RICOEUR ON TIME AND NARRATIVE An Introduction to Temps et récit W I L L I A M C . D O W L I N G RICOEUR ON TIME AND NARRATIVE RICOEUR ON TIME AND NARRATIVE An Introduction to Temps et récit W I l l I A M C . D O W l I N g University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana Copyright © 2011 by the University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dowling, William C. Ricoeur on time and narrative : an introduction to Temps et récit / William Dowling. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-268-02608-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-268-02608-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Ricœur, Paul. Temps et récit. 2. Mimesis in literature. 3. Time in literature. 4. Narration (Rhetoric) 5. Plots (Drama, novel, etc.) I. Title. PN212.R5236 2011 809'.923—dc23 2011025674 This book is printed on recycled paper. For Myra Jehlen CONTENTS Preface ix ChApTER ONE Mimesis 1 ChApTER TWO Time 19 ChApTER ThREE Narrativity 37 ChApTER FOUR Semantics of Action 53 ChApTER FIVE Poetics of History 69 ChApTER SIx Poetics of Fiction 85 AppENDIx Paul Ricoeur: A Philosophical Journey 103 Notes 115 Index 119 pREFACE ThE ObjECT OF ThIS bOOk IS TO MAkE ThE kEy CONCEpTS OF Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative available to readers who might have felt bewildered by the twists and turns of its argument. Those who don’t read French may have assumed that their confusion was due to read- ing Ricoeur in translation. It is a reasonable enough assumption. What can be captured only approximately in another language might, after all, be luminously clear in the original. But that is not the case here. The English translation of Temps et récit is for the most part admirably reli- able, and the experience of reading Ricoeur in English is pretty much the same as reading him in French. Indeed, existing commentary on Ricoeur shows that French readers have had their own difficulties with what can sometimes seem to be a perversely inconclusive style of philo- sophical argument. For readers new to Ricoeur, that style constitutes a major problem. As François Dosse has shown in Paul Ricoeur: Les sens d’une vie, Ricoeur’s style was shaped by his resistance to an opposite style of Paris philosophizing. In France this sometimes goes under the name of pari- sianism: the habit of treating argument as mere assertion and counter- assertion, along with a certain grandiosity of claims pushed to fantastic extremes. Dosse’s account brings out, for instance, the full bitterness of the famous episode in which disciples of Jacques Lacan accused Ricoeur of having stolen Lacan’s ideas for his own book on Freud. But behind that bitterness may be glimpsed a more abstract conflict of intellectual ix