The Expansion of Tense

Abstract: In the first two volumes of this work, Paul Ricoeur examined the relations between time and narrative in historical writing, fiction, and theories of literature. This final volume, a comprehensive reexamination and synthesis of the ideas developed in volumes 1 and 2, stands as Ricoeur's most complete and satisfying presentation of his own philosophy.

Abstract: begin and end in the often overlooked and liminal region of the Pacific Islands, rather than in the culturally and economically more dominant spheres of Europe, America or Asia, is no accident. In this essay, I suggest that Mitchell’s novel can be read as a (re)staging of the perennial conflict between Hobbesian and Rousseauian conceptions of nature and humanity’s place within it. I will argue that Mitchell’s use of cannibalism as a trope for savagery raises questions about the myths of progress and linear time that underlie Western thought. This mythological aspect at the heart of Western culture is echoed in the novel’s temporal structure that resembles an ouroboros, the snake or dragon eating its own tail, which Jung so aptly suggested functions as an archetypal symbol of both destruction and renewal. Mitchell’s novel is structured like a Russian doll, with the reader progressing forward through a series of interrupted narratives, and then, after a pivotal middle section, methodically working back through the narrative plots in reverse order. Within the novel there are two temporal movements that make the first and last (sixth) narrative sections special twins in a set of telescoped time. In terms of chronological story-time, the narrative progresses forward through history, from the mid-19 th century seafaring account of “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing” to the post-apocalyptic future described in “Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After.” These two sections frame the novel. But with the reversal of time effected by the novel’s nested structure, its discourse-time has the reader looping back to an end-point within the 19 th century. There is thus a neat symmetry between the two sections: the first section in the story-time, “The Pacific Journal,” also becomes the final section in the discourse-time. The final story-time section, “Sloosha’s Crossin’,” becomes the heart of the book when viewed within the discourse-time. These first and final sections therefore constitute the past and the future, confounding linear time by positing an interrelationship of past and future configurations of human society.

Abstract: The life of man is a self evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end. The extent to which this generation of circles, wheel without wheel, will go, depends on the force or truth of the individual soul.-Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Circles" (1841)1All the great books in the world are but the mutilated shadowings-forth of invisible and eternally unembodied images of the soul.-Herman Melville, Pierre (1852)2Near the end of "The First Luisa Rey Mystery," one of six largely separate stories that make up David Mitchell's 2004 novel Cloud Atlas, an antinuclear activist named Margo Roker awakens from a coma at the precise moment when Bill Smoke, the hired thug who beat her into that coma months before, is shot and killed in another part of the city. Punctuating the expected, and gratifying, poetic justice of the hit man Bill Smoke's death and the revival of his innocent victim is, less expectedly, a recitation of Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1857 poem "Brahma." The time of these narrated events is marked twice in concurrent sections so readers understand that the figurative rebirth of Margo Roker and the death of Bill Smoke occur simultaneously during the reading of "Brahma." As Margo lays in her hospital bed comatose, Hester Van Zandt, another antinuclear activist, reads the poem aloud to her. Hester is interrupted when Margo regains consciousness; nonetheless, the first three stanzas are completed at the bedside of the victim:If the red slayer think he slays,Or if the slain think he is slainThey know not well the subtle waysI keep, and pass, and turn again.Far or forgot to me is near;Shadow and sunlight are the same;The vanish'd gods to me appear;And one to me are shame or fame.They reckon ill who leave me out;When me they fly, lam the wings;I am the doubter and the doubt,And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.1Emerson's poem functions at this point in Cloud Atlas as an emblem of poetic justice, each stanza enlarging comprehension and perspective, moving beyond human figures (slayer and slain) and categories of perception (distance, shadow, and vision) to surpass even fundamental conceptual categories themselves. As will become clear in the argument to follow, "Brahma" dramatizes particularly well the novel's own ambition for innovative brands of narrative comprehensiveness. Of course, we might be tempted to circumscribe the kind of gimmicky, mystical, causality that has slayer and slain linked instantaneously in a kind of cosmic entanglement to the demands of Mitchell's imitated genre, the thriller a la Dan Brown or Tom Clancy.4 The quick terse prose of the "Mystery," written in a style suggesting such popular fiction, prioritizes kinetic movement and plot coincidence over deep characterization and formal experimentation. This might lead one to argue that Emerson's transcendent, comprehensive figure of Brahma merely lends high literary gloss to the vulgar poetic justice via surprising coincidence that is virtually de rigueur for this type of genre fiction (and indeed proves central to solving the Luisa Rey mystery). But the karmic entanglement and cosmic comprehension that Brahma names extend beyond the Luisa Rey chapters and can be seen to undergird the entire structure of Mitchell's novel, and this despite the fact that the other five stories are written in different settings and styles that do not, with respect to genre, necessitate such narrative shape or resolution.I will argue in what follows that David Mitchell's novels, particularly Cloud Atlas, express a notable brand of contemporary transcendentalism linked to new media forms that I will call digital transcendentalism. Mitchell's formally ambitious and innovative novels, this is to say, possess features relevant to accounts of recent shifts in contemporary literary production-for instance, as a means of understanding the place of the novel in the age of ubiquitous new media and of literature's role in the persistence of religion (both weak and fundamentalist) in the contemporary period, giving rise to descriptions of the present as a postsecular age. …

