1 - A Flow of Unforeseeable Novelty

Summary

Special problems attach to thinking about what has not yet taken place, and it is far from obvious that the theory of narrative should have anything to say about those problems. But that is what this book aims to do: to consider the role of narrative in our conceptualisation and our cognitive control of the future, and to explore the experience of reading fiction in relation to the idea of time flow.

The problems, at first sight, mainly derive from the non-existence of the future: from the fact that thinking about what has not yet taken place differs from thinking about what has happened and what is present because the object of reflection is non-actual, or non-existent. There is an essential emptiness about thoughts with a future-orientation – expectations, anticipations, predictions – because they refer to something that may arrive in a different form, and a kind of provisionality, because they must wait upon the arrival of the object to which they refer for affirmation. Because the future does not exist, thinking about the future exists in a state of suspense, waiting for its arrival, and for the object of thinking to pass from virtuality into actuality.

The idea that we wait for the future to arrive, to come into existence or to become actual is full of problematic suppositions. The future differs from the present and the past not only, as Bergson described it, in being non-actual; it is also open, and in being open, it is subject to our efforts, desires and will.