal notes that “[t]he time that regulates our lives, by means of clocks, schedules, and other means of uniforming lives, is so incorporated, interiorized, or naturalized that it is difficult to imagine that there are conflicts built into it” (2009: 77).