Abstract: This paper examines David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010), with a particular focus on history and narrative time. It seeks to offer an alternative perspective on the multiple and intertwined fictional narratives of Mitchell’s oeuvre as these evidence a move past the "post-" of postmodernism.

Abstract: This essay presents an investigation of the one-day-ness of the one-day novel—to ask what the effects of this temporal frame, in literary form, might be. I approach this question largely through the developing critical field of everyday life studies, in particular on literature and the everyday. There is a surprising paucity of literary criticism focused specifically on the narrative of the single day, and in this essay I launch further discussions of the form, particularly insofar as instances of the one-day novel can also (paradoxically) be read as novels of the everyday. In particular, I argue the one-day novel offers a model for a narrative that operates at a graspably human scale, having a particular capacity to reveal, attend to, and explore the apparently nonproductive or passive elements of everyday life; and that the form also interrogates on the capacity (or otherwise) for individuals to assert agency therein. Finally, I explore the paradoxical future orientation of the apparently bounded and closed single-day narrative structure.

Abstract: In the first two volumes of this work, Paul Ricoeur examined the relations between time and narrative in historical writing, fiction, and theories of literature. This final volume, a comprehensive reexamination and synthesis of the ideas developed in volumes 1 and 2, stands as Ricoeur's most complete and satisfying presentation of his own philosophy.

Abstract: In the first two volumes of this work, Paul Ricoeur examined the relations between time and narrative in historical writing, fiction, and theories of literature. This final volume, a comprehensive reexamination and synthesis of the ideas developed in volumes 1 and 2, stands as Ricoeur's most complete and satisfying presentation of his own philosophy.

Abstract: Foreword by Jonathan Cutler Translator's Preface PrefaceIntroduction 1. Order 2. Duration 3. Frequency 4. Mood 5. VoiceAfterword Bibliography Index

Abstract: Preface 1. Reading for the Plot 2. Narrative Desire 3. The Novel and the Guillotine, or Fathers and Sons in Le Rouge et le noir 4. Freud's Masterplot: A Model for Narrative 5. Repetition, Repression, and Return: The Plotting of Great Expectations 6. The Mark of the Beast: Prostitution, Serialization, and Narrative 7. Retrospective Lust, or Flaubert's Perversities 8. Narrative Transaction and Transference 9. An Unreadable Report: Conrad's Heart of Darkness 10. Fictions of the Wolf Man: Freud and Narrative Understanding 11. Incredulous Narration: Absalom, Absalom! In Conclusion: Endgames and the Study of Plot Notes